ARTS . Arts Picks

Martin Amis

Thu., Feb. 1, 8 p.m., Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St.


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Published: Jan 30, 2007

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When we're first introduced to the unnamed Russian narrator of House of Meetings, the new novel by British author Martin Amis, he's telling us about a boat trip he took in 2004 along the Yenisei River northward from Mongolia to Siberia, what the crew calls the "gulag tour." Indeed, he describes himself as the "gulag bore."

Starting in 1946, we learn, he served a sentence in the Norlag camp — a "janitoriat"-run gulag filled with a stew of "politicals" and other tiers of undesirables incarcerated by the Soviets. Living here in this microcosm gives him a deep, biting understanding of the national character, and it's where he reconnects with his younger brother, Lev, who married Zoya, the woman our narrator loved. As he notes, he thinks Russians tend to champion views "not only irreconcilable but also mutually exclusive." So this former soldier finds himself wanting to protect Lev — a pacifist — from the inmates' brawls and torture, despite realizing that his brother's death would give him a chance with Lev's widow.

The more difficult paradox to make sense of is a national one: "After the war on fascism, fascism." How did Russia emerge from World War II, having opposed the Nazis, to rule as a behemoth of bureaucracy and brutality? Amis has tackled this topic before in his nonfiction study of life under Stalin, Koba the Dread, an intended rebuke to what he perceived as Western romanticized myopia toward the Soviet experiment. Now, after succeeding in documenting the Nazi Holocaust in 1991's Time's Arrow, he builds this novel on copious research. His narrator is a foil for Amis' knowledge and outrage: Busy laying out his memoirs for his Westernized stepdaughter, he details his own graduation from loyalty to disillusionment, not just with Soviet-era arrest and torture "by quota," but with Russia's modern-day heavy-handedness. As he travels, he learns from the TV that the school siege at Beslan has just begun: Chechen terrorists are facing off against trigger-happy Russian troops. So while our narrator reaches for ever-more-generalized explanations for the country's continued chaos — the size of the landmass, the need for a "black hole" of bureaucracy to stabilize its galaxy? — he knows his own story attests to the import of small individual claims of responsibility. If, as the narrator suggests, Russia is dying, its population numbers in freefall, then by itemizing its abuses, this "bore" just has time to make a riveting deathbed confession.

Thu., Feb. 1, 8 p.m., $12, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-569-9700, www.library.phila.gov.