ten. Yes, indeed, Martin Amis appears to be very angry about something. Perhaps he is very angry about his father’s death. Perhaps he is very angry about being a fiftysomething novelist who has run out of things to write about. Yet by inexplicably funneling his displaced anger into a poorly conceived, improbably hysterical diatribe against Stalinism, he has neither revealed anything new, nor retold old stories in an interesting way, nor done any victims any favors. Amis poses, at the start of the book, a legitimate question: Why do we think it is OK to make jokes about Stalinism, to laugh at a political system that killed millions of people? By the end of the book, we no longer want to know the answer.
The whole point of Amis’ book, the skill of it, is precisely in making it entirely plain how despicable the whole system was. He manages this much better than Applebaum because he’s an excellent writer. He doesn’t claim to be an expert. It’s a polemic, not a work of history. He’s pointing out the wood for those who tend to get absorbed in looking at the trees. And he’s wondering, amonst other things, why it was that Nazism was agreed to be evil, but to talk of Communism in those terms branded you in liberal circles as some sort of right-wing nutter.
A reasonable point, you’d think, but Applebaum wasn’t alone in hating Koba. Its publication marked open season on Amis, prompting this , for instance, from Johann Hari:
This is an important book, then, because it exposes a lacerating flaw in one of our most critically (but not popularly) acclaimed novelists. There is a hole at the core of Martin Amis’s personality, and his florid prose and arid intellectualism has, for too long, prevented us from admitting it. (It feels cruel to write so personally, but in this book, Amis dedicates barely 50 pages in a 300-page book to anything other than his personality. It is impossible not to respond in kind.) This book confirms something that I feared to be the case when I read his last few books: that he equates human worth with literary worth. […]
This is a chilling book, because apparently without knowing it, Amis has revealed his own deformed personality. The proper response is not the anger displayed by so many critics. The only human response is to pity poor, preposterous Martin Amis, deluding himself that he – or his talentless father – have more merit than toilet cleaners like my granny, who read little but love more than he can ever know.
You’d think Amis had written a book on the joys of child abuse.
Applebaum, of course, cites Christopher Hitchens in her review. He was the friend who Amis mentioned in the introduction to Koba, as he was the speaker who prompted Amis to write Koba in the first place. And he it was he who delivered the supposedly devastating riposte to Amis (and here) though to me there’s a great deal of Hitchens bluster here. I suppose it all boils down to one thing: whether or not you believe the chanting of the magic word “Trotsky” serves to wash away all the sins of Marxism-Leninism, leaving it pure and uncontaminated by Stalinism. On that I shall say no more because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life is too short to get into an argument with a Trotskyist.
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