Misery a la Russe

In September 2004, a group of Chechen rebels took more than 1200 hostages - many children - in a school in Beslan, Ossetia. When all was said and done, almost 400 lay dead. (It's a testament to the Russianness of this all that I almost wrote "400 souls were lost.") And as a Russian historian, perhaps I expected tragedy. And it was that weekend, walking by the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Ave., that I saw the memorial wreaths and burst into tears. Painful, impotent tears.

These memories came back to me as I began reading Martin Amis' House of Meetings, a gulag novel. Damn, I was expecting old tragedies, not recent ones. But the narrator has traveled back to Russia, to revisit his prisons and perhaps to repent, right as the siege occurs. Thus it has a place in the letter - which comprises the novel - he writes to his step-daughter Venus. And Amis' narrator has the same dull dread I had:

And why is it that we are already perparing ourselves for something close to the worst possible outcome? Why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for the phenomenon understood by all he world - Russian heavyhandedness? For what reason are our hands so heavy? What weighs them down?

Although this leads me to my biggest quibble with the novel thus far. A gulag survivor who eventually escaped to America. Who is old and cranky. Of course he has issues with Russia. And of course he will generalize about his land - Russians and Westerners have been doing it for centuries... the Russian soul, the Russian craving for centralized authority, etc. But Amis does it too much. He spends too much time opining on the deficiencies of the Russian people. It gets old.

I'm much more interested in his characters. The narrator, back in the late 1940s and '50s, is a cipher of sorts. A survivor. A war hero stripped of his heroism. Not a big thinker. He kind of makes me think of Gleb in Cement, a major socialist realist novel. His little brother, Lev, is an intellectual, a dreamer who survives by stubbornly holding to principal. Oh, and he's the one that got the girl. The love triangle is bound to explode - we've already learned as much. It's just a matter of biding our time to find out how.