… Night Train is at once a spoof of a detective novel: Hoolihan is investigating a crime that was solved when it was discovered, and for which the perpetrator cannot be punished, in which the punishment is the crime. And a metaphysical thriller about cause and effect: ‘we all want a why for suicide’ (p. 108), as Hoolihan says. And the novel makes much gruesomely amusing play with the fact that when it comes to suicide it’s easy to get the who and the how, but the why is a big problem. So the question that the novel investigates - the ‘crime’ that a novelist might be better equipped to solve than a detective - is: what is character without motive? ‘Suicides generate false data’ (p. 70), Hoolihan informs us: ‘[a]s a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form’ (p. 77). It makes a mockery, in other (more literary) words, of the expected satisfactions of narrative. Suicide violates our sense of an ending. And frantic to make sense of it, we are forced to go back to the beginning.260 □
Phillips’s review of Night Train, more sophisticated and perceptive than those of Updike or Brookner, is able to account for an unease that the novel arouses which they are unable to explain except as literary weakness because of the constricting critical categories to which they adhere (as novelists of a more conventional stamp than Amis, a certain degree of self-protection perhaps also determines their response). Phillips is also able to suggest why Night Train is likely to be reread and why it will probably attract, in future, further subtle and extended criticism - criticism which will certainly begin by consulting Phillips as an indispensable starting-point. In 1998, Amis published Heavy Water and Other Stories, his first collection of short stories since Einstein’s Monsters. Three of them were originally published in journals well before any of the stories in Einstein’s Monsters were written - ‘Denton’s Death’ {Encounter, 1976), the title story, ‘Heavy Water’ (New Statesman, 1978, though, according to Amis’s own note, ‘rewritten, 1997’ (p. 153)); and ‘Let Me Count the Times’ (Granta, 1981). In the Times of 25 September 1998, Russell Celyn Jones, who had reviewed Night Train unfavourably, remarked that these three tales ‘seem rather mothballed alongside the newer ones’ but served to show ‘Amis’s maturation, and not only as the stylist he is primarily famed for being’:
■ A cavalcade of sex-prose in [‘Let Me Count the Times’] is displaced by an ironic review of the emotional consequences of extra-marital sex in [‘State of England’], written in 1996 [and first published in the New Yorker]……[‘Heavy Water’] is set two years before the Labour Party were to be booted out of office for the next 18 years and purports to show the exhaustion of working class culture. There is something quite risible about the young Amis sounding off about the proletariat … and his comic hyperbole falls flat.
However, in [‘State of England’], the best story in the collection, he regroups around the same theme armed with both a pitiless comedy and a compassion hitherto missing. His protagonist, Mal, is a culture-free untouchable reminiscent of Keith Talent in London Fields, who is attending his son’s school sports day. He and his estranged wife talk to each other across the field by mobile phones, while the sun … sets on their textless, impoverished world. But there is redemption for Mal in the story, and when he gets beaten up by some opera-goers who discover him clamping their Range Rover, you can detect Amis switching empathies since the long-gone days of penning [‘Heavy Water’]. ‘You know what it was like? A revolution in reverse … Two bum-crack cowboys scragged and cudgelled by the quality’ (p. 69).
The class motif is reprised in the very fine story, [‘The Coincidence of the Arts’ (1997)]. In [‘The Janitor on Mars’ (1997)] he alights upon preoccupations aired in Night Train. What marred Night Train mars this foray into science fiction also. Reams of appropriated high-tech dialogues do not amount to character …
Amis’s predominant technique is inversion. So poets in [‘Career Move’ (first published in the New Yorker, 1992)] earn millions in Hollywood while screenwriters have to contend with rejection slips from little magazines. These one-joke stories could easily run out of steam if it were not for his crackling prose propping up the whole enterprise - usually a parallel narrative structure working in counterpoint: background-foreground in constant mutation.261 □
The inversion identified by Jones was also evident in his own and Natasha Walter’s responses to Heavy Water. Where Jones had disliked Night Train and admired the stories in Heavy Water that did not resemble that flawed work, Walter had praised Night Train and found Heavy Water objectionable because it lacked the previous book’s ‘gentler look at life’:
■ [I]n Heavy Water, Amis, again and again, serves up characters such as Denton [in ‘Denton’s Death’], ‘an old tramp in a dirty room’ (p.32); Vernon [in ‘Let Me Count the Times’],… a sad businessman who masturbates [‘]23.8 times a week’ (p.81); and Rodney [in ‘The Coincidence of the Arts’], a bad painter whose pyjamas have reMalned unlaundered for 15 years. Why does Amis do it to himself? Why does he do it to us? Why do we have to keep sitting down with such antipathetic men? … [The] anti-hero [of ‘State of England’] is a recognizable archetype. He’s fat - of course; ugly - naturally; slobby - enormously so; and inarticulate, which almost goes without saying. But not quite without saying.
In fact, Amis revels in laying out quite how gross his protagonist is. Mal’s not just fat; he’s ‘five feet nine in all directions’ (p. 35). He’s not just slobby; he’s sick-making - he remembers, in detail, eating over 100 burgers before a transatlantic flight and putting all the toilets on the plane out of order (pp. 58-60). And he’s not just inarticulate; he’s breathtakingly inarticulate. ‘Call Adam a cunt, but you couldn’t call him corny’ (p. 39), goes one riff. ‘The defence was crap and midfield created fuck-all’ (p.43) goes another.
But when it all gets too much we suddenly move out of Big Mal’s mind and into Martin Amis’s, into his fluent sentences, his startling articulacy. So we find ourselves standing outside Big Mal and looking at him as he stands there - ‘[a]wkward, massively cuboid, flinching under a thin swipe of dark hair’ (p. 41) - and we quickly feel reassured that we aren’t really going to be left alone with Big Mal. No, Amis will be there all the way, touching us on the elbow, showing us quite how unprepossessing his anti-hero is.
There is necessarily something patronizing in this desire of Amis’s to set his protagonists up for us to snigger over. Why does he so rarely create a character he can respect, a story that isn’t a bit of a joke; that isn’t something he’s already seen through and laughed at? I felt that he did make that experiment in Night Train, his only novel to suggest that a current of human sympathy might run between author and protagonist. But many readers didn’t like that gentler look at life. Amis’s usual expression - the fixed sneer - is what brings in the fans.
But let’s get back to Big Mal, since he distils much of what’s good and bad in Amis’s work. Mal’s story is a sad one; as a slobby, ugly, fat, inarticulate man the cards are stacked against him. He fails in his work, he fails in his marriage, he is even failing in the work that comes after that (clamping cars) and in the affair that takes the place of his marriage. He’s running scared. Modern life scares him. Women scare him. Black people scare him. Restaurants even scare him. We catch him on school sports day where, naturally, his son loses his race and he himself loses the dads’ race.
‘State of England’ is a big title for such a story; and Amis clearly thinks this is more than just the story of Big Mal; rather, this is the story of England - and especially of the English male. And it’s a nasty story, Amis keeps telling us. It’s about bad food and bad sex, about fear and failure.
Why does his vision sometimes appear a little thin and forced? … Is [Amis] pushing himself to his limits, as it were; is he daringly presenting Britain with a vivid and horrifying picture of itself? Or has Amis actually retreated from having to put himself and his own society on the line? By making his State of England stories - and although this is the only one call
ed ‘State of England’, it’s not the only one that could bear that title - centre on such crazily pathetic men, Amis makes sure that his readers never need to feel implicated in the tale. Oh sure, men might read them and wince a little over the protagonists’ pornographic imaginations; and anyone might read them and wince at the protagonists’ taste in television and junk food. But as Amis pushes his characters deeper and deeper into the dirt, ridiculing their accents and bodies, their social ineptitude and myriad failures, their wounded faces and their impotence - well, his readers begin to feel more and more comfortable. You know these tales aren’t about you, not really; and though you can sit down and spend an hour playing some game with them, you know that, in the end, it is exactly that: a game.262 □
The sharply contrasting responses of Walter and Jones to Heavy Water demonstrate the continued power of Martin Amis’s fiction to provoke vigorous controversy and debate - and, as Walter’s attack demonstrates, intelligent hostile criticism of his work can have as much and sometimes more to offer than intelligent praise. A critic who wanted to offer a detailed close reading of Heavy Water, as Rachel Falconer did of Einstein’s Monsters (pp. 87-96), might well start from Walter’s proposition that more than one of the stories could be called ‘State of England’; and Walter’s perceptive strictures should not be ignored by anyone who wished to produce a serious positive account of Amis’s fiction as a whole.
As yet, of course, Amis’s fiction is an unfinished whole: there is still, one hopes, much more to come. A memoir is promised for the millennium, but this excursion into autobiography is unlikely to divert him from fiction for long. And while it is impossible to predict what kind of fiction he might produce next, one thing is certain: it will be exciting. But what can be said of Amis’s achievement to date?
In an interview in 1990, George Steiner - the critic whose verdict Amis feared when he started Time’s Arrow - proposed an interesting criterion for literary judgement: ‘I wonder what book you have in your pocket when things go very, very wrong, or - an even harsher test in some ways - are ecstatically wonderful.‘263 It is unlikely that much of Martin Amis would be to Steiner’s taste, and his verdict on Time’s Arrow has not been made public. But when, to use the central metaphor of Amis’s eighth novel, the information comes at night - the information about mortality, decay, suffering, failure, and the atrocities perpetrated by that intelligent, cruel, flesh-eating species that is our own264 - then one could do worse than have the fiction of Martin Amis by one’s side: its complex cartography of our lower depths, its vivid mapping of our traumas and transgressions, can serve as a guide and a stay. And its anatomy of the abyss does not preclude, as in Samson’s letter to Kim Talent at the end of London Fields, glimpses of possibility that are the more dazzling for being hard-won from all that goes wrong in time.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
(Details of first UK editions, followed by details of editions quoted in this Guide, where these are different from the first UK editions.)
The Rachel Papers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Dead Babies. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. London: Penguin, 1984. [Also Published as Dark Secrets. London: Triad/Panther Books, 1977.]
Success. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. London: Penguin, 1985.
Other People: A Mystery Story. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Money: A Suicide Note. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984. London: Penguin, 1985.
London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. London: Penguin, 1990.
Time’s Arrow or The Nature of the Offence. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991.
London: Penguin Books in association with Jonathan Cape, 1992.
The Information. London: Flamingo, 1995.
Night Train. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. London: Vintage, 1998.
Short Stories
Einstein’s Monsters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
Heavy Water and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998.
Poem
‘Point of View’. New Statesman, 98:2543 (14 December 1979), p. 954.
Non-fiction Books
Invasion of the Space Invaders. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
The Moronic Inferno And Other Visits to America. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986.
Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. London: Penguin, 1994.
Articles
‘Martin Amis’, in Ann Thwaite, ed. My Oxford. My [Cambridge/LSE/Drama School, etc.] series. London: Robson Books, 1977, pp. 201-13.
‘The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces’, in Peter Quennell, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: His life, His Work, His World: A Tribute. New York: William Morrow, 1980, pp. 73-87.
‘A Tale of Two Novels’, Observer (19 October 1980), p. 26 (on Jacob Epstein’s alleged plagiarism, in his novel Wild Oats (London: Alison Press, Seeker and Warburg, 1980), of The Rachel Papers. See also Epstein’s reply under the same heading (26 October 1980), p. 32, and Mallon (1989) below).
‘Lolita Reconsidered’. Atlantic 270.3 (September 1992), pp. 109-20.
‘Don Juan in Hull’. New Yorker (12 July 1993), pp. 74-82.
Interviews
These are arranged in order of year of appearance, rather than in alphabetical order of author/interviewer, to make it easier, where appropriate, to link particular interviews with specific Amis novels or short story collections.
1974
Byrne, Kevin. The Two Amises [a radio conversation]’. Listener, 92:2368 (15 August 1974), pp.219-20.
1984
Haffenden, John. ‘Domestic Burlesque: Interview: John Haffenden Talks to Martin Amis’. Literary Review incorporating Quarto, 76 (October 1984), pp. 31-38. (Reprinted, with a slightly amended introduction, in 1985 - see next entry.)
1985
Haffenden, John, ed. Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 1985, pp. 1-24.
1987
Michener, Charles. ‘Britain’s Brat of Letters: Who Is Martin Amis, and Why Is Everybody Saying Such Terrible Things about Him?’. Esquire, 107 (January 1987), pp. 108-11.
Hebert, Hugh. ‘Messages From the Other Side’. Guardian (25 April 1987), p.11.
Profumo, David. ‘Interview: David Profumo Drops in on Martin Amis’.
Literary Review, 107 (May 1987), pp. 41-42. (Einstein’s Monsters.)
1989
Ritchie, Harry. ‘The Greening of Martin Amis’. Sunday Times (10 September 1989), Section G, pp. 8-9.
Taylor, Paul. ‘Waiting for the End’. Independent (16 September 1989), p. 32.
1990
Morrison, Susan. ‘The Wit and the Fury of Martin Amis’. Rolling Stone, 578 (17 May 1990), pp. 95-102.
1991
Lawson, Mark. ‘The Amis Babies’. Independent Magazine (7 September 1991), pp. 42-44.
Wood, James. ‘The Literary Lip of Ladbroke Grove’. Weekend Guardian (7-8 September 1991), pp. 12-14.
Trueheart, Charles. ‘Through a Mirror, Darkly’. Washington Post (26 November 1991), Section B, pp. 1-2.
Hoare, Philip. ‘Martin Amis’. Details (November 1991), pp. 132-3.
1992
Bellante, Carl and John. ‘Unlike Father, Like Son: An Interview with Martin Amis’. Bloomsbury Review, 12:2 (March 1992), p. 5.
Bigsby, Christopher. ‘Martin Amis interviewed by Christopher Bigsby’, in Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke, eds. New Writing. London: Minerva in association with the British Council, 1992, pp. 169-84.
McGrath, Patrick. ‘Martin Amis’, in Betty Sussler, ed. Bomb Interviews. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992, pp. 187-97.
1993
Self, Will. ‘An Interview with Martin Amis’. Mississippi Review 21:3 (Summer 1993), pp. 143-69.
1995
Wilson, Jonathan. ‘A Very English Story’. New Yorker (6 March 1995), pp. 96-106.
Vincent, Sally. ‘In the Boy, Find the Man’. Guardian Weekend (18 March 1995), pp. 12-23.
Appleyard, Bryan. ‘Smart Mart’. Sunday Times Magazine (
19 March 1995), pp. 30-33, 35-36, 38.
Quinn, Anthony. ‘The Investment’. Independent Magazine (25 March 1995), pp. 34-37.
Self, Will. ‘Something Amiss in Amis Country’. Esquire: British Edition (April 1995), pp. 70-76.
Kaplan, James. ‘Tennis with Amis’. New York Magazine (29 May 1995), pp. 38-43.
Fuller, Graham. ‘The Prose and Cons of Martin Amis’. Interview (May 1995), pp. 122-25.
Shnayerson, Michael. ‘Famous Amis’. Vanity Fair (May 1995), pp. 132-40, 160-62.
1996
Wachtel, Eleanor. ‘Eleanor Wachtel with Martin Amis: Interview’. Malahat Review, 114 (March 1996), pp.43-58.
‘Success, Money, Happy?’. Observer Review (12 October 1996), p. 5.
1997
Cowley, Jason. “There Is a Kind of Mean Spiritedness of Which I Am the Focus”’. Times (4 August 1997), p. 15.
1998
Moss, Stephen. ‘After the Storm’. Guardian Weekend (3 October 1998), pp. 22-4, 26.
Books devoted to Martin Amis
Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. Understanding Contemporary British Literature series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. (All Amis’s novels from The Rachel Papers to The Information; Einstein’s Monsters.)
Books with key discussions of the fiction of Martin Amis
(Main novels discussed in brackets at the end of each entry)
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 26