Martin Amis
I awoke this morning to the news that Martin Amis died aged 73.
I haven't read or thought about Martin Amis in years, but strangely I was looking at some of his books yesterday. I have yet again run out of shelf space at home and began picking books that I could store in my office at work instead (a fraught process, since I do academic writing at work, creative writing at home, so I need to predict when I might need to reach for Hobbes’s Leviathan or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart). I pulled the first edition hardback of Time’s Arrow which my friend Thom gifted to me in 2016 (I think, I was in Leeds for launch a book which I think was TWBB to three friends and two librarians. One of the friends had to leave halfway through) thinking it was maybe time for a re-read. Purely coincidental, of course, but one of those coincidences that makes a writer think.
Amis was a big influence on my writing in my late teens in positive and negative ways. He has always represented, to me, a kind of creative stubbornness of the artist doing their thing, their way, for better or worse. Someone finding an audience rather than chasing one. He was the first ‘stylist’ I came across, and I became fascinated by the idea that you could be poetic and tell a realist story at the same time, that you could be in the gutter and the stars simultaneously. That you could put a game of darts in a rough London pub into a literary novel. That you could be funny and profound in the exact same sentence.
In my early days I took this too far, went too much for style over substance, the idea that a beautiful sentence is enough, regardless of what the sentence is actually saying. This wasn’t something Amis taught, just me only paying attention to half the lesson. I learned technical tricks from his writing that I still apply today, from those above to simple things like don’t start two paragraphs in a row with the same word.
Apart from rereading Time’s Arrow when Thom gifted it to me, I haven’t read Amis in more than a decade. The last time I read a new Amis novel was in 2012: Lionel Asbo: State of England. It wasn’t very good. Mildly funny in places, interestingly provocative in others, but mostly that kind of lazy satire written by people who think they know better. The title says enough.
The last time I read a good new Amis novel was in 2006: House of Meetings. Like Amis, for a time I was fascinated with the Soviet Union, and with Solzhenitsyn in particular. House of Meetings is unashamedly riffing on One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was atmospheric, lyrical, moving.
The Amis book that had a surprisingly long, strong influence over me was actually a non-fiction book: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the 20 Million, a book about Stalin and the post-war intellectual Left in the UK, which I read on release in 2002. It’s influence had little to do with content (I barely remember his argument beyond “Stalin was bad, mmmkay?”) but it was a way of writing about history I hadn’t encountered before, a subjective, memoir-ish approach to history, an engagement with history on a personal level rather than an academic one. Amis wasn’t in the Russian archives unearthing new information, rather he was interested in how people reacted to the events of history, how they were interpreted, understood and weaponised for social and political ends for generations after. It’s a long journey, but without Koba the Dread, perhaps I would never have written The Japan Lights.
He will always be remembered for Money, for London Fields (and therefore to blame for much of Damon Albarn’s output in the 90s and 00s), for fiction that helped define literature in the UK in the 80s. He will also be remembered for the kind of insane advances that don’t exist anymore, and for saying some stupid, crass things just to get a rise, or headlines. He was of a generation in the UK where novelists could be rock stars, obsessed over by tabloid editors and paparazzi, and we’re unlikely to see that again.
When Amis was curious, when he was interested in people, when he was telling a story, he was unbeatable. When he was in a lecturing mood, when he was convinced he knew best, when he was showing off his education and privilege, he was insufferable. There’s a lesson there for all writers, including me. We’re not teachers; we’re explorers. Above all, thinking about him today, I can’t help but be struck by just how painfully human he was, in all his talents and faults.