When things go Amis
Martin Amis is, so it goes, the Greatest British Novelist never to write a Great British Novel. He started promisingly enough; 1973’s autographical novel, The Rachel Papers, Amis’ paean to teenage self-disgust and sexual obsession introduced us to the linguistic gymnastics and verbal inventiveness that announced to the world that Daddy’s Boy really could write.
Then, there followed the unsettlingly visceral Dead Babies, enmeshed in the paranoia of its day and the author’s document of societal neurosis, the indulgent and obfuscatory Other People and the readable but largely intellectually mute Success. Then, Money, which constitutes a high watermark in the Amis canon. Condensing the consumer love, commercial romance and stylistic anarchy of the 1980’s into approximately fourhundred pages. A few more novels and then...
iatus… broken only by his non-fiction - and controversial - Koba The Dread with all its foot-noted gravitas, followed by the prodigal Yellow Dog, giving us Amis grappling with the email age and the near-impossible task of satirising The Daily Sport. Criticism has followed Amis his whole career. Accusations of a hyper, almost spasmodic, style over substance have fused with attacks of a more personal nature.
Enduring accusations of spouse abandonment to bling dentistry, Kingsley’s son has never had it easy from the British press. Despite all of this he was, and remains to this day, the Godfather of modern British fiction; say what you like about his style - and people do - it enthuses, it excites, it has spawned a generation of imitators.
What, for example, is Will Self but an adolescent Amis with his trigger finger on a thesaurus? Put simply, amidst the crackling, fizzing prose, Amis retains the ability to condense more thought into a single, perfectly weighted sentence than almost any living writer. From flawed masculinity to pandemic societal disorder, nothing escapes his hypodermic gaze. So, as others have noted, the force is certainly with him.
But what next for the ageing enfant terrible of English letters? Three words, actually - The Pregnant Widow - out next year, when the literary world’s most famous progeny will be fifty-six. Amis himself has expressed his anxiety that most great writers wrote their masterpieces in early middle age. That period is more or less behind him now and, with the possible exception of Money, he is magnum opus-less.
The firebrand days of his early youth have all but disappeared, replaced by an increasing cultural conservatism more in line with his late father. Such filial echoes may bode well for Martin; after all, Amis senior wrote arguably his greatest work, the booker-winning The Old Devils, age sixty-four. If the pattern continues, then, dubious title aside, 2006 may finally bring us the book that we all know Mr Amis is capable of writing.
27th Oct 2005