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 I'd give him a go. I duly handed over my £4.99 and bused it home with the paperback.

By journey's end I was already in Amis's grip. As a late-developer intellectually (just like the author himself, as I'd one day discover), I didn't always understand what he was on about. He seemed to combine a preoccupation with lowlife, pub-life, the scatological aspects of social existence, with a lyricism that, to my relatively inexperienced ears, was like music, as well as a thematic consideration of deep issues that I'd yet to be exposed to. But it was his commitment to perversely beautiful prose, the snap and fizz of each sentence, that first seduced me.

Looking back, I see in more detail why I responded to Amis's work the way I did. His masculine themes, fractious tensions arising from the split between being working class (who, as Amis suggests, "fear the serious") and intellectualism, a love of language, the fierce comedy -- all perhaps come as a package when you arise from certain backgrounds with a strand of aspiring DNA. People who should know better considered Amis a toff, probably because of how he spoke; he was in fact nothing of the sort. His family, of a lowly background, was elevated into the higher reaches of British society only by his father's literary success (in his 30s). As a child, Martin Amis was washed in a steel bath in the garden; in his teens, he was doing what all us lads did -- tooling around town, playing pool and arcade machines, dabbling fecklessly with booze. It was only then, at about 18 years old, and facilitated by his mother-in-law (no less a doyen than Elizabeth Jane Howard), that he got triggered into self-betterment.

Well, he certainly served the same function for many like me, growing up in the cultural waste-ground of late 20th century Britain. He made such artistic impoverishment a central concern in his work, of course. For instance, in a world full of pretenders, fakes, and YouTube know-alls (who know fuck all without first going online), his depiction of John Self in MONEY is prescient in the way the finest art functions: it captures its times and even shapes them. Equipped with a headful of Amis quotations, and with the rhythms of his words in your skull, chaotic latter-day life starts to make a curious kind of sense.

The very best work gets inside you, shapes your perceptions, arms you against stupidity and ignorance. It would be a curmudgeonly soul (and Lord knows Amis had to deal with quite enough of those wankers in his lifetime) who'd deny that his collected output rewards readers with such indispensable gifts.