LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/13. MARTIN AMIS (1949)

● Martin Amis writes oral novels, in which people talk a lot, as it happens in Barnes’ Talking It Over, Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, or in most novels which are a monologue whose hero addresses the reader, directly or in an oblique way. His language abounds in four-letter words, as a verbal tic. These novels are noisy, but point to a feeling of sad inner emptiness.

● Just like Fowles, but in a more extensive way, Amis is his own hero. Not only do we find the author in the book, we also find his biography to be the biography of Amis himself.

● Like Gray in 1982 Janine, Martin Amis’ Money and The Information reveal dirty minds, dirty sex-life and foul language. The heroes could not care less whether they are alive or dead. Life is wasted on them, which is a form of irony on the author’s part, tending more to become bitterness, actually. They are not sane minds, either. Everyone is or seems to be neurotic, crazy, driven out of their minds by the absurd life around them. Absurdity enforces mental insanity on author, heroes and even reader. The atmosphere is stifling.

● John Self, in Money, states, ‘My life is getting less memorable all the time.’ Unmemorable characters is Amis’ ambition. The plot itself is bushy and unmemorable. The reader has a hard time remembering what the book is about, the incidents are inessential. What is essential is sharing the hero’s fantasies, which Amis has in common with Gray again, and also with many of his contemporary American novelists. The same character confesses, ‘I am a pornographic addict.’ This addiction rules feelings out.

● Amis aims at a kind of novel-vérité. Orality debunks suspense, yet something must keep us interested, must keep us reading on. Amis resorts to something he carries to a peak, which is the aesthetics of the repelling. The author is very direct, the characters do not intend to win us over. They love their lovelessness.

● Martin Amis does not take himself seriously, and his heroes also mock at themselves and everybody else. They con themselves and whomever else they can, they are eager to outsmart. The reader, on the other hand, sees through the hero’s (the author’s) deviousness, and is not amused. He is disabused. The reaction Amis stirs in his reader is one of escape: whoever reads him feels like running to the nearest life other than his, and renting it. Running away from themselves is what heroes do best in these books.

● Amis writes from everybody’s point of view. He creates a need for privacy in his books. It feels as if the readers, millions of readers, were the heroes, and Amis had to flee for his life, not give himself away, hide whatever he can. The readers devour the author, this is the major fear in Money.

● Amis feels language to be very important, which makes him highly quotable at times. He also has a reversed cult for America, which means he admits there are advantages, but he feels that Brits going that way are wrong. Puns, pilgrimages to America and hatred would be an adequate summary of The Information, and a good description of Amis’ main obsessions. Adding to it sex, of course, emotionless as it may be. The trick which makes us go on reading is Amis’ successful attempt at making us share creation: he makes us the writers, takes us as his accomplices, treats us as his equals, who know everything he knows.

● Aside from the themes already used by Desperadoes – pilgrimage to America, love of pornography, emptiness, the suggestion of plagiarism (see Lanark, Chatterton) – Amis has his own voice, too: he mocks at literature, at his own book, at the novel as such. He notices that the literary genres ‘have all bled into one another.’ Hybridization, in Amis’ case, drains fiction of its vigour. The novel is limp.