264- ] English Literature - J. G. Ballard

264 - ] English Literature

J. G. Ballard 

British author

Posthumous publication

In October 2008, before his death, Ballard's literary agent, Margaret Hanbury, brought an outline for a book by Ballard with the working title Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any , of Life to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it was to be in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly was to move on to broader themes. In April 2009 The Guardian reported that HarperCollins announced that Ballard's Conversations with My Physician could not be finished and plans to publish it were abandoned.

In 2013, a 17-page untitled typescript listed as "Vermilion Sands short story in draft" in the British Library catalogue and edited into an 8,000-word text by Bernard Sigaud appeared in a short-lived French reissue of the collection by Éditions Tristram (ISBN 978-2367190068) under the title "Le labyrinthe Hardoon" as the first story of the cycle, tentatively dated "late 1955/early 1956" by B. Sigaud, David Pringle and Christopher J. Beckett. Reports From the Deep End, an anthology of short stories inspired by J. G. Ballard (London: Titan Books, 2023, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Rick McGrath), could have included "The Hardoon Labyrinth"—the original edition by B. Sigaud enriched to about 9,400 words by D. Pringle—but opposition from the J. G. Ballard Estate terminated the project.

Archive

In June 2010 the British Library acquired Ballard's personal archives under the British government's acceptance in lieu scheme for death duties. The archive contains eighteen holograph manuscripts for Ballard's novels, including the 840-page manuscript for Empire of the Sun, plus correspondence, notebooks, and photographs from throughout his life. In addition, two typewritten manuscripts for The Unlimited Dream Company are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dystopian fiction

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With the exception of his autobiographical novels, Ballard most commonly wrote in the post-apocalyptic dystopia genre.

His most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which the characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become increasingly obsessed with the violent psychosexuality of car crashes in general, and celebrity car crashes in particular. Ballard's novel was turned into a controversial film by David Cronenberg.

Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands (1971), set in an eponymous desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants who provide for them. Each story features peculiarly exotic technology such as cloud-carving sculptors performing for a party of eccentric onlookers, poetry-composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos to match, phototropic self-painting canvases, etc. In keeping with Ballard's central themes, most notably technologically mediated masochism, these tawdry and weird technologies service the dark and hidden desires and schemes of the human castaways who occupy Vermilion Sands, typically with psychologically grotesque and physically fatal results. In his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard cites this as his favourite collection.

In a similar vein, his collection Memories of the Space Age explores many varieties of individual and collective psychological fallout from—and initial deep archetypal motivations for—the American space exploration boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Will Self has described much of his fiction as being concerned with "idealised gated communities; the affluent, and the ennui of affluence [where] the virtualised world is concretised in the shape of these gated developments." He added in these fictional settings "there is no real pleasure to be gained; sex is commodified and devoid of feeling and there is no relationship with the natural world. These communities then implode into some form of violence." Budrys, however, mocked his fiction as "call[ing] for people who don't think ... to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education".

In addition to his novels, Ballard made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories, including influential works like Chronopolis. In an essay on Ballard, Will Wiles notes how his short stories "have a lingering fascination with the domestic interior, with furnishing and appliances", adding, "it's a landscape that he distorts until it shrieks with anxiety". He concludes that "what Ballard saw, and what he expressed in his novels, was nothing less than the effect that the technological world, including our built environment, was having upon our minds and bodies."

Ballard coined the term inverted Crusoeism. Whereas the original Robinson Crusoe became a castaway against his own will, Ballard's protagonists often choose to maroon themselves; hence inverted Crusoeism (e.g., Concrete Island). The concept provides a reason as to why people would deliberately maroon themselves on a remote island; in Ballard's work, becoming a castaway is as much a healing and empowering process as an entrapping one, enabling people to discover a more meaningful and vital existence.

Television

On 13 December 1965, BBC Two screened an adaptation of the short story "Thirteen to Centaurus" directed by Peter Potter. The one-hour drama formed part of the first season of Out of the Unknown and starred Donald Houston as Dr. Francis and James Hunter as Abel Granger. In 2003, Ballard's short story "The Enormous Space" (first published in the science fiction magazine Interzone in 1989, subsequently printed in the collection of Ballard's short stories War Fever) was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it. The plot follows a middle-class man who chooses to abandon the outside world and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.

Influence

Ballard is cited as an important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, and by author William Gibson.[66] Ballard's parody of American politics, the pamphlet "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", which was subsequently included as a chapter in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition, was photocopied and distributed by pranksters at the 1980 Republican National Convention. In the early 1970s, Bill Butler, a bookseller in Brighton, was prosecuted under UK obscenity laws for selling the pamphlet.

 In his 2002 book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, the philosopher John Gray acknowledges Ballard as a major influence on his ideas. The book's publisher quotes Ballard as saying, "Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions." Gray wrote a short essay, in the New Statesman, about a dinner he had with Ballard in which he stated, "Unlike many others, it wasn't his dystopian vision that gripped my imagination. For me his work was lyrical—an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation."

According to literary theorist Brian McHale, The Atrocity Exhibition is a "postmodernist text based on science fiction topoi".

Lee Killough directly cites Ballard's seminal Vermilion Sands short stories as the inspiration for her collection Aventine, also a backwater resort for celebrities and eccentrics where bizarre or frivolous novelty technology facilitates the expression of dark intents and drives. Terry Dowling's milieu of Twilight Beach is also influenced by the stories of Vermilion Sands and other Ballard works.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the "first great novel of the universe of simulation".

Ballard also had an interest in the relationship between various media. In the early 1970s, he was one of the trustees of the Institute for Research in Art and Technology.

In popular music

Ballard has had a notable influence on popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk and industrial groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx and The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A by Exodus, various songs by Joy Division (most famously "Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer and "Disorder" from Unknown Pleasures), "High Rise" by Hawkwind, "Miss the Girl" by Siouxsie Sioux's second band The Creatures (based on Crash), "Down in the Park" by Gary Numan, "Chrome Injury" by The Church, "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" by Madonna, "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal and Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown. Songwriters Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit Ballard's story "The Sound-Sweep" with inspiring The Buggles' hit "Video Killed the Radio Star", and the Buggles' second album included a song entitled "Vermillion Sands". The 1978 post-punk band Comsat Angels took their name from one of Ballard's short stories. An early instrumental track by British electronic music group The Human League "4JG" bears Ballard's initials as a homage to the author (intended as a response to "2HB" by Roxy Music).

The Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers include a sample from an interview with Ballard in their song "Mausoleum". Additionally, the Manic Street Preachers song, "A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun", is taken from a line in the J. G. Ballard novel Cocaine Nights. The English band Klaxons named their debut album Myths of the Near Future after one of Ballard's short story collections. The band Empire of the Sun took their name from Ballard's novel. The American rock band The Sound of Animals Fighting took the name of the song "The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's Medallion" from Crash. UK-based drum and bass producer Fortitude released an EP in 2016 called "Kline Coma Xero" named after characters in The Atrocity Exhibition. The song "Terminal Beach" by the American band Yacht is a tribute to his short story collection that goes by the same name.[citation needed] American indie musician and comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis mentions Ballard by name in his song "Cult Boyfriend", on the record A Turn in The Dream-Songs (2011), in reference to Ballard's cult following as an author.

In the 2024 Met Gala

The 2024 Met Gala dress code was "The Garden of Time", inspired by Ballard's 1962 short story "The Garden of Time".

Awards and honours

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2012)

1979 BSFA Award for Best Novel for The Unlimited Dream Company

1984 Guardian Fiction Prize for Empire of the Sun

1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Empire of the Sun

1984 Empire of the Sun shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction

1997 De Montfort University Honorary doctorate.

2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe & South Asia region) for Super-Cannes

2008 Golden PEN Award

2009 Royal Holloway University of London Posthumous honorary doctorate

Works

Novels

The Wind from Nowhere (1961)The Drowned World (1962)The Burning World (1964; also The Drought, 1965)The Crystal World (1966)The Atrocity Exhibition (1970, first published as Love and Napalm: Export USA, 1972)

Crash (1973) Concrete Island (1974) High-Rise (1975) The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) Hello America (1981) Empire of the Sun (1984) The Day of Creation (1987) Running Wild (1988) The Kindness of Women (1991)

Rushing to Paradise (1994) Cocaine Nights (1996) Super-Cannes (2000)

Millennium People (2003) Kingdom Come (2006) Short story collections

The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) Billennium (1962) Passport to Eternity (1963) The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) The Terminal Beach (1964) The Impossible Man (1966) The Overloaded Man (1967) The Disaster Area (1967) The Day of Forever (1967) Vermilion Sands (1971) Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976) The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977) The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)

The Venus Hunters (1980) Myths of the Near Future (1982) The Voices of Time (1985) Memories of the Space Age (1988) War Fever (1990) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006) The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)

Non-fiction

A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996) Miracles of Life (autobiography; 2008)

Interviews

Paris Review – J.G. Ballard (1984) Re/Search No. 8/9: J.G. Ballard (1985)

J.G. Ballard: Quotes (2004) J.G. Ballard: Conversations (2005) Extreme Metaphors (interviews; 2012)

Adaptations

Films

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970, Val Guest) Empire of the Sun (1987, Steven Spielberg) Crash (1996, David Cronenberg) The Atrocity Exhibition (1998, Jonathan Weiss) Low-Flying Aircraft (2002, Solveig Nordlund) High-Rise (2015, Ben Wheatley)

Television

"Thirteen to Centaurus" (1965) from the short story of the same name – dir. Peter Potter (BBC Two) Crash! (1971) dir. Harley Cokliss "Minus One" (1991) from the story of the same name – short film dir. by Simon Brooks.

"Home" (2003) primarily based on "The Enormous Space" – dir. Richard Curson Smith (BBC Four) "The Drowned Giant" (2021) from the short story of the same name, is the eighth episode of the second season of the Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots

Radio

In Nov/Dec 1988, CBC Radio's sci-fi series Vanishing Point ran a seven-episode miniseries of The Stories of J. G. Ballard, which included audio adaptations of "Escapement," "Dead Astronaut," "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," "Low Flying Aircraft," "A Question of Re-entry," "News from the Sun" and "Having a Wonderful Time".

In June 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast adaptions of The Drowned World and Concrete Island as part of a season of dystopian fiction entitled Dangerous Visions.

263- ] English Literature - J. G. Ballard

263- ] English Literature

J. G. Ballard 

British author 

James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media. with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962). He later courted controversy the 1968 story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", and later the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.

In 1984, Ballard won broad critical recognition for the war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Three years later, the American film director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name. The novelist's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles of Life (2008). Some of Ballard's early novels have been adapted as films, including Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, and High-Rise (2015), an adaptation of the 1975 novel directed by Ben Wheatley.

From the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the adjective Ballardian, defined as: "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as preoccupied with "Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".

Life

Shanghai

J. G. Ballard was born to Edna Johnstone (1905–1998) and James Graham Ballard (1901–1966), who was a chemist at the Calico Printers' Association, a textile company in the city of Manchester, and later became the chairman and managing director of the China Printing and Finishing Company, the Association's subsidiary company in Shanghai. The China in which Ballard was born featured the Shanghai International Settlement, where Western foreigners "lived an American style of life". At school age, Ballard attended the Cathedral School of the Holy Trinity Church, Shanghai. Upon the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Ballard family abandoned their suburban house, and moved to a house in the city centre of

Shanghai to avoid the warfare between the Chinese defenders and the Japanese invaders.

After the Battle of Hong Kong (8–25 December 1941), the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the International Settlement and imprisoned the Allied civilians in early 1943. The Ballard family were sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre where they lived in G-block, a two-storey residence for 40 families, for the remainder of the Second World War. At the Lunghua Centre, Ballard attended school, where the teachers were prisoners with a profession. In the autobiography Miracles of Life, Ballard said that those experiences of displacement and imprisonment were the thematic bases of the novel Empire of the Sun.

Concerning the violence found in Ballard's fiction, the novelist Martin Amis said that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him." About his experiences of the Japanese war in China, Ballard said: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage-set that everyday reality in the suburban West presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience." "I have—I won't say happy—[but] not unpleasant memories of the camp... I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on—but, at the same time, we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!" In his later life, Ballard became an atheist, yet said: "I'm extremely interested in religion ... I see religion as a key to all sorts of mysteries that surround the human consciousness."

Britain and Canada

In late 1945, Ballard's mother returned to Britain with J. G. and his sister, where they resided at Plymouth, and he attended The Leys School in Cambridge, where he won a prize for a well-written essay. Within a few years, Mrs Ballard and her daughter returned to China and rejoined Mr Ballard; and, whilst not at school, Ballard resided with grandparents. In 1949, he studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist.

At university, Ballard wrote avant-garde fiction influenced by psychoanalysis and the works of surrealist painters, and pursued writing fiction and medicine. In his second year at Cambridge, in May 1951, the short story "The Violent Noon", a Hemingway pastiche, won a crime-story competition and was published in the Varsity newspaper. In October 1951, encouraged by publication, and understanding that clinical medicine disallowed time to write fiction, Ballard forsook medicine and enrolled at Queen Mary College to read English literature. After a year, he quit the College and worked as an advertising copywriter, then worked as an itinerant encyclopaedia salesman. Throughout that odd-job period, Ballard continued writing short-story fiction but found no publisher.

In early 1954, Ballard joined the Royal Air Force and was assigned to the Royal Canadian Air Force flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. In that time, he encountered American science fiction magazines, and, in due course, wrote his first science fiction story, "Passport to Eternity", a pastiche of the American science fiction genre; yet the story was not published until 1962.

In 1955, Ballard left the RAF and returned to England, where he met and married Helen Mary Matthews, who was a secretary at the Daily Express newspaper; the first of three Ballard children was born in 1956. In December 1956, Ballard became a professional science-fiction writer with the publication of the short stories "Escapement" (in New Worlds magazine) and "Prima Belladonna" (in Science Fantasy magazine). At the New Worlds magazine, the editor, Edward J. Carnell, greatly supported Ballard's science-fiction writing, and published most of his early stories.

From 1958 onwards, Ballard was assistant editor of the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry. His interest in art involved the emerging Pop Art movement, and, in the late 1950s, Ballard exhibited collages that represented his ideas for a new kind of novel. Moreover, his avant-garde inclinations discomfited writers of mainstream science fiction, whose artistic attitudes Ballard considered philistine. Briefly attending the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention in London, Ballard left disillusioned and demoralised by the type and quality of the science-fiction writing he encountered, and did not write another story for a year; however, by 1965, he was editor of Ambit, an avante-garde magazine, which had an editorial remit amenable to his aesthetic ideals.

Professional writer

In 1960, the Ballard family moved to Shepperton, Surrey, where he resided till his death in 2009. To become a professional writer, Ballard forsook mainstream employment to write his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), during a fortnight holiday, and quit his editorial job with the Chemistry and Industry magazine. Later that year, his second novel, The Drowned World (1962), also was published; those two novels established Ballard as a notable writer of New Wave science fiction; he also popularized the related concept and genre of inner space.: 415 : 260  From that success followed the publication of short-story collections, and was the beginning of a great period of literary productivity from which emerged the short-story collection The Terminal Beach (1964).

In 1964, Mary Ballard died of pneumonia, leaving Ballard to raise their three children, James, Fay and Bea Ballard. Although he did not remarry, his friend Michael Moorcock introduced Claire Walsh to Ballard, who later became his partner. Claire Walsh worked in publishing during the 1960s and the 1970s, and was Ballard's sounding board for his story ideas; later, Claire introduced Ballard to the expatriate community in Sophia Antipolis, in southern France; those expatriates provided grist for the writer's mill.

In 1965, after the death of his wife Mary, Ballard's writing yielded the thematically-related short stories, that were published in New Worlds by Moorcock, as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).[citation needed] In 1967, the novelist Algis Budrys said that Brian W. Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany and J. G. Ballard were the leading writers of New Wave Science Fiction. In the event, The Atrocity Exhibition proved legally controversial in the U.S., because the publisher feared libel-and-slander lawsuits by the living celebrities who featured in the science fiction stories. In The Atrocity Exhibition, the story titled "Crash!" deals with the psychosexuality of car-crash enthusiasts; in 1970, at the New Arts Laboratory, Ballard sponsored an exhibition of damaged automobiles titled "Crashed Cars"; lacking the commentary of an art curator, the artwork provoked critical vitriol and layman vandalism. In the story "Crash!" and in the "Crashed Cars" exhibition, Ballard presented and explored the sexual potential in a car crash, which theme he also explored in a short film made with Gabrielle Drake in 1971. Those interests produced the novel Crash (1973), which features a protagonist named James Ballard, who lives in Shepperton, Surrey, England.

Crash was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail campaigning for it to be banned. In the years following the initial publication of Crash, Ballard produced two further novels: 1974's Concrete Island, about a man stranded in the traffic-divider island of a high-speed motorway, and High-Rise, about a modern luxury high-rise apartment building's descent into tribal warfare.

Ballard published several novels and short story collections throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but his breakthrough into the mainstream came with Empire of the Sun in 1984, based on his years in Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp. It became a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It made Ballard known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve the same degree of success. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard himself appears briefly in the film, and he has described the experience of seeing his childhood memories reenacted and reinterpreted as bizarre.

Ballard continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels, Super-Cannes (2000) was well received, winning the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize. These later novels often marked a move away from science fiction, instead engaging with elements of a traditional crime novel. Ballard was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". In June 2006, he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which metastasised to his spine and ribs. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. His final published short story, "The Dying Fall", appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a British sci-fi magazine. It was later reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April 2009. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

262-] English Literature , J. G. Ballard

262- ] English Literature

J. G. Ballard

British author 

J.G. Ballard (born November 15, 1930, Shanghai, China—died April 19, 2009, London, England) was a British author of science fiction set in ecologically unbalanced landscapes caused by decadent technological excess.

The son of a British business executive based in China, Ballard spent four years of his boyhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai during World War II. This experience is recounted in his largely autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984; film 1987). The devastated city and nearby countryside also provided settings for several of his apocalyptic novels. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, but left without a degree. His first short stories appeared in the 1950s. Beginning in the 1960s, Ballard wrote longer works, including The Drowned World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966).

With the gory images of his surreal short stories in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; also published as Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.; film 2000), Ballard began writing of dehumanized sex and technology at their most extreme. His novels Crash (1973; film 1996), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975; film 2015) depict 20th-century middle-class people devolving into savagery. Contrasting with this apocalyptic vision of the future were his almost wistful short stories about the decadent technological utopia Vermilion Sands; these were collected in Vermilion Sands (1971). His short-story collection War Fever (1990) contains humorously nihilistic meditations on such topics as compulsory sex and the oblivious attitudes of a media-saturated society.

Ballard’s stylistic debts to Joseph Conrad are evident in his novel The Day of Creation (1987). The Kindness of Women (1991) follows the alternately dissipated and transcendent later life of the protagonist of Empire of the Sun and is written in the same semiautobiographical vein as its predecessor. Ballard infused later works with new variations on the dystopian themes of his earlier novels. Rushing to Paradise (1994) concerns an environmentalist so rabidly committed to her cause that she becomes homicidal, and Cocaine Nights (1996) centres on an island community whose cultured lifestyle is supported by crime. Ballard deploys events of extraordinary violence in the plots of Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006), effectively exposing the foibles of his middle-class characters by documenting their reactions to the violence against a stark backdrop of shopping malls and office parks.

Ballard’s essays and reviews were compiled in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996). The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard was released in two volumes in 2006. An autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008.

 

261-] English Literature - Martin Amis

261-] English Literature

Martin Amis 

British author 

Personal life

Amis married the American academic Antonia Phillips in 1984 and they had two sons together. Towards the end of that marriage, he met the writer Isabel Fonseca, whom he married in 1996; together they had two daughters. He became a grandfather in 2008; he later described his new status as "like getting a telegram from the mortuary".

From 2004 to 2006, he lived with his second family in Uruguay, where Fonseca's father had been born. Upon returning, he said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reported that he was disquieted by what he saw as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.

In late 2010, Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, US, although it was uncertain how much time he would be spending there.[110] In 2012, Amis wrote in The New Republic that he was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill. He also had a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, United States.

Death

Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on 19 May 2023. Like his father, he died at age 73. Amis was a life-long smoker.

Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for services to literature, and the knighthood was backdated to the day before his death.

Views

Writing

On writing, Amis said in 2014: "I think of writing as more mysterious as I get older, not less mysterious. The whole process is very weird ... It is very spooky."

Interviewed by Sebastian Faulks on BBC television in 2011, he said that unless he sustained a brain injury, it was unlikely he would write a children's book: "The idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable ... I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write." The "brain injury" remark caused opprobrium among various children's authors, although the poet Roger McGough wagered that "if I gave him £100 to write a children's book I bet he'd do a good one".

Nuclear proliferation

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."

Geopolitics

In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the more dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis of Evil, but that Iran was Britain's "natural enemy", suggesting that Britain should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence".

Electoral politics

In June 2008, Amis endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president of the United States, stating: "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world." When briefly interviewed by the BBC during its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election, Amis displayed a change in tone, stating that he was "depressed and frightened" by the US election, rather than excited. Blaming a "deep irrationality of the American people" for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis said the Republican Party had swung so far to the right that former president Ronald Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the present party – and invited viewers to imagine a Conservative Party in the UK that had moved to the right so much that it disowned Margaret Thatcher. He said: "Tax cuts for the rich, there's not a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!"

In 2015, Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for The Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated". In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Amis said that United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union was a "self-inflicted wound" that had left him "depressed".

Islam and Islamism

On the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine about community relations in Britain and the alleged threat from Muslims; he was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children ... It's a huge dereliction on their part."

The interview provoked immediate controversy, much of it played out in the pages of The Guardian newspaper. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for this particular quote, saying that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, ... but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world". In a highly critical Guardian article, entitled "The absurd world of Martin Amis", satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employed "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran" to incite hatred.

Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating: "We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being ... Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived... But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination ... Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Mohamed Atta."

On terrorism, Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder", and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."

His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet "Blitcon" (British literary neoconservative) from Ziauddin Sardar, who labelled Amis as such in the New Statesman.

Euthanasia

Amis aroused a new controversy in 2010 with his comments regarding euthanasia during an interview, when he said that he thought Britain faced a "civil war" between the young and the elderly in society within 10 or 15 years, and called for public euthanasia "booths". Of the geriatric cohort, he declared: "They'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. ... there should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal."

Agnosticism

In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". He added that "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated" and "so over our heads" that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.

In 2010, Amis said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe ... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us ... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2021)

Novels

Amis published 15 novels:[a]

The Rachel Papers (1973: ISBN 9780224009126)

Dead Babies (1975: ISBN 9780224011679)

Success (1978: ISBN 9780224015714)

Other People (1981: ISBN 9780224017664)

Money (1984: ISBN 9780099461883)

London Fields (1989: ISBN 9780224026093)

Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence (1991: ISBN 9780670843664)

The Information (1995: ISBN 9780002253567)

Night Train (1997: ISBN 9780224050180)

Yellow Dog (2003: ISBN 9780224050616)

House of Meetings (2006 : ISBN 9780224076098)

The Pregnant Widow (2010: ISBN 9780224076128)

Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012: ISBN 9780224096218)

The Zone of Interest (2014: ISBN 9780385353496)

Inside Story (2020: ISBN 9780593318294)

Short fiction

Collections

Einstein's Monsters (1987: ISBN 9780099768913)

Two Stories (1994: ISBN 9781898154044; both later collected in Heavy Water and Other Stories)[b]

God's Dice (1995: ISBN 9780146000546; two stories reprinted from Einstein's Monsters, part of the Penguin 60s series)[b][35]

Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998: ISBN 9780609601297)

Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)

The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)

Vintage Amis (2004)

Stories

Title   Year  First published     Reprinted/collected        Notes

Oktober      2015  Amis, Martin (December 7, 2015). "Oktober". The New Yorker. 91 (39): 64–71.            

Non-fiction

Books

Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982: ISBN 9780458953509)

The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986: ISBN 9780670814329)

Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993: ISBN 9780224038249)

Experience (2000: ISBN 9780224061254)

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (2001: ISBN 9780099422228)

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002: ISBN 9780786868766)

The Second Plane (2008: ISBN 9780099488699)

The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016 (2017: ISBN 9780099488729)

Essays and reporting

Amis, Martin (August 29, 2022). "The Queen's heart : in time for her Golden Jubilee, two biographies of Elizabeth II". The Critics. Books. May 20, 2002. The New Yorker. 98 (26): 60–62, 64–65.[c][d]

Screenplays

Saturn 3 (1980)[e]

London Fields (2018; with Roberta Hanley)[f][g]

 

260- ] English Literature - Martin Amis

260-] English Literature

 Martin Amis 

British author

2000s

The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the 1970s (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic increase in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection). In 2000, Amis published the memoir Experience, largely concerned with the relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. Amis describes his reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.

In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Stalin and the denial that they received from many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the material and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend Christopher Hitchens. Amis accused Hitchens – who was once a committed leftist – of sympathy for Stalin and communism. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in The Atlantic, his friendship with Amis emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded, "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."

In 2003, Amis published Yellow Dog, his first novel in six years. The book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but its reception was mostly negative. The novelist Tibor Fischer denounced it: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder ... It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure: "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for." Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award. Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to the beach resort of José Ignacio, Uruguay, with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.

In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh novel. House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also focused some consideration on the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman. House of Meetings saw some better critical notices than Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality. Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in The Independent, the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories – one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 11 September attacks – but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book." The same article asserts that Amis had recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (inspired by a phase used by Donald Rumsfeld), in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on Greeley, Colorado. Instead he continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:

The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child.

The new novel took some considerable time to write: in 2008, Amis made the "terrible decision" to abandon his first version and a much-different Pregnant Widow was not published until 2010. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well but was not well received, particularly in the United States.

2010s and 2020s

In 2010, after a period of writing, rewriting, editing, and revision dating back to 2003, "by far the longest writing-time of all [his] books", Amis published The Pregnant Widow, a long novel concerned with the sexual revolution. Its title is based on a quote from Alexander Herzen: "The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass."

The first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Writers' Centre Norwich by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an ageing man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically, but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form."

The story is set in a castle owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania, Italy, where Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer of 1970, the year that Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and women". The narrator is Keith's superego, or conscience, in 2009. Keith's sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally, described by Amis as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims.

Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow was met by searing criticism, accusations of sexism, and guessing the real-world identity of its characters. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a general expectation that Amis's time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize longlist. In 2010, Martin Amis was named GQ writer of the year.

In 2012 Amis published Lionel Asbo: State of England. The novel is centred on the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout and persistent convict; for the benefit of his US readers, Amis explained the origin of the latter's surname in an interview with NPR. It is set against the fictional borough of Diston Town, a grotesque version of modern-day Britain under the reign of celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic events in the lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and Lionel's fantastic lottery win of almost £140 million. Much to the interest of the press, Amis announced that the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody" (quotation marks included), had been created to honour the British celebrity Jordan, whom he had a few years earlier summed up as "two bags of silicone". In an interview with Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman, Amis said the novel was "not a frowning examination of England" but a comedy based on a "fairytale world", adding that Lionel Asbo: State of England was not an attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English" and viewed the nation with affection. Reviews, once again, were mixed.

Amis's 2014 novel The Zone of Interest concerns the Holocaust, his second work of fiction to tackle the subject after Time's Arrow. In it, Amis endeavoured to imagine the social and domestic lives of the Nazi officers who ran the death camps, and the effect their indifference to human suffering had on their general psychology. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and a 2023 film, "loosely based" on the novel, premiered to acclaim at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix.

In December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first, a collection of journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016, was published in October 2017. The second project, a new untitled novel which Amis was working on, was an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens. In an interview with livemint.com, Amis said of the novel-in-progress, "I'm writing an autobiographical novel that I've been trying to write for 15 years. It's not so much about me, it's about three other writers – a poet, a novelist and an essayist ... and since I started trying to write it, Larkin died in 1985, Bellow died in 2005, and Hitch died in 2011, and that gives me a theme, death, and it gives me a bit more freedom, and fiction is freedom. It's hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things. I don't have them looking over my shoulder anymore." The finished product, Inside Story – his first novel in six years – was published in September 2020.

Other work

Amis released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water) and five volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché, The Second Plane and The Rub of Time). While he was writing Money, he wrote a guide to arcade video games of the 1970s and 1980s, Invasion of the Space Invaders.

Amis regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and contributed book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.

University of Manchester

In February 2007, Amis was appointed as a professor of creative writing at the Manchester Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, where he started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.

Of his position, Amis said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but ... I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them." He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants." It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year in return for 28 contracted hours. The Manchester Evening News broke the story saying that according to his contract Amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers.

In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year. Of his time teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, Amis was quoted as saying, " teaching creative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire". He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and tolerant contingent". Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in September 2011.

From October 2007 to July 2011, at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Hall and Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st-century literature, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing, his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow, violence, film, the short story, and America).

  

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.

 

258-] English Literature - Martin Amis

258-] English Literature

Martin Amis

British author 

Facts

Born  August 25, 1949 • Oxford • England

Died  May 19, 2023 (aged 73) • Florida

Notable Works     “Dead Babies” • “Einstein’s Monsters” • “Experience” • “House of Meetings” • “Inside Story” • “Koba the Dread” • “London Fields” • “Money” • “Night Train” • “Other People” • “Success” • “The Information” • “The Pregnant Widow” • “The Rachel Papers” • “The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016” • “The War Against Cliché” • “The Zone of Interest” • “Time’s Arrow” • “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and Other

Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died May 19, 2023, Lake Worth, Florida, U.S.) was an English satirist known for his virtuoso storytelling technique and his dark views of contemporary English society.

As a youth, Amis, the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, thrived literarily on a permissive home atmosphere and a “passionate street life.” He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1971 with first-class honours in English and worked for several years as an editor on such publications as the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman.

Amis’s first novel was The Rachel Papers (1973), the tale of a young antihero preoccupied with his health, his sex life, and his efforts to get into Oxford. His first major critical success was Money (1984), a savagely comic satire of the conspicuous consumerism of the 1980s. London Fields (1989; film 2015) is an ambitious work set in 1999 in which a number of small-scale interpersonal relationships take place amid a society on the verge of apocalyptic collapse. His other major work of this period is Time’s Arrow (1991), which inverts traditional narrative order to describe the life of a Nazi war criminal from death to birth. In Amis’s works, according to one critic, “morality is nudged toward bankruptcy by ‘market forces.’ ” Other novels of the first decades of his literary career included Dead Babies (1974), Success (1978), Other People (1981), The Information (1995), and Night Train (1997).

His short-story collection Einstein’s Monsters (1987) finds stupidity and horror in a world filled with nuclear weapons. The forced-labour camps under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin are the subject of both the nonfiction Koba the Dread (2002) and the novel House of Meetings (2006). In his novel The Pregnant Widow (2010), Amis examined the sexual revolution of the 1970s and its repercussions on a group of friends who lived through it. The pop culture indictment Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012) chronicles the vicissitudes of a fictional small-time criminal and his upstanding nephew after the former wins the lottery and becomes a fixture in the tabloid press. The Zone of Interest (2014) revisits the Holocaust themes explored in Time’s Arrow. Told from the perspectives of two Nazis and a Jew, the novel examines the horrors of Auschwitz by chronicling the quotidian romantic entanglements of the former two alongside the grim duties imposed on the latter. The “novelized autobiography” Inside Story (2020) centres on his relationships with the writers Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens.

Amis was one of the best-known public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was a frequent guest on television programs, and his decades-long friendship with Hitchens was arguably the most prominent and productive literary relationship of his era. He related his thoughts on his homeland in the television documentary Martin Amis’s England (2014). Among his volumes of essays are The Moronic Inferno, and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and Other Excursions (1993), The War Against Cliché (2001), and The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016 (2017). Experience (2000), an autobiography that often focuses on his father, was acclaimed for an emotional depth and profundity that some reviewers had found lacking in his novels.