Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis was published in 1980. Recent events have prompted me to have a look at it again. It’s not one of his best-known novels and probably not even one of his best. It is fascinating, though, for reasons that I hope I shall make clear.
It’s a sort of science fiction novel that depicts a Britain under Russian military rule at some unspecified point in the twenty-first century, after an event referred to only as the “pacification”. The central character, Alexander, is a young Russian officer who becomes involved in a plot to undermine the government and restore rule to the British. He is an unsympathetic figure, selfish, vain and chiefly interested in his numerous affairs with women, including a rather strange mother and daughter. Character and the rather convoluted plot are not really the point here, though. What is so compelling is the believable world of a conquered Britain.
The oil is beginning to run out and cars are reserved for senior Russian officers. Horses are once more the main mode of transport for everyone else. Computers have been and gone. Everything seems dirty or degraded and there is a general air of shabbiness. Most of the trees have gone from the gardens of English country houses. Inside, the old furniture and paintings have long since disappeared.
Nothing, from clothes to alcoholic drinks is made to the standard that we would consider normal. Most people are reduced to eating a sort of peasant diet of broth and vegetables.
Everyone speaks Russian most of the time and English dialogue is printed in italics. It’s fashionable among the Russians to drop English phrases into their conversation but with no real knowledge to draw on they get them wrong, and it comes out sounding like a sort of mangled Bertie Wooster.
We are told that there was a deliberate policy of “de-nationing”. British history and culture have been almost completely eradicated. The civilian population has no knowledge of what happened in the second world war. A festival of British culture is planned and it becomes apparent that no-one remembers Christian church services, or understands Shakespeare.
Something else that has been and gone in this world is Marxism. The Russian rulers have reverted to a sort of Tsarist autocracy. There is no moral centre in this world where both Christianity and Marxism are things of the past.
The game of the title is a variation on Russian Roulette, played with live ammunition.
It’s not really clear what Amis was up to here. On the one hand there’s a certain similarity to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, where the “Russian” slang of the teenage characters stood in for the American slang of the rock and roll era. Is it all meant to be a sort of allegory of the late 1970s when it was written, a warning about the loss of traditional British culture from a writer who was becoming increasingly conservative in his political outlook at this point? Or is it a sort of transferred depiction of the actual quality of life inside the Soviet Union at that time?
It’s not the easiest read, but a thought-provoking one. It’s a major structural fault, I think, that so much of the information about what exactly happened in the past is held back until too near the end. There is a pointed mention of the fact that the Americans did not intervene.
Too many Russian names are introduced too quickly at the beginning. Oddly enough, this is precisely the problem that English readers often have with Chekov or Tolstoy, so it rather makes me wonder whether it might have been intended as a parody.
It is compelling, though. For all its faults, I’ve read it three times.
There’s an interesting anecdote about this book in Amis’ Memoirs. It was his current book at the time he met Mrs Thatcher. On being told what it was about, she replied “No, no, no!”, indicating that whatever her other qualities, an understanding of fiction was not among them.
The Good Reader 