Hit and Amis
I’ve been a Martin Amis fan on and off for a very long time. Success got me hooked, at the tender-brained age of 14.
I’d never been so well manipulated by an author before (as far as I knew, in any case), and I was truly grateful. It forced me to rethink my preconceptions of story; the notion of an unreliable narrator thrilled me. We’re all so unreliable when it comes to telling tales.
Over the years, Amis has charmed and irked me with equal measure. I’ve vacillated between gaping reverence over his erudition and turn of phrase and man, he makes me laugh, to snarling and book-tossing over his self-indulgence and random opacity, uneasy with his odd awed fawning over Nabokov and Bellow (perhaps an admission that he’ll never quite measure up).
I’ve never given credence to Amis-bashing in the press. Authors as celebrities is an absurd provocation, as absurd as celebrity in general, but I guess we’ll just never outgrow the need for gods. I couldn’t care less about his teeth.
I remember Caterina offering up a thought on Amis, something to the tune of: what a pity that such a magnificent mind is trapped inside such a small soul.
Amis is brain food above all: dense, well-tuned phrases, fine cadence and a dazzling scope of reference. With the notable exception of The Information (and even there, the author doth digress too much methinks), attempts at broaching heart-wrenching topics have been largely intellectual exercises (Time’s Arrow, Einstein’s Monsters…). Experience was lovely, albeit evasive and footnoted to a fault.
And so, to the point: the full busload field trip, Koba the Dread. The outstanding question has been posed in all the reviews, namely: why? Amis has been assaulted by experts on the matter, critics and tagged lifetime friends alike.
Unfortunately, it’s not because he’s touched a nerve, but rather because he appears to be pulling thin strings, calling in connections to make a point that he hasn’t reflected upon thoroughly. I’ll spare commentary on facile equations of communism=dictatorship and the blind faith that many intellectuals put in the movement back in the days of budding anti-capitalism (I’ll take subsequent shame and the dismantling of statues as proof of retraction though not resignation; it is marvellously human to go astray in the quest for an ideal).
I got stuck. While I’m by no means an expert on the matter of Stalin, it’s a period in time that has fascinated me for years, and I lived a short while in its relics in Leningrad and across the USSR.
I got stuck, and the potential power of this already too messy book was erased for me when Amis tells us that he was alone with his infant daughter one night. And she began to cry. He tried for an hour to soothe her, then called the nanny at home.
‘The sounds she was making,’ I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, ‘would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That’s why I cracked and called Caterina.’
Indeed?
Equating the cries of the coddled child of a wealthy couple testing limits in her teddy-beared bed, and then in her father’s arms, with the cries of men and women imprisoned for only their thoughts in hungry clumps in grim rat-infested stone cells on the whim of a madman , clawed from their past, present and future, destitute, lice-ridden, shamed and reduced to battling with the mere sense of self, their true mettle, with what they conceived as reality, sanity, wailing against the foulness of random fate, a feral nightmare that we’re so obscenely lucky to have only read in books…
Indeed.
A poignant footnote, thanks to Nick Sweeney.
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