Koba the Dread

When Tina Brown signed her ex-boyfriend Martin Amis to the nascent Talk Miramax Books, she certainly knew there was a memoir in the pipeline; a collection of reviews and essays was part of the deal as well. But after that, surely, this great British novelist would surely provide — well, a novel. Instead, we get Koba the Dread, a history book-cum-memoir which less than two months after its publication has already sunk to 1,440 on amazon.com's sales ranking. It might have made the front page of the Sunday New York Times book review section, but the American public clearly has little time for a précis of Stalin's purges, interspersed with personal anecdotes and peculiar sideswipes at Christopher Hitchens.

Bizarrely, the genre this book most closely approximates is neither textbook nor memoir, but weblog. It was written, as far as I can make out, while Amis was on holiday in Uruguay with "several yards of books about the Soviet experiment". Sometimes Amis puts all those books to one side and rattles off stories of himself at his father's knee in the company of Philip Larkin; most of the time he'll pull one of the books off the shelf and use it to bludgeon the figure of Iosif Stalin. In keeping with the book's solipsistic tone, thoughts of Stalin bring up musings on Kingsley Amis, Christopher Hitchens and even Martin's own daughter, and so we hear about them as well.

None of it, I have to say, makes a great deal of sense. Amis jumps around a lot, both chronologically and stylistically, and it can be very hard to keep up. One minute he'll be waxing grandly on the "politicization of sleep"; the next he'll quote a gulag survivor's memoir just because a particular passage speaks powerfully to him; and the next his conversational tone will return, and we'll get the feeling that we're eavesdropping on one side of an argument between Amis and Hitchens in which a detailed knowledge of all several yards of books is assumed.

Amis is a much better novelist than he is polemicist, however, and he has picked as an adversary one of the greatest polemicists in the business. Hitchens' demolition of Amis in the Guardian is much more fun to read than the ponderous and slightly incoherent accuasations against which he is defending himself; his book review in the Atlantic starts with a section of over-generous praise before morphing effortlessly into a well-deserved skewering session.

The real weakness of the book, however, is its historical unreliability. Because Amis did no originial research, his prose is littered with paragraphs like this one:

Stalin's aims were clear: crash Collectivization would, through all-out grain exports, finance wildfire industrialization, resulting in breakneck militarization to secure state and empire "in a hostile world." According to Robert Tucker, Stalin was beginning to picture himself as a kind of Marxist Tsar; he hoped to improve and replace Leninism (with Stalinism), and also to buttress the state "from above," as had Peter the Great. What remains less clear is whether his strategy was thought through, or simply and intoxicatedly ad hoc. The Five Year Plan, after all, was not a plan but a wish list. It was certainly Stalin's intention, or his need, to regalvanize Bolshevism, to commit it, once again, to "heroic" struggle. And yet, unlike Hitler, who announced his goals in 1933 and, with a peculiarly repulsive sense of entitlement, set about achieving them, Stalin is to be seen at this time as a figure constantly fantasticated not by success but by failure.

Wow. There's a lot of omniscience here: "Stalin's aims were clear... It was certainly Stalin's intention... Stalin is to be seen at this time as". But there's also that peculiar "According to Robert Tucker" in the middle: is Amis hedging, or simply citing? And he puts quotation marks around "in a hostile world", without any indication of who or what he might be quoting. Then, that bizarre final sentence: "And yet, unlike Hitler..." — why him, all of a sudden? And what on earth does "fantasticated" mean, anyway?

The most withering criticism of Koba the Dread has come not from Hitchens, or from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times ("the narcissistic musings of a spoiled, upper-middle-class littérateur"). It has come, rather, from Anne Applebaum in Slate."Contrary to the reviews," she writes, "Koba the Dread is not, in fact, a competent account of Stalin's reign but rather a muddled misrendering of both Soviet and Western intellectual history."

Amis has failed, in other words, even at the relatively modest task he set himself. If we can't trust his take on Soviet history, the very foundations on which the book is built crumble, and we are left with nothing at all.

Amis says that he's working on a new novel, one which harkens back to the comedy of Money. If I worked at Talk Miramax, I'd be very happy about that: Mart's attempts at genre-hopping only seem to land him in trouble. Bring on the old!

Posted by Felix at 11:21 EST

Comments

Hmm. Can't be bothered to look up "fantasticate;" takes another critic's word for the scholarly inadequacy of the work being reviewed (doing so immediately after castigating the reviewed author for not "doing research")...

This is very very sloppy journalism. Shame on you.

Posted by: Anonymous at 13:44 EST, December 11, 2002

Excellent review Mr. Salmon! Amis' recount of Stalin's Soviet Union is jumbled and chronologically inconsistent. In short, it is nothing more than a historical heterogeneous mess. In Koba, Amis' style of writing falls far from delineating the artist's unique talent of writing, which from his previous works has made him one of my favorite authors. He should simply keep to story telling and leave the paraphrasing to high schoolers cramming to finish a last minute term paper.

Posted by: Andrea Quijano at 12:33 EST, January 18, 2003

I think that Koba is both a 'good' book and an important book.

I have little interest in the criticisms of Amis's style, or his segue's between personal memory and historic record. That is entirely consistant with his previous works.

The book introduced me to several important (and, perhaps, stylisticaly more consistent) works and authors.

In addition it takes sucessfully communicates the enormous scope and scale of the disasters of the Soviet experience in a way that most of the more scholoarly tomes do not.

Given that these events scarcely register in the public historic memory, I believe that Amis has a real contribution to the 'strugle of memory against forgetting' that Kundera talks about.

If the tone is slightly 'hysterical', as one critic puts it, then perhaps we should be grateful that we have, in Amis, an author who is not concerned to conceal his incomprehension and bewilderment at the Western Intelligensia's duplicity with the 'Big Lie' of the communist's propaganda.

God forbid that he should have written a dispassionate, disinterested and clinical book. His 'tone', in my opinion, permits the reader to react to the appaling facts he presents in a visceral rather than cerebral way.

I would recommend his book as THE starting point for anyone who wishes to learn about the Soviet Union and the crimes of Stalin and Communism.

Get started with Amis - he'll take you to Conquest; Ginzberg; Dolot and Burdach.

Posted by: Ted Fernyhough at 19:11 EST, March 29, 2005

Koba the Dread

Comments

Post a comment

Felix Salmon: Recent posts

Felix's del.icio.us links

Archives