In the "little zona," where much of House of Meetings takes place, there is ultra-violence between the brutes and the bitches. Brutes are urkas, or socially friendly elements, content with their status near the top of the prison-camp food chain. Bitches are urkas who aspire to reach the summit as administrators or guards. Their class goes by the title of pigs.

With both factions having easy access to tool shops, skirmishes between bitches and brutes feature "warm work with the spanner and the pliers, the handspike and the crowbar, vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chiselings." Blindings and castrations are common. So is plain murder. Survivors of these wars inflict any leftover violence on the juvenile factions, called the locusts, and on the ordinary criminals, known as leaches. Nearly beneath their contempt are the actual political prisoners in the camp, referred to as fascists, or the informants, dubbed the snakes. Still further below dwell the shit-eaters, their moniker derived from the slops and garbage on which they must subsist.

"There were also animals, real animals, in our animal farm," the narrator, a member of the fascist category, notes in passing: "Dogs." He is recalling the gulag in a book-length suicide letter to his stepdaughter a half-century after his incarceration there. He is an unnamed Russian émigré. She is an American named Venus.

Whether Venus is aware of it or not, the world her stepfather is recreating on the page in English – his story would be even worse in Russian, he assures her, it being a language of "gutturals and nasals and whistling sibilants" – is ground well covered by landmark novels and memoirs that likewise chronicled the 20th century's most calamitous foray into social engineering.

Part love story, part polemic, part meditation on death and decay, Martin Amis's 11th novel is first a compendium of literary responses to Stalinism. As such, the George Orwell of Animal Farm and 1984, and the Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange, are compressed into Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and more recent scholarly excavations of the Soviet era.

Amis's own 2002 non-fiction probing of Stalinist terror, Koba the Dread, is also part of the compendium. House of Meetings boasts serious literary pedigree and a syncretic intelligence. A work of precise intellectual argument, the novel still manages to work through the familiar Amis obsessions, most of them endearingly compulsive.

Readers who navigated the vast bog of his previous fiction, Yellow Dog, will be pleased, or maybe simply relieved, by the precision. Amis has done this before in his career, as when Time's Arrow, a prismatic take on the Holocaust, served to quietly counter the wide-lens sprawl of its predecessor, London Fields. As for the no-less-compulsive vividness of the Amis prose style, it is intact. Famously, he cannot commit a cliché, either of the pen, heart or head, as he once explained in an essay. Less evident is that Martin Amis can scarcely write a sentence that has not been buffed and polished to an occasionally blinding sheen by an abhorrence of the linguistically over-determined.

"Remembering him now," the narrator says of his younger half-brother, "I see a child-sized version of the posters and paintings of an earlier time – the great globes of sweat, the raised veins on the forearms, even the sheet-metal stare that went out to meet the future."

The story of that brother, Lev, who joins his older sibling in the camp, and of their shared passion for a Jewish woman called Zoya, anchors the narrative. The narrator may be a brute, a war hero turned serial rapist, ready and able to do what is necessary to survive, but Lev's own nature obliges passive resistance. In the gulag, this is suicide.

Brother protects brother while not-so-secretly lusting after his wife, whose beauty earns her the epithet "the Americas" – a Brazilian backside, the tiny waist of Panama, and Californian breasts. Zoya travels to Siberia in 1956 for her conjugal visit in the hut known in camp as the "House of Meetings." The fallout of that encounter is kept secret until the end.

Zoya remains a problem between the siblings, especially once they are liberated. While Lev succumbs to existential listlessness, the narrator thrives in the slow Brezhnev thaw. He winds up in the armaments trade, thus easing his emigration to the United States. But before departing his homeland, he commits one further violation. "Now, my brother," Lev's letter from the grave reads presciently, "it is my suspicion that you aren't yet done with Zoya."

But then Amis's nihilist guide through 60 years of Russian nightmare shares his creator's distaste for language that skirts or softens truth. "In the rapist army," he says of Soviet troops in 1945, "everybody raped. Even the colonels raped. And I raped too." Or this pithy dismissal of therapy-culture talk: "Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a non-existent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets over anything."

Nor, House of Meetings contends with an audacity certain to earn Amis accusations of overstepping his boundaries as a fly-by writer of a "Russian novel," does membership in the rapist army or a decade in the Soviet gulag fully account for such attitudes. After all, even Joseph Stalin is little more a mere bit player in the "big zona" that is "the Russian totality."

From the novel's opening sentence, where the narrator promises to tell Venus why "my country is dying," to its closing lines, where he wishes it a speedy death, Russia itself is declared the nightmare. No escaping it, either, except, of course, by death – individual or collective.

"Call me a literalist," he writes of his own planned suicide, "but I am only doing what Russia is doing." As evidence of this national suicide, he cites fresh atrocities, including massacres of Moscow theatre-goers and Beslan schoolchildren, along with statistics evidencing the country's actual shrinkage, on account of declining lifespans and high abortion rates.

Admirers of Martin Amis have had cause to wonder at the apparent scattershot nature of his mid-career interests, not the least being his increasingly trenchant post-9/11 forays into the minds of jihadists and the mindset of radical Islam. A clue to the dimensions of his literary canvas can be found in a remark made some years ago: "Post-1945 life is completely different from everything that came before it," Amis said. "We are like no other people in history."

With its narrative span of, indeed, 1945 to 2006, House of Meetings fits snugly into the frame. Be it the Holocaust or nuclear weapons, totalitarianism or fundamentalism, the need to recognize and accept core truths about the postmodern condition – his own "big zona," perhaps – is what unifies his singular, extraordinary project.