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If you are a fairly successful writer, among the privileged ten per cent or so, your novels are reviewed. If, however, you are a superlatively successful one, often considered to be the voice of a generation, then such is the level of interest that even your reviews are reviewed. The following, from John Sutherland’s recent book, How to Read a Novel, concerns a now famous evocation by Tibor Fischer in his review of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003):

The abuse (it could hardly be called literary criticism) was published in the Daily Telegraph and widely reprinted, creating less a pre- emptive strike than a kicking to death of a novel in the womb … Somehow the image of the uncle wanking in the schoolyard was unexpungeable.

Martin Amis’s fame as a novelist is such that the lexical equivalent of a Russian doll exists around his work; I am a critic referring to the comments of a critic on the comments of a critic on the merits of a novel.

But if it is unusual for a novel by a living writer to set so many words in motion, Amis’s reputation as a novelist is itself currently unusual: he is considered a key practitioner by some and a lightweight with fancy prose by others; he is ecstatically praised and prodigiously scorned, often by the same people at different times.

His career as a novelist began with The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975), each witty and enjoyable enough (the former more so) but both clearly apprentice works. His next two books demonstrate a leap forward. Success (1977) is a great comic novel about greed and cruelty played out in a London where wealth and squalor collide. Other People (1981), a darker, sadder tale, is a claustrophobic modern ghost story. It was through his next three novels, though, that he moved from cult writer to star of British literature. Money (1984) and London Fields (1989) are masterpieces of comedy, each about greed and endless masculine viciousness, the first set in the world of movies, the second, hilariously, in the world of darts. Time’s Arrow (1991), his short, backwards-running Holocaust novel, is quieter in style than the others, but its humanity, compassion and inventiveness make it arguably his best to date.

After that, there was a falling away in his fiction. The Information (1995) loses out through comparison with the novels it most resembles, Money and London Fields, while Night Train (1997), a tough-talking detective story set in New York, is economical and entertaining but lacks the weight of earlier work. Yellow Dog is nowhere near as bad as some suggested — as with any Amis novel, it has passages of brilliant humour and incomparable verbal felicity — but its satire verges on the heavy- handed.

It is a relief, then, to say that House of Meetings represents a vast upswing in form. A novel (not, as has been widely reported this year, a novella and two short stories), it is presented as a document written, at incredible speed, during the first days of September 2004 by an unnamed, 85-year-old Russian émigré to his stepdaughter, Venus, who lives in America, his adopted country. It is a history of Russia in the last years of Stalin, an account of sibling love and sibling rivalry, and a confession. In the background is the siege of Number One Middle School in Beslan, which takes place as the narrator, who is visiting home for the final time, writes his story. He breaks off several times to condemn the way the authorities are dealing with the crisis (which, according to official figures, ended with the deaths of 344 people, 186 of them children).

The early part of the narrator’s account is one of unremitting hardship. Before being imprisoned he fights in the second world war, and shortly after falls in love with a girl named Zoya but, despite his great physical charms, is rebuffed. He is then sent to Norlag, a freezing prison camp, for being a ‘political’ — one of many spurious crimes against an increasingly paranoid state. Not long after, Lev, his smaller, weaker half-brother, is also sent to Norlag, and on arrival announces that he has married Zoya. This creates a dynamic which lasts throughout the brothers’ eight-year incarceration, whereby the narrator feels both bitter and protective towards his half-brother. Lev is introvert and pacifist, while the narrator is willing to kick and punch his way through prison to keep himself and Lev relatively safe.

Towards the end of a brutal time in Norlag, during which Lev is rendered deaf in one ear by a punch from a psychotic guard, the atmosphere lightens, and the ‘house of meetings’ opens. This is a small chalet where, with the guards’ acquiescence, the inmates occasionally see their spouses. Lev meets Zoya one night, but something happens there which haunts the rest of his life — something he refuses to share with his half-brother.

Following the brothers’ release, the narrator makes a success of his life while Lev deteriorates. The narrator plays the system, amassing a fortune through hard work. Lev, meanwhile, seems deflated; eventually he parts from Zoya and has a son with another woman, but then dies. He leaves behind a letter explaining what happened in the house of meetings, but the narrator will not open it until he, too, is ready to die — a moment which approaches.

Amis demonstrates early on that his prose is as dazzling as ever. In the space of a few lines we have the narrator musing on swearing among the elderly:

Yes, yes, I know — the old shouldn’t swear […] it is such a transparent protest against failing powers: saying fuck is the only dirty thing we can get up to.

And then taking a moment to consider his hands:

Christ, look at my hands. The size of cheeseboards, no, cheeses, whole cheeses, with their pocks and ripples, their spread, their verdigris. I have hurt many men and women with these hands.

Before reflecting on his drunken bad temper and his habit of leaving big tips:

Around dawn, I started physically preventing certain people from leaving the bar and had to be moved the next day, in a blizzard of swearwords and twenty-dollar bills.    

The novel’s greatest strength, however, lies in the narrator’s ability to tease affection from us even as he reveals the most shocking things. He was a serial rapist during the second world war, and later, in the prison camp, was inhumanly brutal towards other inmates. But even when he makes perhaps his most shocking confession of all, and we see him as he is — a man whose moral development could be retarded in seconds — he commands a curious degree of sympathy, someone who asks awkward questions of us. There are echoes of Lolita, a novel about a paedophile which delights intelligent, sensible readers, who, if the story were not fictional and joyously penned, would ordinarily be sickened. Here the crime is different, but the effect is similar.

In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Amis’s friend Christopher Hitchens writes, on comedy:

A rule of thumb with humour: if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.

Martin Amis divides critical opinion in this way; not everyone laughs or applauds. House of Meetings may perpetuate those divisions, but if it fails to unite all readers, it succeeds admirably as a novel nonetheless.