Friday, December 22, 2006

Amis on terror

The wonderful stylist and interesting social theorist Martin Amis has a new novel out in England, soon to be released here: "House of Meetings." In it, according to a fierce but finely observed review by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books, he does a kind of short novelization of his nonfiction book "Koba the Dread" -- Soar, being a bit fresh, calls it "a 'non-fiction' book" -- about the crimes committed under Stalin and Communism.

We're never clear, reading Soar, on where exactly the novel takes us, but Soar is dogged about pursuing Amis's mind, not only in this story but in his whole oeuvre. Of most concern to him, as to many former fans of his and Christopher Hitchens', is Amis's recent rhetorical war on Islamism, which Soar suggests is the metaphorical raison d'etre of this novel about Stalinism. Soar reproduces some of Amis's words about Islam and Islamism in a recent interview. For those unaware of these statements, it's worth reading the whole piece. Here they are, in part:

There’s a definite urge -- don’t you have it? -- to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation -- further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:02 PM

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