"People are like countries, and countries are like people," Martin Amis tells me, pausing to light one of the hand-rolled cigarettes that have been continually going out as his capacity for talk outlives the ember glowing between his fingers. He is a smoker and a raconteur from the Old School. His taste for both tobacco and tales is unapologetic, and his stories about girl-chasing in literary London during the seventies ("You get the scent of one in the wind," his friend Christopher Hitchens used to mock him, "and you're gone") and his opinions on the rise of Islamist fundamentalism—a favored topic of late—have been crafted, like his prose, to be remembered. Amis savors another drag and goes on: "I'm sure you know many a fascist state and many a peace-loving theocracy and many a failed state among your acquaintances."
I have come to the Paddington Sports Club, a tidy complex of tennis courts and bowling greens in London's Maida Vale—a neighborhood of terraced housing and organic grocery stores—to talk with Amis, who is relaxing after a midday tennis match, about the failed state that, at the moment, is closest to his heart: Russia. In 2002, Amis daringly upended his reputation for corrosive comedy with Koba the Dread, an impassioned investigation into Stalin's machinery of terror that mixes political and personal history.
Then, in Yellow Dog, his witheringly satiric 2003 novel, Amis lent the name Russia to the sexy, sympathetic wife of Xan Meo, a minor celebrity and dabbler in short stories who goes berserk after suffering a head injury. Now, with his new novel, House of Meetings (Knopf), Amis's subject is the country itself in all its tragic glory—a vast ungovernable territory, neither East nor West, where the rivers run backward, every epiphany is negative ("The fatherland is eternally prodigal with anti-illuminations," his narrator writes), and the only constant is a state of "permanent desperation."
It's a sunny October afternoon, and our table overlooks the tennis courts where Amis has played regularly for years. The cheerful wallop of ground strokes fills the air, and when I listen to the recording of our interview later it sounds as if we spoke while lounging in a pair of towering umpires' chairs. "One of the reasons I wrote Koba the Dread was to give myself a political education," Amis explains over a glass of beer in the club garden, recounting how an author famous around the world for his devotion to the everyday—from the minutiae of making out in his hilarious first novel, The Rachel Papers, to competitive darts in London Fields, perhaps his best-known book—was first drawn into the nightmare reality of the Soviet Gulag, one of the twentieth century's cruelest inventions and the setting of House of Meetings.
The novel traces two brothers condemned to overlapping sentences in an Arctic prison camp. The life force that gives them both hope is Zoya, a Jewish sexpot blessed with a foul mouth, a figure like "a platitude," and a nickname for her substantial proportions—"The Americas"—that invites arrest when uttered aloud. The triangle formed by the three makes for compelling storytelling in and of itself, but the journey through the decades, over a time of convulsive global change from Stalin to Putin, is where Amis's elegy for the victims of Russian failure reaches its fullest flower. House of Meetings just might be the most somber book that he has written. It might also be his most surprising. And who will deny that we are living in a sobering age?
Certainly not Amis, who has just finished a round of British television appearances to rail against what he christened, in a much-publicized essay in the British newspaper The Observer on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, "Islamist horrorism."
"I've been thinking quite a lot about it lately," he says, "and it's very plain to me that ideology is violent." It's as if his exploration of Stalin's horrors in House of Meetings is a mirror for our own "Age of Vanished Normalcy," as Amis puts it. (He has recently published short stories, yet to be collected in book form, about Saddam's inner circle and the final day of Muhammad Atta's life.)
Like his best-known fiction, Amis's club is decidedly unposh. On our way out to the garden, the famous novelist stopped to talk snooker with a beefy man wearing his hair in an extreme form of a mullet. He went on to recite a joke about Princess Di told to him by a "gangster friend," cockney accent and all. Later, our beers drained, I ask Amis about the critical response to House of Meetings in Britain, where he's been a punching bag ever since the uproar surrounding his 1995 novel, The Information, when his divorce, dental work, and defection to American agent Andrew Wylie became tabloid fodder. No major writer in recent memory has invited more of a drubbing through sheer audacity—or has deserved it less.
"The reviews have been very good on the whole," Amis says with a shrug, and it seems he'll leave it there. But then he sits up to deliver the kind of diatribe you might expect from him, whether he's talking about Osama Bin Laden, Joseph Stalin, or the feminist judges who allegedly kept the swaggering London Fields off the Booker Prize short list in 1989. "It's been said by a couple of reviewers that Zoya is a male fantasy figure. All that means is she's pretty! And what's the subtext of that? Either people think that novelists can't pull girls, or that book reviewers can't pull girls." Once again, Amis pauses to relight his cigarette. "The idea of having a pretty girlfriend is not a fantasy for me."
My laugh comes easily, as a tennis ball sails away from the courts and lands in the grass nearby.
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