Team Amis

On tribal literary allegiance

On Saturday it was announced that Martin Amis had died of oesophageal cancer. I was in Oxford—Amis’s birthplace—visiting friends when I heard the news and was devastated that I would never get the chance to interview him, hang out, and tell him how much his work meant to me.

Indeed, one of the first things I wanted to write for this blog was about Martin Amis. The premise of the article was about how literary tribalism makes us not only love a writer but also unfairly dismiss others. I still have a draft that I occasionally revisit, tweaking a word or two before abandoning it. Until now.

The article was inspired by discovering the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day (1989), who is in many ways the opposite of Amis. Whereas Amis has dazzling prose and grotesque characters, Ishiguro’s prose and people are understated. I was curious about whether it is possible to say which of them is the better and who deserves to join the pantheon.

While I don't think of myself as tribal—who does?—I was reminded of how tribalism can manifest in the individual when I think of my allegiance to Amis. A defining feature of tribalism is that it allows you to dismiss people and ideas from outside the tribe without engaging with them. In a world of infinite options, we need heuristics to make the world manageable and tribalism provides them. Nuance is nice in theory, but we haven’t got all day.

Nowhere is this truer than when you're in a bookshop. Every day another hundred books are published on top of the millions already in print. It's too much, so it helps when you can dismiss something quickly based on some pre-existing prejudice. We judge a book by the cover, by the blurb, by the title, by the section it's in, by anything but actually reading it.

In 1989, Martin Amis published London Fields, his ambitious novel about darts and nuclear war. London Fields didn’t make the Booker Prize shortlist because two of the panellists thought that Nicola Six was a misogynistic character. For me, it’s hard to think of her as anything other than her literary type, a linguistic construction who bears no resemblance to reality but simply serves the contrivances of the plot. However, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil vetoed it. The winner that year was Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

I remember reading about the controversy in the late nineties, when the Tory MP, George Walden, dismissed the Booker winner as a "vapid and vacuous book about butlers." As a teenager, I was deeply impressed by the phrase “vapid and vacuous.” I didn’t really know what the words meant but they were alliterative and witty. However, I’m ashamed to say that for 20 years I didn’t read Kazuo Ishiguro on the basis of that one-line dismissal.

When I finally did read The Remains of the Day, I found a subtle, serious book about an unreliable narrator in politically volatile times. Not vapid at all. Look at this quote:

His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom.

The Remains of the Day is part of the English novel tradition of Jane Austen and EM Forster, what was once called The Great Tradition of FR Leavis. It is parsimonious, clear, never putting a foot wrong in terms of character. It isn’t flashy and doesn’t have dazzling prose, but probably translates well. London Fields is from the more disreputable Dickensian tradition.

Amis tells us in The War Against Cliche that “quotation [from the books] is all we have” to distinguish “the excellent from the less excellent.” This works well for Amis, whose prose excels in individual passages but perhaps doesn’t fully capture the effect on the reader of an entire novel. Here is a quote from London Fields that shows Amis’s high-low style.

Tears at the dartboard, lachrymae at the oché: this was Keith’s personal vision of male heroism and transcendence, of male grace under pressure. He remembered Kim Twemlow in the semi of last year’s World Championship. The guy was in agony up there (and now Keith flinched as he saw again the teartracks on that trex-white face), trailing four sets to nil and two legs down in the fifth. No one, not even Keith, had given him a fucking prayer. A burst gastric ulcer, they said later, brought on by a few curries and a late night out. But what does the guy do? Calls a ten-minute medical delay, sinks a few Scotches, wipes away his tears, picks up his darts – and he throws. And he throws…Five-four it was in the end. And the next night he only goes out there and butchers Johnny Kentish in the big one. Seven-fucking-nil. INNIT.

Kim and Keith: they were men. Men, mate. Men. All right? Men. They wept when they wept, and knew the softnesses of women, and relished their beer with laughter in their eyes, and went out there when it mattered to do what had to be done with the darts.

The sentences call attention to themselves, they introduce uncommon words, rock’n’roll rhythms … I love it. Martin Amis has given me so much pleasure over the years that I can’t quite shift my allegiance, even if everything he wrote after The Information (1995) is somewhat patchy.

As a fan of Amis, you get caught up in his frequent writings about the canon and what it means to achieve literary immortality. But canon formation is in the hands of the reader. Do we still read these authors? Do we find something new and relevant? Is it influential on other writers? These are the kind of things that grant literary immortality and I, for one, am going to carry on reading Martin Amis.