Amis has loved two men who have found reasons not to dismiss what happened after October 1917 in Russia as an inexcusable moral atrocity. These two are his late father, Kingsley Amis, and Christopher Hitchens. Kingsley Amis, before his spectacular conversion to the right, was a member of the Communist party from 1941 to 1956. Hitchens was never a Stalinist, but he stayed loyal to an intellectual Trotskyist view of the Bolshevik revolution, which honoured Lenin and blamed Stalin for deforming the revolution into a state-capitalist dictatorship. Amis is asking how could they have. But of course he is also asking how could I have, how can I continue to love them?It's a shame that this book is so subjective, more personal memoir than cultural critique, because the objective question it asks is as pertinent today--when we are asked to take Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders seriously--as it was twenty years ago: why is it that we treat those who embrace(d) Stalinism so much more charitably than those who embrace(d) Nazism, that we can laugh along with the former but not the latter? For Martin Amis this quandary arose when he listened to his friend, Christopher Hitchens, joke, to appreciative chuckles, about having spent time in a debating hall with "many an old comrade," which Hitch, having been a Trotskyite, defender of the USSR and hater of America until the aughts, meant literally: Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many "an old blackshirt," the audience would have ... Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher—or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little mustache and the big mustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.Lest one think that his friend was "just" an anti-anti-Communist, as liberals who opposed the Cold War insist on being styled, he recounts the following: 'What about the famine?' I once asked him. 'There wasn't a famine,' he said, smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. 'There may have been occasional shortages....'Having seen the speaker on tv for three decades, the averted eyes are impossible to credit: Hitchens always took great joy in his own ideologies, no matter how repellent to decent folk. Complicating the matter for Mr. Amis is the fact, as cited in the review above, that his beloved father, the novelist Kingsley, had been a Communist into the mid-50s. Somehow, it took until the turn of the century for him to try and come to grips with their embrace of horror. Were he to stick with exploring the question he has raised--why treat a Stalinist more respectfully than a Nazi--Mr. Amis could have penned a truly valuable essay, especially had he kept the focus on the value of comedy in assessing both. But he shifts to considering the crimes of the USSR--relying on the works of his father's friend, the great Sovietologist Robert Conquest--as if he were encountering them for the first time. And his outline of the work of Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov and others is not just late but is incomplete, often erroneous and embarrassingly self-centered. The mass murders of Communist regimes are not primarily evil because a reader finds them upsetting, but because of the actual victims. Likewise, the crimes of those who defended the murders are not made worse because you knew them, but because they excused the evil done to the victims. Because Martin Amis makes this all so much about Martin Amis it is too easy for critics to make fun of him and dismiss the very real question from which he begins. But let us approach it afresh. The Left has called every Republican leader of my lifetime a racist, so their hatred of Donald Trump was inevitable. But it is to the credit of moderates of both parties that they too refuse to treat his genuine racism as if it were more politics. He is rightly and righteously denounced for his open Nativism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and various other racisms. This does not require that we term him a Nazi or compare him directly to Hitler--even if he kept Hitler's speeches on his nightstand and his father was a Klansman--it is enough that we don't relent in calling him out for his own evils. But, somehow, Democrats and the media hold the Communist-apologist Bernie Sanders to a lower standard. Among the horrifying stories to come out during this presidential campaign is the account of Alan Gross, who Senator Sanders visited in a Cuban prison: "He said, quote: 'I don't know what's so wrong with this country,' " Gross recalled.Strong as the emotional urge is to view the Holocaust as sui generis, it simply is not morally serious to argue that the six million matter more than the 100 million dead that Communism piled into heaps. Yet people continue to tolerate advocates for the latter in a way we never would the former. And because Mr. Amis loses control of his own narrative he ultimately doesn't make much of a contribution to ending the sorry phenomenon. (Reviewed:) Grade: (C+) Tweet Websites:-WIKIPEDIA: Martin Amis -Martin Amis Web -PODCAST: TheMartin Chronicles: Martin Amis one book at a time (Dan Kois) - -OBIT: British Author Martin Amis Dies at 73: He is best known for novels ‘Money: A Suicide Note,’ ‘London Fields’ and ‘The Information’ (Ginger Adams Otis, May 20, 2023, Wall Street Journal) -OBIT: Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73 (Dwight Garner, May. 20th, 2023, NY Times) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis’s Comic Music: The great British novelist, who has died at seventy-three, had a true literary vitality that was high-spirited and farcical. (James Wood, 5/20/23, The New Yorker) -OBIT: Martin Amis, Influential Writer, Dead at 73: His stylish fiction and nonfiction addressed grand moral questions (TOBIAS CARROLL, 5/20/23, Inside Hook) -OBIT: Martin Amis’s death is the end of a great British comic tradition: The novelist leaves a distinctive and distinguished legacy (Alexander Larman, May 20, 2023, Spectator) -OBIT: Martin Amis, a second-generation literary lion (Barney SPENDER, May 20, 2023, AFP) -OBIT: Martin Amis, British writer who cast caustic eye on society, dies at 73 (Brian Murphy, May 20, 2023, Washington Post) -OBIT: Martin Amis obituary: Writer whose acrobatic wit defied gravity and solemnity and who epitomised literary fame in an age of glitz and hype (Boyd Tonkin, 5/20/23, The Guardian) -PODCAST: Remembering Martin Amis (NY Times Book Review, 5/26/23) -TRIBUTE: The Sardonic Inferno: At its best, Amis’s fiction broke open the locked door behind which our culture tries to keep its skeletons hidden. (Matt Hanson, 2 Jun 2023, Quillette) -TRIBUTE: “The British Male!”: On Martin Amis (The Paris Review, May 26, 2023) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis, Cinephile (ABHRAJYOTI CHAKRABORTY, 6/07/23, Hazlitt) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis, R.I.P. (RICHARD BROOKHISER, May 20, 2023, National Review) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis’s confrontational genius: Not many novelists, even the very greatest, have a career that lasts fifty years (Philip Hensher, May 22, 2023, Spectator) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis knew the horror of words: Debased language is the tool of the dictator (DAVID PATRIKARAKOS, 5/21/23, unHerd) -TRIBUTE: Losing a Brother in Martin Amis (Ian McEwen, May. 22nd, 2023, The New Yorker) -TRIBUTE: The liberal complacency of Martin Amis: His exquisite style hid a squalid sense of morality (TERRY EAGLETON, 5/22/23, UnHerd) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis’s Comic Music: The great British novelist, who has died at seventy-three, had a true literary vitality that was high-spirited and farcical. (James Wood, 5/22/23, The New Yorker) -TRIBUTE:William Boyd on his friend Martin Amis: ‘He was ferociously intelligent – and very funny’(William Boyd, 22 May 2023, The Guardian) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis was Mick Jagger in literary form, I was besotted with his electrifying prose (Geoff Dyer, %/21/23, The Guardian) -TRUBUTE: ‘Damn, that fool can write’: how Martin Amis made everyone up their game (Lisa Allardice, 22 May 2023, The Guardian) -TRIBUTE: Rediscovering Martin Amis: He made reading, and writing, fun (Ben Sixsmith, 21 May, 2023, The Critic) -ESSAY: The Winter of The Information: Revisiting the four-month scandal that made Martin Amis the center of the literary world. (DAN KOIS, MAY 20, 2023, Slate) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis, 1949–2023: A craftsman whose abhorrence of cliché helped create greatness. (BILL RYAN, MAY 22, 2023, The Bulwark) -TRIBUTE: The voice of a generation: Martin Amis, 1949-2023 (David Herman, 5/23/23, The Article) -TRIBUTE: The dark genius of Martin Amis: His brilliant satires of 1980s Britain reflected a unique literary talent. (James Heartfield, 5/23/23, spiked) -TRIBUTE: Fizz and Moxie Martin Amis was both a master and a progenitor of the English idiom. (Jonathan Clarke, May 24 2023, City Journal) -TRIBUTE: MARTIN AMIS, R.I.P.: On the late British novelist. (Matthew Walther, May 23, 2023, The Lamp) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis Against Mediocrity: Cliches are dangerous because they turn into ideology. (Emina Melonic, Splice Today) -TRIBUTE: Good Night, Sweet Prince: Our critic assesses the achievement of Martin Amis, Britain’s most famous literary son. (A. O. Scott, 5/22/23, NY Times) -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis and Apocalypse: The late author had long warned of the danger of nuclear catastrophe. (James W. Carden, May 27, 2023, American Conservative) -TRIBUTE: Other Writers Seem Asleep by Comparison (Jennifer Egan, May. 26th, 2023, The Atlantic) - - -REVIEW: of The Dean's December by Saul Bellow (Martin Amis, LRB) -WIKIPEDIA: Koba the Dread -BOOK SITE: Koba the Dread (Penguin Random House) -EXCERPT: First Chapter of Koba the Dread -ESSAY: The palace of the end: The first war of the Age of Proliferation will not be an oil-grab so much as an expression of pure power (Martin Amis, March 4, 2003, The Guardian) -REVIEW ESSAY: Lightness at Midnight: Stalinism without irony (CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, SEPTEMBER 2002, The Atlantic) Writing toward the very end of his life, a life that had included surprising Stalin himself by a refusal to confess, and the authorship of a novel—The Case of Comrade Tulayev—that somewhat anticipated Darkness at Noon, Victor Serge could still speak a bit defensively about the bankruptcy of socialism in the "midnight of the century" represented by the Hitler-Stalin pact. But he added, -INTERVIEW: Martin Amis in Conversation with Olga Slavnikova (The New Yorker, 6/13/12) -INTERVIEW: Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151 (Interviewed by Francesca Riviere, ISSUE 146, SPRING 1998, Paris Review) -PROFILE: A VERY ENGLISH STORY (Jonathan Wilson, February 26, 1995, The New Yorker) -TRUBUTE: Martin Amis, by a woman who loved him (By Alys Denby, 5/24/23, CapX) -BOOK LIST: Six Essential Books by Martin Amis (Tobias Carroll, 5/21/23, Inside Hook) -ESSAY: Why We Should Read Martin Amis (Riley Moore, 1/09/21, Quillette) -TRIBUTE: The Singular Robert Conquest (JAY NORDLINGER, September 10, 2015, National Review) - -ESSAY: Son of Saul: Martin Amis and Saul Bellow (Jeffrey Meyers, 10/15/23, The Article) -PROFILE: Is Saul Bellow Martin Amis’s true father?: Reviews of Martin Amis’s new book prove that the best questions are the ones that no one asks (David Herman, 10/02/20, the Critic) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread by Martin Amis (Paul Berman, NY Times Book Review) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Anne Applebaum, Slate) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Neal Ascherson, The Guardian) Amis has loved two men who have found reasons not to dismiss what happened after October 1917 in Russia as an inexcusable moral atrocity. These two are his late father, Kingsley Amis, and Christopher Hitchens. Kingsley Amis, before his spectacular conversion to the right, was a member of the Communist party from 1941 to 1956. Hitchens was never a Stalinist, but he stayed loyal to an intellectual Trotskyist view of the Bolshevik revolution, which honoured Lenin and blamed Stalin for deforming the revolution into a state-capitalist dictatorship. Amis is asking how could they have. But of course he is also asking how could I have, how can I continue to love them? -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Publishers Weekly) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Complete Review) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Jason Cowley, The Observer) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Charles Taylor, Salon) -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Paul Daley, The Age) -REVIEW: of House of Meetings by Martin Amis (Joan Acocella, the New Yorker) -REVIEW: of House of Meetings (Thomas Mallon, Washinhgton Post) -REVIEW: of THE SECOND PLANE: September 11: Terror and Boredom By Martin Amis (Warren Bass, Washington Post) -REVIEW: of Inside Story by Martin Amis (New Statesman) -REVIEW: of Inside Story (Ronald K. Fried, Daily Beast) -REVIEW: of Inside Story (Douglas Murray, UnHerd) -REVIEW: of Inside Story (declan Fry, Australian Book Review) -REVIEW: of The Pregnant Widow (Jenny Turner, LRB) -REVIEW: of Martin Amis: the Biography by Richard Bradford (Brian Finney, LA Review of Books) - -REVIEW: of Night Train by Martin Amis (Adam Phillips, LRB) -ESSAY: The End-Of-History Smart Set: From '60s radicals to pro-war liberals, the West's last literary clique now seems a relic of the 20th century. That isn't such a bad thing. (Matt Purple, 5/28/21, American Conservative) Book-related and General Links: -EXCERPT: Robert Conquest: Sovietologist and Poet (DAVID PRYCE-JONES, April 28, 2020, National Review) |
Copyright 1998-2015 Orrin Judd
