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.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
I've read some Amis and had pretty well decided not to read any more. You've hardened up that resolution.
2 - Melita Teale
Thanks Natalie. This was my first Amis - I'd heard stories of him being a self-obsessed or self-involved writer, which I don't usually have a problem with so I thought I'd give HoM a chance. But aeroport stores with a lousy selection notwithstanding it will probably be my last.