House of Meetings
Martin Amis’s new novella is an audacious attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history with all its hidden squalor and unspoken dread through the triangular love story of two half-brothers and the Jewish woman they love. A “love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape,” Amis’ 11th novel revisits Stalin’s labour camps and dramatises the nature of masculinity, power, violence and loveless sex.
The ‘House of Meetings’ of the title refers to the hut in the gulag where the enemies of the people, consigned by the Soviet authorities to these camps, were permitted occasional conjugal visits. Valiant women would travel huge distances, says the jacket sleeve, sometimes for weeks or even months, in the hope of spending a night in the House of Meetings.
The story begins in the famine winter of 1946 in a gulag camp and turns on the life-long obsession of the two half-brothers, the one a soldier and rapist, the other a worker and poet, with Zoya – the Jewish bohemian nicknamed by them, with that typical Amis’ flair for satire, “The Americas.” “Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. When she sneezed -you felt that absolutely anything might happen,” the author writes.
Zoya is married to the younger brother. Her arrival, on July 31, 1956, at the House of Meetings and the first night they spend together as man and wife sets in motion a complex interplay of emotions that shadows the novel that grapples with far more serious themes of rust, ruin and decay. The love story, with all its piquant ironies, expertly blends with a dark meditation on the character and complexion of contemporary Russia, evoked as “a slum family” in which “all the money has been divided up between the felons and the state.”
A grim retrospect on the ‘ravaged century’, the House of Meetings is also about jealousy, desire, morals, anarchy, resistance, aggression, solipsism and confession. The book continuously asks the readers to question who is responsible for the act of brutality in the book; whether it is an individual, or the state or if it is the unfolding of the history as a nightmare we have not yet woken from.
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