House of Meetings

Martin Amis's new book takes the form of a novella and two stories. The novella "House of Meetings" is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. Two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in the pogrom-poised Moscow of 1946; and the fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labour camp above the Arctic Circle. The destinies of all three lovers remain unresolved until the days after the death of Brezhnev in 1982; and for the single survivor the reverberations continue into the next century. Accompanied by one of the 'muscle' Saudis, Muhammad Atta drove to Portland, Maine, on September 10, 2001. No one knows why. In "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta", Martin Amis provides a rationale for Atta's insouciant detour, and for other lacunae in the 'planes operation'. We follow Atta on that day: from his small-hour awakening in the budget hotel room in Portland, all the way to 8:46:40 a.m. - and beyond. "In the Palace of the End" is narrated by one of the doubles of a Middle Eastern tyrant: Saddam Hussein, as it might be (or Uday Hussein, his demented son and heir). The double divides his day between epic torture and epic lovemaking with picked beauties - all of it filmed for the delectation of the dictator. He also has a third obligation: he must duplicate on his person the wounds sustained by the dictator in the almost-daily attempts on his life. These themes and settings may look like unfamiliar ground for Martin Amis. But in fact he is returning to his central preoccupation: the nature of masculinity, and the connections between male sexuality and violence.