A writer on a European book tour arrives in Germany and finds himself caught in the middle of a clash of opposing dialogues in a city overwhelmed with a huge refugee crisis.
Pertinent, but also personal: British author Martin Amis has revealed in an interview with the New Yorker that his new short story, Oktober, was inspired by what he saw on his most recent book tour in Europe, a trip he called “unusually interesting and unusually disturbing”.
Published in the New Yorker this week, Oktober follows an author narrator who finds Munich overwhelmed by Oktoberfest revellers, as well as by refugees pouring in from “what was once known as the Fertile Crescent”. Bernhardt, an Iranian-German photographer, tells him of how “they all want to get to this country because they have friends and family here. Germany is trying to be welcoming, trying to be kind”; businessman and travelling Brit Geoffrey, is less welcoming.
“They’ve turned their own countries into, into hellholes, quite honestly, and now they’re coming here,” he tells Amis’s narrator. “And even if they don’t start killing us all they’re going to want their own ways, aren’t they?”
Amis writes, later, that “it was as if a tectonic force had taken hold of Europe and, using its fingernails, had lifted it up and tilted it, politically, causing a heavy mudslide in the direction of old illusions, old dreams of purity and cruelty”.
In the interview, Amis said the two characters “certainly represent two opposed human impulses”, with Bernhardt “naturally inclined toward inclusiveness, whereas Geoffrey, a conservative Yorkshireman, feels the urge to reject and even to punish”.
“Although old Geoff may not be entirely despicable, he is unlikely to respond well to a demographic influx. The refugee crisis, I fear, will expose many ‘sleeper’ reactionary diehards in the west,” said Amis.
Amis told the New Yorker that he “considered writing a think piece of some kind, but I wanted the singular freedom offered by fiction.”
“As the story evolved, it seemed to demand that I give some impression of my own life – my life not as a writer but as a son, a husband, and a father,” he said.
In Oktober, Amis’s author narrator is reading Letters to Vera, by Vladimir Nabokov; the Lolita author, Amis told the New Yorker, faced situations “as extreme as that of any present-day Syrian. Uprooted and pauperised, he faced mortal danger three times over, fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1917, fleeing Nazi Berlin in 1937, and fleeing the Wehrmacht in France in 1940.”
Asked if he planned to address the “current crisis” further in book form – he wrote about 9/11 in the collection of fiction and non-fiction The Second Plane – Amis revealed to the New Yorker that a decade ago, he “got quite far with a satirical jihadi novella, and then abandoned it: every sentence seemed to be a hostage to fortune”.
In 2007, Amis came under fire over an interview in which he said that “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.’”
Taking on the crisis now, he told the New Yorker, it “would have to be in the form of essays and, perhaps, oblique short stories”.
“The time to write about the Age of Terrorism will come when it is over, or at least dwindling,” said the novelist. “Norman Mailer talked of reducing terrorism to ‘a tolerable level’, and that may even be the best we can hope for.”
