No Laughing Matter: Martin Amis takes on the Gulag

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
Knopf, 2007, 256 pp., $23.00

Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread was an articulate, postmillennial reminder of the twentieth century’s second, more silent, holocaust and a study of its maniacal perpetrator: Joseph Stalin. The book argued that one of the differential qualities between Nazi and Communist terror was humor. German fascism, with its industrially efficient genocide, was cold and pitiless; yet “laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself” from the protracted, haphazard violence of Bolshevism.

With this in mind, one expects House of Meetings, Martin Amis’s own Gulag novel, to make good on his contention. But this book doesn’t make you laugh. Despite lithe, buoyant prose and unencumbered realism (a first for Amis in years), the novel is sunk by clumsy self-consciousness and inanimate characters.

Told in epistolary monologue, House of Meetings unravels the tortuous guilt of a Gulag survivor as he travels by boat to the eastern reaches of Russia. Like Time’s Arrow, Amis’s other prison camp tale, this Conradian voyage is into the known, the remembered; it is the shadows of one’s past—not one’s future—that provide anxiety.

Our narrator begins by explaining how he got to the slave camp. A decorated Red Army combatant in the Second World War (“I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany”), he ...