Martin Amis, House of Meetings, Child 44, Tom Rob Smith, Sashenka, Simon Sebag Montefiore

These works of fiction cannot be understood without the Bacchanal into which Blairite "Cool Britannia" has proliferated. Racial paranoia--with Russians in hell, Israelis in Limbo and EU in Purgatorio-- in the Blair's Britain is a logical answer to the Londonistan. To symbolically redeem the balkanization of the English society, intellectuals needed to invent and exorcize a bogeyman. Not that there hard-line islamists, Eastern European irredenta and Nazi sympatizers and ex-Soviet mobsters who immediately transform from "Freedom Fighters" against Russian Imperialism into Russian Mafia as soon as they cross the channel, are as numerous there as in Holland, or in France. What is peculiar about the UK is the leeway, which was given by the Blair's Government for their self-organizing, dropping out of the mainstream society and subsequently popularizing their extreme views as a new mainstream. Similar processes were going in Jospen's France where some cities, such as Orleans, allegedly became a virtual no-go zone for the French police. However, French bureaucratic system immediately began a crackdown on these liberties when the political climate changed.

And so, in Blairite Britain, writing an anti-Russian rag became a hallmark of an intellectual (see my review of T. J. Binyon's "Pushkin" and O. Figes' "Natasha's Dance"). Too bad that quickly it became the only hallmark . And once the [Economist comment] movement is initiated, everyone jumps on the bandwagon [Tyler Brule comment].

So the emergence of Martin Amis' "House of Meetings" was not surprising: to justify his elite status in the world of English letters he was obliged to write something demeaning and portray Russians as a nation of alcoholics and rapists. His knowledge of Russia was probably limited to small talk in cocktail parties with a few oligarch exiles to London, their bodyguards and whores, and Discovery Channel-style series listened to between numerous drinks. Interestingly, in 30 raving Amazon reviews posted so far, only about 1/3 praise his use of language, a few find a story or characters particularly well developed but a vast majority highly values his book for showing what the brutes Russians are. Obviously, these are repressed souls who cannot say this loudly anymore about African-Americans or, for instance, Albanians or Chechens, not that many of them ever met one.

It is not surprising to pour disdain on people, more precisely, on cutout characters, for becoming bestial in the inhuman conditions of the gulag, nor it is surprising. What is surprising and I claim it through knowning much more former gulag prisoners than Amis ever did, how many of them retained humanity and even
sense of humor.

However, by common recognition of the English-language critics, Amis Jr. is a fine writer. So we could forgive his racism in a testament to W. H. Auden: "...And will pardon Paul Claudel, pardon him for writing well." [Paul Claudel was a right-wing Catholic who applauded Nazi killings of Jews and Communists. Unlike fellow Nobelists Hauptmann and Hamsun, he escaped WWII with his reputation unscathed because of a few protests against cruel treatment of French POWs, which fit nicely into the Gaullist legend of the "fighting nation."]

After Amis, the bandwagon was jumped by everybody with literary talent and totally without. Simon Sebag Montefiore certainly knows more about Russia than Amis but who told him he can write fiction? Tom Rob Smith's "Child 44" is a bestseller thriller but his depictions of the life in USSR behind the Iron Curtain are about as true to reality as James Bond movies. Let me provide random glances into his masterpiece. A provincial cop on the beat in the late 1940s USSR has a Jewish first name Aron, about as probable as an English bobby being named "Hassan" or "Fikret" at the same time. A provincial sleuth drives his car on a highway from his sleepy township of Voulsk to a regional center. Him traveling on horseback over the steppe would be strange but not that unreal. While it is possible that a police precinct would have a (chauffered) car, or even two, usually a truck with back seats or a jeep from the Lend Lease War surpluses, the whole idea of a personal car is ridiculous. Finally, there is a lawyer building the case of retarded defendant in his care on the notions of English Common Law! I am not very much offended by his treatment of Mother Russia, neither one can expect accuracy of detail from a successful thriller writer. Yet his characters are cutout automatons with primitive motivations so much so that after half-an-hour with his book I completely forgot the name of the book's protagonist.

Ultimately, I am not asking the reader why this garbage gets written. I am asking why they publish them all? Could the publishers just settle on one or two of the better selling lot, if needed in triplicate number of copies and save on fees and trees? Is this a conspiracy of dunces or groupthink unbound? I reserve my opinion.