At the other end of the spectrum we find Rushdie. Midnight’s Children is a literary landmark, but his career overall is Magic Realism by rote: endlessly proclaiming his rejection of the standard menus of representation and, as a consequence, endlessly predictable. He has been writing versions of the same book for almost four decades. Imagine that Joyce decided against despatching experiment to the oblivion of impenetrability that is Finnegans Wake and instead recycled versions of Ulysses until the 1950s (while avoiding his own untimely demise): thus you have an account of something similar to Rushdie’s career. In Martin’s oeuvre the differences between, say, Dead Babies, Money, Time’s Arrow, Yellow Dog and House of Meetings are so striking that one might think they had been written by different men. If there is a consistent feature in his work it is to be found in his almost maniacal preoccupation with different levels of perception and representation: the dreadful inequitability between what we know, or admit, or say.
It could be argued that Barnes comes closest to him in terms of eclecticism and versatility. Perhaps, but he is an author who buys his deserved admiration with meticulous caution. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is a very British bow to the architecture of modernist writing. England, England is dystopian allegory so beautifully executed that it politely spares us feelings of unease let alone fear, and the monologists of Talking It Over marshal their distress so excellently that we admire more than pity them. Barnes is outstandingly talented, and by equal degrees reserved and thoughtful. Unlike Martin he does not deliver unexpected punches: he does not force us, despite ourselves, to confront our conflicting impulses when we read the novel. In short he does not make us think.
Should the tendentious notion of morality play a part in an assessment of a writer’s quality and value? Aside from conservative postmodernism the most significant development in British fiction over the past twenty-five years has been the shift of the historical novel from the popular margins to the respectable centre of ‘literary’ fiction. The cause of this is still open to debate. Some see the end of the Cold War as a special invitation to explore history, given that we appeared to have been spared its enduring consequences; alternately, it is possible that those novelists who have either built their reputations on the new historical novel or used it to demonstrate their versatility – all born after 1945 – felt sufficiently immune from the worst of the twentieth century to be able to revisit it without a fear of private sacrilege. What is clear is that Martin Amis re-creates our not so recent past like no other writer of his generation. Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd, Adam Thorpe and many others are respectful connoisseurs of the two world wars and there is hardly an era or a historical landmark of the past hundred years that has not been ransacked for a novel’s emotional baggage. But at the same time, in Barker’s or Faulks’s accounts of the effects of mass destruction and warfare, there is an assuring sense of distance; as if it is close enough for us to intuit horror and pity but not quite so near as to raise the question of ‘what if’? This is precisely what Martin builds into Time’s Arrow and House of Meetings. We know they are about the past but they never release us from the grip of sharing, of belonging to the same species as people who perpetrated and suffered things we’d rather ignore.
Martin has made another significant contribution to the history of the modern novel by obliging writers to face the pitiless spotlight of evaluation. Consider, for example, Martin’s comments on Michael Crichton’s The Lost World (in The War Against Cliché): ‘The characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs . . . Malcolm seems to own “gloomily”; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving “gloomily” too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving “irritably”. Forget about “tensely” and “grimly” for now. And don’t get me started on “thoughtfully”.’ Martin makes use of his own skills as a stylist to pinpoint the inadequacies and excesses of Crichton’s endeavours. Similarly, after reading a weary passage by D. M. Thomas he offers hilarious, disingenuous concern ‘that the writer’s face is about to flop on to the typewriter keys; the sentences conjure nothing but an exhausted imagination’. One is aware that here is a novelist well attuned to the peculiarities and demands of good writing making use of them to signal their negligent scarcity in the work of his peers. These are the comments of a ruthless, unsparing critic, a man who feels that stylistic laziness is an insult to the profession of writing. It also discloses something of his private mantra as a writer, the factor that has kept alive the evaluative element in contemporary literary culture. Experimental writing, by its nature, always needed an established cultural behemoth against which to pit itself and this obsession with reaction and reinvention has enabled modernists to obfuscate embarrassing inconveniences such as the essential quality of a prose passage. If the emphasis is upon the dynamic remaking of literary models then the notion of good or bad writing can be dismissed as contingent and relative. Pure modernism is among other things an escape route for the stylistically untalented or aesthetically apathetic. If you are concerned exclusively with eschewing conventional writing then the pure demonstration of radicalism sidelines any attendance upon questions of whether a sentence or paragraph is elegantly crafted. Martin is a radical, in the sense that he has taken aspects of fiction such as characterization and behavioural plausibility in directions never previously envisaged, but at the same time he has reserved space in his work for writing that demands to be judged against the style of the best novelists in the canon. And even his begrudgers, those who find him unsatisfactory in other respects, concede that he is a stylistic genius. Aside from the many differences between Martin and his father the one thing that isolates them from their respective peer groups is an ability to make words work together elegantly, often with dry hilarity and, crucially, as routes that mislead; trajectories of meaning that are variously false, ominous and freakishly unanticipated. This, from London Fields, is Nicola welcoming Keith to her flat for the first time:
‘Come on up,’ she said.
As Keith followed her heavily into the apartment, Nicola did something right out of character: she cursed her fate. Then she swivelled and inspected him, from arid crown to Cuban heels, as he cast his scavenging blue eyes around the room: Keith, stripped of all charisma from pub and street. It wasn’t the posture, the scrawniness of the shanks and backside, the unpleasant body scent (he smelled as if he had just eaten a mustard-coated camel), the drunken scoop of his gaze – unappealing though these features certainly were. Just that Nicola saw at once with a shock (I knew it all along, she said to herself) that the capacity for love was extinct in him. It was never there. Keith wouldn’t kill for love. He wouldn’t cross the road, he wouldn’t swerve the car for love. Nicola raised her eyes to heaven at the thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And in earnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death.1
The very best third-person narrators are those who keep us guessing about their partialities and affiliations, make us wonder who in the novel we know best, whether this impression is false, and most of all make us ask questions about why we are being made to jump through such hoops. This short passage is a superb example of third-person double-bluffing. The mood seems droll, almost satirical, but is this a reflection of Nicola’s state of mind or a protective film, perhaps lent to the narrator by Young, to smother something much darker and potentially macabre at the heart of the book? From Keith’s smell – ‘as if he had just eaten a mustard-coated camel’ – by parts hilarious and surreal, we are shifted in a matter of two words to an extended reflection on such universals as love, death, extinction, murder, suicide. We should feel a jolt of discontinuity, an arbitrary moment of thematic incompatibility, but we do not because this is a master class in prose segueing. It is a symphonic meshing of registers, moods, perspectives that ought not to work in such close proximity. But they do.
As a critic Martin is a harsh scrutineer, a conservative unforgiving of stylis
tic laziness or of self-indulgence disguised as the latest contribution to the avant-garde. And he judges others by the same standards that he sets himself as a writer. This is one other thing that he and his father have in common. Kingsley was by far the best prose stylist in English of the post-war years and, without becoming a facsimile of his father, Martin has filled that role in the closing decades of the last and the opening of this century.
Notes
Chapter 1: Before He Left
1. Zachary Leader (ed.), The Letters of Kingsley Amis (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 7 March 1950, p. 228.
2. Ibid., 22 October 1956, p. 487.
3. Ibid., 24 May 1958, p. 535.
4. Experience, p. 165.
5. Review of translation of The Enchanter, TWAC, pp. 261–3.
6. Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London: Cape, 2007), p. 464.
7. Experience, p. 102.
8. Dead Babies, p. 319.
9. Leader, Life, pp. 511–15.
10. Experience, p. 101.
11. Dead Babies, pp. 223–4.
12. Experience, p. 106.
Chapter 2: Wild Times
1. The Rachel Papers, pp. 49–50.
2. Leader, Life, p. 546.
3. Leader, Letters, 4 August 1950, p. 242.
4. Ibid., 12 June 1950, pp. 232–3.
5. Ibid., 27 November 1950, p. 247.
6. Ibid., 30 July 1950, p. 238.
7. Experience, p. 9.
8. Ibid., pp. 86–7.
9. Leader, Letters, 19 June 1946, p. 73.
10. Ibid., 18 April 1946, p. 56.
11. Experience, pp. 19–20.
Chapter 3: Oxford
1. The Rachel Papers, p. 210.
2. Ibid.
3. Experience, p. 41.
4. Ibid., p. 44.
5. My Oxford (ed. Ann Thwaite) (London: Robson Books, 1977), p. 209.
6. The Rachel Papers, p. 211.
7. My Oxford, p. 207.
8. The Rachel Papers, p. 66.
9. My Oxford, p. 207.
10. Experience, pp. 270–2.
Chapter 4: The Novelist
1. Leader, Letters, 19 April 1969, p. 714.
2. Experience, p. 214.
3. Dead Babies, p. 107.
4. Experience, p. 49.
5. Dead Babies, p. 78.
6. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
Chapter 5: The Seventies
1. TWAC, pp. 3–9.
2. Julie Kavanagh, ‘My Life with Martin Amis’, Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2009; Emma Soames, ‘How Churchill’s Granddaughter Was Seduced and Then Breezily Betrayed by “Scribbling Dwarf” Martin Amis’, Daily Mail, 6 June 2009; Tamasin Day-Lewis, ‘Am I the “Leggy Temptress” in Martin Amis’s New Novel?’, Daily Telegraph, 17 February 2010.
3. ‘The Coming Thing’, review of The Best of Forum, New Statesman, 28 September 1973.
4. Success, p. 49.
5. Ibid., pp. 26–7.
6. ‘The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces’, in Peter Quennell (ed.), Vladimir Nabokov: His Life, His Work, His World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p. 76.
7. Graham Fuller, ‘Yob Action’, Village Voice, 1 December 1987.
8. Leader, Letters, 13 December 1977, p. 842.
9. ‘Blackpool Diary’, New Statesman, 14 October 1977.
10. London Fields, p. 22.
11. Leader, Letters, 18 March 1978, p. 845.
12. James Fenton, ‘Of the Martian School’, New Statesman, 20 October 1978.
13. ‘Point of View’, New Statesman, 14 December 1979.
Chapter 6: Paris
1. Leader, Letters, 10 May 1979, p. 871.
2. Blake Morrison, review of Success, TLS, 14 April 1978.
3. Paul Ableman, review of Success, Spectator, 15 April 1978.
4. Peter Ackroyd, Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (London: Vision Press, 1976).
5. John Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (London: Athlone Press, 1976).
6. Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970, 1979).
7. Experience, pp. 51–2.
8. Leader, Letters, 9 March 1981, pp. 915–16.
Chapter 7: America, Kingsley and Bellow
1. TMI, p. 89.
2. Ibid.
3. Kingsley Amis, On Drink (London: Cape, 1972), p. 11.
4. Leader, Letters, 9 March 1981, p. 917.
5. TMI, p. 137.
6. Ibid. p. 55.
7. VMN, p. 114.
8. ‘Lolita Reconsidered’, The Atlantic 270, September 1992, pp. 115ff.
9. TWAC, p. 379.
10. Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia (London: Fourth Estate, 2010); Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber, 2009); Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London: Allen Lane, 2010).
11. TMI, p. 199.
12. Experience, pp. 176–7.
13. Ibid., p. 177.
Chapter 8: Self, Marriage, Children
1. Money (Penguin edn), p. 47.
2. Ibid., pp. 246–7.
3. Ibid., p. 248.
4. TWAC, pp. 451–2.
5. Money, p. 39.
6. Ibid., p. 119.
7. Ibid., p. 104.
8. Ibid., p. 222.
9. Leader, Letters, 18 June 1984, p. 976.
10. Experience, p. 249.
11. Einstein’s Monsters, p. 47.
12. Leader, Letters, 7 June 1986, pp. 1021–2.
13. Einstein’s Monsters, p. 12.
14. Ibid., p. 18.
15. Ibid., p. 19.
16. Ibid.
17. The Pregnant Widow, pp. 165–6.
Chapter 9: Dystopian Visions
1. VMN, p. 227.
2. Ibid., pp. 228–9.
3. Ibid., pp. 229–30.
4. Mira Stout, ‘Martin Amis: Down London’s Mean Streets’, New York Times magazine, 4 February 1990, pp. 1–13.
5. Experience, p. 82.
6. Ibid., p. 260.
7. Time’s Arrow, p. 170.
8. Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 8.
9. Ibid.
10. Time’s Arrow, p. 142.
11. Ibid., pp. 47–8.
12. Roger Scruton, ‘Books of the Year’, TLS, 13 December 1991.
13. Rhoda Koenig, ‘Holocaust Chic’, New York, 21 October 1991, p. 117.
14. James Buchan, ‘The Return of Doctor Death’, Spectator, 28 September 1991, pp. 37–8.
15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).
Chapter 10: The Break-Up and The Information
1. Evening Standard, 16 September 1993.
2. Daily Mail, 10 September 1993.
3. Sunday Times, 12 September 1993.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Evening Standard, 28 November 1994.
7. Laura Doan, ‘“Sexy Greedy Is the Late Eighties”: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money’, Minnesota Review 34–5 (1990), pp. 69–80.
8. TWAC, p. 4.
9. Experience, pp. 158–9.
Chapter 11: A Gallery of Traumas
1. Experience, pp. 69–70.
2. Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (London: Faber, 1992); Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber, 1993).
3. Tom Paulin, Letter in TLS, 7 November 1992.
4. Experience, p. 366.
5. ‘Action at Sea’, Sunday Telegraph magazine, 21 January 1979.
Chapter 12: Novelist and Commentator
1. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. Korba the Dread, pp. 252–4.
3. Christopher Hitchens, review of Korba the Dread, Atlantic Monthly, 20 Se
ptember 2002.
4. TSP, p. 19.
5. ‘John Pilger Takes on Martin Amis’, New Statesman, 17 June 2002.
6. Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (London: Viking, 2010).
7. ‘If Confined to a Single Word to Describe Vegas You’d Have to Settle for: Un-Islamic’, The Australian magazine, 21 October 2006.
8. TSP, p. 76.
9. Liz Jensen, review of Yellow Dog, Independent, 6 September 2003.
10. Michiko Kakutani, review of Yellow Dog, New York Times, 28 October 2003.
11. Matt Thorne, review of Yellow Dog, Independent on Sunday, 31 August 2003.
12. Walter Kirn, review of Yellow Dog, New York Times, 9 November 2003.
13. Review of Yellow Dog, Economist, 25 September 2003.
14. Lewis Jones, review of Yellow Dog, Sunday Telegraph, 31 August 2003.
15. James Hynes, review of Yellow Dog, Washington Post, 23 November 2003.
16. Theo Tait, review of Yellow Dog, TLS, 5 September 2003.
17. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, review of Yellow Dog, Financial Times, 5 September 2003.
18. TWAC, p. 475.
19. Independent, 19 February 2002.
20. M. John Harrison, ‘Decline and Fall’, Guardian, 30 September 2006.
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