Not your usual Amis, and the fact that he does so well outisde his natural settings is one of this books strenghts. The theme itself - life in Stalinist USSR and its Gulags - is one I have a personal obssession with, and have done much reading on. Amis holds his own, presents a brutal description of what life was like for these characters made brutal by the daily struggles to survive - in and out of the gulag itself. Into this he inserts the tragedy of a love triangle between two brothers, both archetypes of the new soviet man - one a brutal survivor, the other an idealist and intellectual, and a quintessential russian woman, and how each one was destroyed despite survival, and how love and hate can fuel the will to live under the most miserable conditions, and keep you going far beyond anything that resembles life.