Martin Amis (1949 – )

Contemporary success requires a writer to be in tune with his times. Consequently his work may acquire a period flavour which may make it seem dated before it has the chance even to take on a period charm. The first novels of Martin Amis, for example, though evidently the work of a gifted writer, now emit stale gusts of the late 1960s and early 1970s; they are for the moment almost unreadable. It was not till his fourth novel. Other People (1981), that Amis began to escape from the limiting condition of being bang up to the minute, of having the ear of his exact contemporaries, and only theirs. These early books, The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975) and Success (1978), combined a shimmer of verbal brilliance with an adolescent desire to shock. This, however, was only a case of joining with other adolescents in shocking their elders; there was nothing to disturb readers of his own generation. They indeed were flattered by the novels, and, since the investigation of human nature was superficial, shrinking from the depiction of serious emotion, these novels were ultimately trivial and unambitious.

What makes Amis interesting, however, is the ability to develop which he has shown. Other People itself was an unsatisfactory novel, principally because of its indeterminate centre; but it was disturbing as none of his previous books had been, because he was now admitting to ignorance of certain aspects of personality, which he had formerly presented with a glib assurance.

Money (1984) showed a remarkable, not unexpected, advance. Set partly in a glittering but insubstantial New York, partly in a London that offered a shoddy imitation of New York, it was at once contemporary and timeless. Money is both its theme and title, as it was the theme of Our Mutual Friend; and Amis recalls Dickens in the exuberant fecundity of language, in his startling insight and moral seriousness, without, one may say gratefully, being in any way what is conventionally and slackly called Dickensian. Money, Amis perceives, has taken on a life of its own: "All America was interflexed by computer processors whose roots spread outward from the trunks of skyscrapers until they looped like a web from city to city, sorting, clearing, okaying, denying, denying. Software America on a humming grid of linkup and lookout, with display screens and logic boards of credit ratings, debt profiles." Money, he sees, has become metaphysical. People have it without showing it, and, having it, go down into the streets and with imaginary money purchase whatever comes into their heads. This is the atmosphere in which his novel lives and the atmosphere into which he launches his greedy innocent John Self.

The narrative is offered as an exaggerated and comic version of modern life; the characterization is no more than emblematic. The vitality of the novel arises not from incident but from the author's disgusted enjoyment of the world he has summoned into being. This money world is like Coketown in Hard Times, a monstrous and inhuman creation which fascinates the author; he responds with zestful loathing.

It is the style which constitutes the book's triumph, because it is the galloping and inventive prose which carries Amis's adoring revulsion from modernity. It has an amazing range. It can carry menace: "as my cab pulled off FDR drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out lane and sloped in fast right across our bows"; a sentence where the rhythm is just right, and the weight rests on that word "sharking" like a fighter on the balls of his feet. It can accommodate reflection, can convey pathos and self-loathing. It is very funny and intensely visual. Whatever is sick, sad and ugly in modern urban life is caught in this style; its rare moments of beauty too.

Money is a delight to read, even though it is made of material which is disgusting and depressing. Almost everything that is good and natural and loving and lovely in life has been jettisoned; we are looking into the trash cans outside the fast-food eatery of a junk civilization. Yet from this Amis has created an entrancing work of art. There has been no novel from him since, though one sensed that Money represented a signing-off, that it was a bridge leading from his clever young man's novels to something deeper and more sympathetic. Whatever form his future fiction takes, one cannot think Martin Amis a candidate for Maugham's Italian pensione.