2007-02-03

The Neutral Madness of a Sparrow's Eye

Seafood is bullshit. I want meat.
- Martin Amis

There are a lot of things I want to say here, and most of them are about Martin Amis. I was gifted by Eskimo an advance copy of House of Meetings just before Christmas (it had been released in the UK but not in North America, so Amazon did finally change my life long after I stated it never would.) It is a love story of one-upmanship between brothers that takes place during the Stalinist era, told via written narrative to the step-daughter of the protagonist. The letter is a farewell, an apology, and a reason to beg forgiveness. As is typical of Amis, the world of the narrator is righteously cynical (“That's right, stay down. No one’s going to lick your face or try and fuck you back to life.”), but unlike Amis, there is room for hope (“You are as well-prepared as any Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful colour. Look at you - look at the burnish of you.”).

Undoubtedly, all the reading and research Amis had to do for Koba the Dread has paid off here. House of Meetings is good, definitely good, maybe not 'will change your life' type of good - but it builds, and shudders, and by the midway point you feel as if the damn fluorescent lights have finally stopped flickering and you can look in wonder at the insanely decorated room that is Martin Amis' mind. This is Martin's gift: his novels leave you gasping, first at the kinds of thoughts he is able to snare and pin on paper, and second by always getting there before you could. It is as if he always has an index finger in your mouth - occasionally, he will hook it into your flesh and force you to drink a cup of water before you knew you were thirsty. His novels will dry you out, fill you up, smash your gullet. And you always want more.

So, before I go any further, let me just say what has perplexed me most about the available reviews of House of Meetings: seemingly no reviewer can mention it without at the same time attacking his penultimate novel, Yellow Dog, which was routinely destroyed by the then-current reviews, none more infamously than that by Tibor Fischer, which stated that being seen reading it was like having your uncle caught masturbating to children in the school playground.

(Perhaps it is worth noting that Fischer's own book, Voyage to the End of the Room, was published on the same day as Yellow Dog. Amis' novel was on the longlist for the Booker that year. Guess whose wasn't?)

But Yellow Dog is much better than that. It is not his best work, but nearly so. It is certainly better than almost anything published in the same calendar year, even if it couldn't match the standard set out by his earlier work, for example, The Information. Some complaints about Yellow Dog included that there were many threads of plot and not all of them were tied together tightly - or that Amis had already dissected the boredom of pornography, boringly, to death, for the last 30 years. That is was more of a 'published' work and less of an 'edited' novel. Perhaps he was given free reign after previous glories. But I hadn't read Yellow Dog for some time, so I defer to a description of an early page in that work in a review by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, which, contentedly, sums up what I remember thinking about this supposed 'dog of a novel' at the time:

'How does he do that?', you wonder, as he describes how, 'after a while, marriage is a sibling relationship - marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest'. And then he does it again: 'the contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe'. And then again: 'Fame had so democratised itself that obscurity was felt as a deprivation or even a punishment.' And then you notice that all three sentences appear on the same page of Yellow Dog, and you are still only on page 8. Faced with writing of this quality, the temptation for the reviewer is simply to quote as much as possible without getting in the way: the 'neutral madness' of a sparrow's eye; the sound of 'unserious panic' coming from a playground; the 'motion jigsaw' of a swimming pool.

And I'll be the first to admit that I'm anything but unbiased here. Amis is definitely the reason why I first wanted to be a novelist. (Or, perhaps I should thank Professor Chase for assigning The Information in that ENG 100 class years ago. Thanks Thomas. By the way, you were right: I didn't have a fucking clue back then. But I do know. Err...I mean, now. I do now.) Biased, in this case, reminds me of my Dad, who also wanted to be a novelist, or writer of some sort, for many years. How can you be biased when you're simply right, Dad? You see, you can argue with my Dad about anything subjective and always be wrong. I'd say, but Dad, this is my opinion of so-and-so. And he'd say, giggling, but not unseriously, I know it's your opinion - but it's the wrong opinion.

House of Meetings is excellent. It just takes a while to really get rolling. And you sometimes wonder how a Russian got such an amazing English vocabulary and vernacular. Or why he has this blasted letter that he's been holding onto for years and years and why he keeps telling you he'll get to it before his death, which he keeps telling you is coming at the end of the narrative. How does he know? Where is he writing this thing? Is it email? Is he editing it, or what? So many contrivances! Arghhh!

But really, the book is great. Seriously, you'll want to overlook all the machinations too.

OK, fine. I'm biased. I'm biased towards the greatest novelist writing in English in the last 50 years. And anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.

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