Fiction or not?: Martin Amis's Oktober

Martin Amis's Oktober runs under the heading "fiction" in the current New Yorker but it seems about as close as fiction can get to journalism/essay/reportage. I suppose "fiction" allows him some latitude to compress characters or even to invent characters as needed. Still hard not to read this as an essay: Amis on a book tour through Europe this summer in his last stop, Munich, consumed by thoughts about the Syrian refugees streaming toward Europe and on the doorstep of Germany, and the great social angst an upheaval as Germans generally seem ready to open the doors but fearful that the stream of refugees will become a torrent. Amis artfully weaves strands together: a photographer working with him shows pictures he'd taken of refugees on a train and Amis sees them for the first time not as a mass but as individuals; thoughts about the terrible history of Germany and of Jews trying to flee the Nazi regime blocked at borders, his own peripatetic life with due acknowledgment of how easy it is for him to cross borders, the publishing and publicity business, the life of exile of another great writer (Nabokov) chronicled in VN's letters to Vera (Amis reading an advance copy; his review appeared recently in NYTBR), and the bitter mouthings of an English businessman whom Amis twice encounters and who screams orders into his cell phone and then expresses the benighted and probably majority viewpoint about the refugee hordes. That's a lot for any one story, or essay, and Amis handles the material well, with seamless transitions among these topics. Over great time he could, and maybe will, use transform this material into a structure more closely resembling short fiction - characters (not just the nondisguised author), plot, resolution - but it's also the raw, front-line qualities that make this piece compelling, engaging, and timely.