December 29, 2002

MARTIN Amis has been making literary headlines since the publication of his first novel, The Rachel papers in 1973. Following his widely-acclaimed memoir, Experience, Amis has turned his attention to Stalin’s Russia. Koba the dread: laughter and the twenty million is a polemical account of the Soviet experiment. The book is a catalogue of Stalin’s crimes, followed by an open letter to Christopher Hitchens, close friend and former Trotskyist. Finally, Amis reflects on the death of his sister, and attempts to reconcile personal bereavement with the death of millions — to Stalin a mere ‘statistic’.


Observer: When did you decide to do this book?

Martin Amis: Well, I never did decide to do it. In fact, ‘decide’ is nearly always a misleading word in the business of writing, because the decisions are way back in your spinal column and they dawn on you slowly. I just wanted to write something about this stuff. And I started and I thought it’d be a long piece, then a pamphlet, then maybe a short book, then it turned into a medium-short book. But my longest book, London fields, began as a novella. So whaddya know?
 

Obs: Did you realize that there was going to be a memoir framing the more researched element?

MA: I didn’t know my sister was going to die. I’d done all the early stuff, before you get to Stalin himself, and I was halfway through that when she died. If it had been a novel I wouldn’t have dreamt of putting it in. You don’t really think — is this going to work? You think — are there thematic connections? And I was writing about my family, and about death, and there were connections, I thought. My respect for death is really climbing at a huge rate.
 

Obs: Respect — rather like fear or something different?

MA: That, too. But respect for its complexity and its power. The definition of youth is the belief in your own immortality; the minute that goes it’s a full-time job looking the other way. I’ve even come, since finishing the book, to suspect that we will extend the human lifespan really dramatically, quite soon maybe, but we’ll never be immortal because it’s the death of others that kills you. Takes so much out of you.

The death of a father’s something else, but the death of a sibling, a younger sibling is a different kind of experience. It demands of you a little death yourself. Your body kind of rehearses it, you feel that you are dying. You don’t want to be feeling that too much. Can’t be good for you. It’s one of the experiences that when you get there, you think, Christ, why didn’t literature warn me? Of course, literature probably did, but you weren’t listening.
 

Obs: Is that increasingly what you’re setting out to do — to warn?

MA: It’s certainly stimulating to think that you’re seeing things in your own writing that you haven’t seen in print, ever. Perhaps they are out there, perhaps they’re in Shakespeare, perhaps they just didn’t catch on you, but if you can say one new thing about death, then that is exciting.
 

Obs: There’s an open letter to Christopher Hitchens at the end of Koba. Is he the kind of belated fellow-traveller you’re addressing in the book?

MA: I wouldn’t call him that. I make it clear he had no time for Stalin. But his allegiance to Trotsky, and guarded admiration for Lenin — it’s part of him and he wouldn’t be himself without it. But I don’t see how he can justify it rationally.
 

Obs: An American critic has said that he sensed lots of anger in the book.

MA: I didn’t feel angry. I was re-reading [Robert] Conquest today on the asymmetry of indulgence of the atrocities from the Left, and it was a massive phenomenon. Not just intellectuals, and not just Jean-Paul Sartre, but businessmen, scientists, academics, and every kind of artist. And there was of course no rational reason for it.
 

Obs: Is that a change in your belief from circa 1970 at the New Statesman?

MA: I’m just a little bit more militant about not being militant. But I didn’t like it then; I didn’t like the kind of herd rectitude. Because you could see what they were after was to be violent and right at the same time, and I feel that those are incompatible, and violence is itself meaningless.
 

Obs: Why did you want to write about Stalin?

MA: It’s a heavy call to want to even more deeply demonize an historical figure. I haven’t been reading the reviews, but already I get the sense that if I’d written a book about Hitler it would have been a completely different atmosphere.
 

Obs: Some readers have taken offence at the ‘laughter’ of the title. MA: It is a paradoxical idea. I talked to someone I thought had read the book very well the other day. He said that even the section on Stalin is often comic, the reality was so farcical. As I say at the end, the joke is on human nature. How quickly it all turns to a nightmare.
 

Obs: You mention once or twice the idea that if you put two people together, and give one absolute power over the other, torture quickly ensues.

MA: Yes, the thoughts of torture will be more or less automatic, I think.
 

Obs: How much was the Fred West element of Experience still in your mind?

MA: This convulsion in my writing life is a lot to do with that, with my cousin, and having a horrible inverted kind of link with this little one-man death camp. Both Experience and this are kind of wrestling with that. I never thought for a minute that fiction was at all trivial; it’s a very high pursuit, but I just couldn’t... didn’t feel playful enough. You have to feel playful to write fiction.
 

Obs: Even Night train was a departure from your familiar terrain. Is your writing driven by a fear of predictability?

MA: A quest for novelty? I don’t think it can be, because the novel I’m writing at the moment has a character called Clint Smoker. It’s so me, it feels like I’m going through my hoops.
 

Obs: How big’s that going to be?

MA: Not very long, and more comic than I’ve done for a while.
 

Obs: Right back to the lightness of The Rachel papers?

MA: No, more like Money, perhaps. Where you give various characters and ideas their head, but not a long novel. You can say of Graham Greene that he wrote about the same things but he just got older as he did them. The perspective is like a shadow moving across a lawn.
 

Obs: What is the changing perspective?

MA: Time. Age. Mortality. That can make you all frisky as well. A terrible sort of giddy, senile friskiness comes over us. I can tell I’m doing some new things in the one I’m writing now because it’s tough; you know you’re trying to coax the language into maximum effect.
 

Obs: What’s the novel called?

MA: I haven’t got a title yet. Maybe Men in power. One of the main characters is the King of England, Henry IX. It’s on a sort of three-character loop, but then it changes halfway through. I’m assuming the reader will be wondering intensely how these three characters are connected. One of them’s Clint Smoker, who works for a paper well below the Sun in its intentions and strategies.
 

Obs: How far on are you?

MA: One hundred-odd typed pages, second draft sort of thing, another 50 in long hand. It won’t be much longer than 250.
 

Obs: How do you write?

MA: I do a lot of longhand. I’ve come to think that the process of writing a novel is finding out about the novel. When you’ve done your year or two of longhand and you go back to start at the beginning again, you’re amazed by how little you knew about it. You’ve got some little throb or spark that gives you a sentence or a situation and for the next few years you’re just finding out more about the novel.
 

Obs: How much do you write a day?

MA: Sometimes I write so fast I can hardly keep up. And other days I’d be hard-pressed to write the dosage instructions on a Nurofen packet.
 

Obs: You don’t force out 1,OOO words every day?

MA: No. I’m very impressed by writers who can do that, but it’s much more of a groping business. If I’m having a day where I don’t feel I can write the instructions on a Nurofen packet I won’t sit there staring. I’ll read and I’ll be alone. I think that reading, being alone, waiting, is a huge part of it all.
 

Obs: Do you keep office hours?

MA: No. I get up much too late for that. But you have to put it about in your household that daddy’s working all the time - even when he’s asleep in front of the snooker. Actually what you’re doing is nursing a preoccupation.
 

Obs: The routine for Koba must have been different because you were working with source materials and must have had something like index cards.

MA: No, I’m much too chaotic for that. But you’re right, when you’re dealing merely with what actually happened, it seems quite a lot of the job is done before you get there, you don’t have to be dreaming it up. Writing Koba was a very happy writing experience.
 

Obs: Do you have any more history brewing?

MA: Well, I’ve already written a novel about Nazism, but I feel I have unfinished business with Hitler. —Dawn/Observer news service

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