No Laughing Matter

One Wonders what Amis is truly up to. Why is he writing a fictionalized slave-camp narrative sixteen years after the cold war ended? When considered with his other recent work, in particular his New Yorker stories ("In the Palace of the End" and "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta"), House of Meetings provides Amis with one more means to articulate the argument he put forth in his 2006 Guardian essay, "The Age of Horrorism": that incorrigible Islamic fundamentalists—"Islamo-fascists," as he calls them—are not only the world's newest body-count manufacturers but are also guilty of the same authoritarian sadism as their Nazi and Soviet forebears. This contention, however relevant or disputable, is difficult to argue when the novella is taken out of the context of his other recent stories, and what remains beneath the din of historical reprobation is little more than hollow, thinly conceived characters.