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Monday 1 December 2008

House of Meetings

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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.

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