Martin Amis 1949-2023
Apart from computer game magazines, newspaper articles, and some TV tie-in novelisations, I hadn't read much before my teenage years. Then I discovered the likes of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum, and greatly enjoyed their page-turning plots. All the same, I quickly outgrew such fictional thrills. Stephen King was better, a literary voice who drew on traditional storytelling methods. I like to think that he served as a bridge to more challenging work. Before long I was reading William Golding, Margaret Drabble, Graham Greene, and any number of Victorian novelists, as well as Shakespeare (of course) and Shaw. But my nuclear moment, my Gestalt shift was yet to occur. In 1990, while browsing the bookshelves at W H Smiths, I chanced upon a novel by a certain Martin Amis. LONDON FIELDS it was called, a sexy title coupled with a sexier cover depicting a naked woman rendered in blurred neon. I'd heard of the author in the chattering classes journalism I still read, and so thought...