Amis pulls off the Red Terror without a Hitch.

MARTIN AMIS walked out onto the stage and over to the podium with a slow, cautious gait, wearing a rumpled shirt beneath a muted suit. He looked out at the audience from the top of his glasses and said, in a deep, fifth-act voice, "Thank you for coming out on such a vile night."

Bill Buford had introduced him, in tones of unbridled awe, recalling the days of Amis' ascent, when Buford was the editor of Granta, publishing him every chance he got. Amis looked faintly uncomfortable, but performed to perfection, reading a piece he'd written years earlier on Ronald Reagan called "Phantom of the Opera." It was characteristically funny, lyrical and lapidary.

But it was also safe in its targets and observations. This was the Martin Amis of 1990, the voice of post-ironic British insouciance, every line glittering in its own protective salt, not a bead of sweat. It was a virtuosic performance that lacked only one thing. Not heart exactly, but some kind of brokenness, or savor, or-handicap. My visceral impression was of a writer struggling to free himself from a harness: the father, the privilege, the haute-Britannic education, the talent. Somehow he has to transcend all this to get free, I was thinking. Free like Nabokov, his hero, who wrote monstrously, tragically, and without any fear of sentiment.

For years I had dismissed Amis as being brilliant but ultimately trapped in the lattice-work of his own style and his abiding and very British fear of "cliche." I read some of his books, and was dazzled, but not penetrated. Then, recently, I read Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million at the insistence of a friend and nearly dropped out of my chair. I know all the noses went sniff sniff when it came out two years ago, but I think it's a very important book.

A left-leaning intellectual British friend, who knows Amis well and who frequently unleashes anti-American tirades, declaring that we are nothing but a "nation of peasants and thugs," gave me a proper thrashing when I told him I thought Koba the Dread was a masterpiece. "Darling, that book was universally panned," he said, jutting his chin out. "Rehashing old crap about Stalin that everybody has known for 20 years. It was an embarrassment."

"You're crazy," I said.

The bad reviews (and they weren't universal) are just a reenactment of the phenomenon Amis charts: the arrogant refusal, among the parlor literati and glitterati, to unequivocally condemn the crimes of Stalin as they do the crimes of Hitler.

The book isn't just "about" Stalin. It's about Stalin and us. In writing it, Martin Amis stood up to his entire social circle, his best friend (Hitchens) his father (in part) and the whole bizarre, haunted spectre of communist apologia in the West.

"Oh don't fall for that Mart," Hitchens warns Amis in a telephone conversation. "Don't fall for moral equivalence."

"Why not?"

"Lenin was a?great man."

"Oh no he wasn't."

"This will be a long talk."

"A long talk."

The lecture hall at the 92nd Street Y was about two-thirds filled, mostly with people who probably read The New Yorker, hold decent, disapproving views about the war in Iraq and ride the bus. Buford shuffled through the cards on which people had written their questions and chose one. "Somebody's asking you Martin?Do you think you have a moral responsibility, when you address issues such as pornography and violence."

Amis shifted in his seat, then quoted a few lines from Lolita, and said something about the creative importance of cruelty.

"America," he said, "has come down to two things: taking offense, and not giving offense. I find myself very much attracted to what will cause offense. It's self-destructive. These 'no entry' signs that are erecting themselves around any number of subjects?my impulse is to go on in."

But Koba may be the first book he's ever written that could stake a claim to causing "offense." Anti-communism still, to this day, has to bow and scrape and distance itself from the social fumes of "red-baiting."

Amis is not rehashing the facts about Stalin's unfathomable crimes in this book-he's breathing life into them the way only a great novelist could, forcing us to imagine the horrors that currently are lost in a kind of opaque, theoretical realm. Lost in everybody's discomfort about the anti-communist right.

He uses phrases that, in a few words, do more to illuminate history than all the history books he plowed through to write this. Drawing on numerous historical references, he interlaces sheets of horror-the millions starved, the millions who died in labor camps, the millions who were executed, the ever escalating raw terror-with zoom-shots of heart-breaking details, where the "20 million" begin to assume faces and identities, at last. And this was Amis' aim. We glimpse a labor camp prisoner whose fingers have been "permanently molded by the tools he wields," another who hangs himself in a tree fork "without even using a rope," thousands of women on a slave ship cooped up in cages "as in a gigantic poultry farm," covered in boils and blisters, "perched like birds?yet seeing a man coming down the stairs?many of them began to smile and some even tried to comb their hair."

It's closer to a prose poem than a history. It relies on the economy of lyricism. But it is also an open-ended cry, an unresolved chord.

He describes a Christopher Hitchens lecture in 2002 that he attended with the historian of the Soviet terror-famine, Robert Conquest. Hitchens mused on being in that same room decades earlier with many "an old comrade," which elicits a cozy chuckle from the audience.

He asks Conquest afterward:

"Did you laugh?"

"Yes," he said.

And I said, "And so did I."

Why is it? Why is it?

Amis tries to imagine Hitchens referring blithely to his evenings with many "an old blackshirt," and in wondering how the audience would have reacted to that, realizes that with such a past, there would be no audience, because "Christopher would not be Christopher-or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever."

The book closes with two letters, one to Hitchens and one to his dead father, pleading for an answer to this question: What is the difference? Why is Communism still a fashionable old smell to have on your person, when it killed-under Stalin alone-at least three times as many as Hitler had time to kill?

"An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror," he writes to his friend. "They would not want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration for terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom."

There is no answer.

After the reading, Amis sat signing books, and the crowd sipped white wine. I shook his hand and told him how much I admired Koba the Dread, and he smiled, a bit uneasily, I thought, and signed my book.