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Friday 18 July 2008

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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).

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