259-] English Literature - Martin Amis

259- ] English Literature

Martin Amis

British author 

Sir Martin Louis Amis FRSL[ (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature. He was portrayed by some literary critics as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". He was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis. Amis influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

A life-long smoker, Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in Florida in 2023. The New York Times wrote after his death: "To come of reading age in the last three decades of the 20th century – from the oil embargo through the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the way to 9/11 – was to live, it now seems clear, in the Amis Era."

Early life

Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford, England. His father, novelist Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Kingston upon Thames-born Hilary ("Hilly") Ann Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He had an elder brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally – for whose birth Philip Larkin composed "Born Yesterday" – died in 2000 at the age of 46. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12 years old; following the separation, Hilly and the children decamped to Mallorca, Spain, where they stayed for a while with Robert Graves.

Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s, including an international school in Mallorca, Bishop Gore School in Swansea, and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising". The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim (1954) sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, where his father lectured.

In 1965, at the age of 15, Amis played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. At 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) tall, he referred to himself as a "short-arse" while a teenager. His father said Amis was not a bookish child and "read nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen". Amis said he had read little more than comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often named as his earliest influence. He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a congratulatory first in English, "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers".

After graduating from Oxford in 1971, Amis wrote reviews of science-fiction novels under the nom de plume "Henry Tilney" (a nod to Austen) in a column for The Observer. He found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement by the summer of 1972. At the age of 27, he became literary editor of the New Statesman, where he cited writer and editor John Gross as his role model, and met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remained Amis's closest friend until his death in 2011.

Early writing

According to Amis, his father was deeply critical of certain aspects of his work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped [reading Amis's novel Money] and sent it twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." Kingsley complained: "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself."

His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) – written at Lemmons, the family home in north London – won the Somerset Maugham Award. It tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university; It has been described as "autobiographical" and was made into an unsuccessful 1989 film.

Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends who convene in a country house to take drugs. A number of Amis's writerly characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000, which Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw described as "boring, embarrassing, nasty and stupid – and not in a good way".

Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically "pairing" characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train). During this period, because producer Stanley Donen detected an affinity between his story and the "debauched and nihilistic nature" of Dead Babies, Amis was invited to work on the screenplay for the science-fiction film Saturn 3 (1980). The film was far from a critical success, but Amis was able to draw on the experience for his fifth novel, Money, published in 1984.

Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) – the title is a reference to Sartre's Huis Clos – is about a young woman coming out of a coma. It was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry. It was also the first novel Amis published after committing to being a full-time writer in 1980.

Main career

1980s and 1990s

Amis's best-known novels are Money, London Fields and The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy". Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives. Amis wrote, "The world is like a human being. And there's a scientific name for it, which is entropy – everything tends towards disorder. From an ordered state to a disordered state."

Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note) is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century". "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed", the novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. Time included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005. On 11 November 2009, The Guardian reported that the BBC had adapted Money for television as part of its early 2010 schedule for BBC 2.[44] Nick Frost played John Self, and the adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser, Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall. The adaptation was a "two-part drama" and was written by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford. After the transmission of the first of the two parts, Amis was quick to praise the adaptation, stating: "All the performances [were] without weak spots. I thought Nick Frost was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. He fills the character. It's a very unusual performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely graceful, a pleasure to watch ... It looked very expensive even though it wasn't and that's a feat ... The earlier script I saw was disappointing [but] they took it back and worked on it and it's hugely improved. My advice was to use more of the language of the novel, the dialogue, rather than making it up."

Martin Amis talks about creative writing, his father and PR for books. (Interview 1990)

London Fields (1989), Amis's longest and "most London" novel, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, "the fool, the foil, the poor foal" who is destined to come between the other two.

The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there were only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, 'It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."[48] A 2018 film of London Fields, on which Amis worked as a scriptwriter, suffered from a problematic production process and was critically and commercially unsuccessful.

Amis's 1991 novel, the short Time's Arrow, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Notable for its backwards narrative, including dialogue in reverse, the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The reversal of the arrow of time in the novel, a technique borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) and Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World (1967), is a narrative style that itself functions in Amis's hands as commentary on the Nazis' rationalisation of death and destruction as forces of creation with the resurrection of Nordic mythology in the service of German nation-building.

The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance of £500,000 (almost US$800,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, Pat Kavanagh, to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew Wylie. The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiographical collection Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences. The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction: one, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels", is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose.

Amis's 1997 short novel Night Train is narrated by Mike Hoolihan, a tough woman detective with a man's name. The story revolves around the suicide of her boss's young, beautiful, and seemingly happy daughter. Night Train is written in the language of American 'noir' crime fiction, but subverts expectations of an exciting investigation and neat, satisfying ending. Many reviewers subjected it to negative criticism, e.g., John Updike "hated" it, but others such as Jason Crowley writing in Prospect have applauded his attempt to write in an American idiom and Beata Piątek wanted "to discuss Night Train as more than a clumsy spoof detective story and argue that it is an intellectual and intertextual joke that Amis plays on the critics who compare him with the American writers and criticise him for his sexist portrayal of women." The novel found other defenders too, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's mentor and friend Saul Bellow. It was adapted for the cinema in 2018 as Out of Blue.