Martin Amis’s latest novel, The House of Meetings, didn’t hurt my eyes. That’s not the strongest praise in the world, but it’s all I can say for a book that engaged my interest for five unbroken hours and left a nasty aftertaste.

The good news is this book is the perfect consistency for an afternoon reading binge. The love triangle plot seems ambitious because of its partial setting in a Soviet prison camp. Descriptions of the camp are appropriately hellish and evocative. Amis also pulls out some nice metaphors on pleasanter subjects, as with a heroine nicknamed "the Americas" after the curves of her silhouette.

Also, there’s a really ambitious exploration of love in the face of rejection and of a hostile world. This exploration gets a great physical metaphor in the House of Meetings, where camp inmates have conjugal visits with wives they haven't seen for years and where they face the emasculating prospect of their future.

The bad news is that The House of Meetings reads like a mash-up of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a little gore thrown in to keep the morbid interested. Outside of the gore, there’s no good reason to read The House of Meetings instead of either of those books. However, there are several good reasons to read Never Let Me Go and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting instead of The House of Meetings.

Kundera was once a master of using characters to explain himself as a thinker. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was particularly good for this. In its seven narratives, Kundera explores oppressive human emotion in the face of an oppressive state. Such a theme is so tied in to an author’s philosophical perceptions that it would be nearly impossible to have perfectly natural characters living it out.

This means there needs to be a puppeteering aspect to such writing. Kundera was an artful puppeteer. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’s characters sometimes seemed stilted and artificial, but they always worked as parables or similes. They helped us understand the perspective of the man behind them, and to make that perspective seem worth understanding.

The House of Meetings, also dealing with oppressive emotion in an oppressive context, is nowhere near as successful in its philosophizing. While Kundera manipulated characters in the framework of stories, Amis manipulates a first-person voice. This makes episodes of puppeteering far too obvious and disruptive. Bits where the voice veers into opinionating are cringe-inducing, as when the narrator comments on his own stepdaughter and her generation.

And here we come to why it’s a much better idea to read Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro is a master of convincing and illuminating first-person narration. Nobody who’s read The Remains of the Day (with the emotionally retarded Stevens somehow managing to provide a coherent portrait of himself and of Miss Kenton) or Never Let Me Go (Kathy is a tragic miracle, with a baffling calm regarding her tragedy) could deny that.