Joe Bennett: Remembering English novelist Martin Amis

Columnist Joe Bennett pays tribute to English author Martin Amis, who died recently at age 73, despite not liking most of his work.

Martin Amis is dead. Of oesophageal cancer. He was 73.

As a novelist, he had the worst of all possible starts: he was the son of a novelist. And not some unread dilettante, but the famous, distinctive and funny Kingsley. So when Martin wrote his first novel, it was like Dan Carter Junior turning up at rugby training and offering to play first five. Comparisons would be made.

Some have suggested that being Kingsley’s son gave him a head-start, got him published, made him noticed, and there may have been some truth in that at the outset. Everyone wanted to see how Kingsley’s son wrote. At the same time, they were queuing up to chop him down, to dismiss him as an Edson Ford, a later Kennedy, even a Don Junior or Eric, both of whom try hard to emulate their dad but neither of whom can quite manage the full pathological, narcissistic malice.

But Martin emerged instantly from his father’s shadow. He might have adopted the same profession but he could not have done it more differently. No one could mistake one line of Martin’s for one line of his father’s.

He did well, and sold lots of books. In the ‘80s and ‘90s he earned huge advances, and those advances earned him huge resentment. Inadvertently, he became a celebrity of sorts, a tall poppy whom the tabloids sought to scythe. He had terrible teeth, teeth that rotted, ached and fell out; he spent thousands on getting them fixed. The tabloids accused him of cosmetic dentistry.

But that was all fiddle-de-dee. What mattered to him and to those who read him was the written word. Like a lot of people, I read pretty well all his novels of the ‘80s and ‘90s but I actually never liked them much. They presented a world of sordid hyperbole, a world I didn’t quite recognise. I didn’t feel for his characters. I didn’t become emotionally invested. I found much to admire in the writing, but I wasn’t gripped.

For me, the best sort of novel tells a story, convinces me of its own truth, engages my feelings and above all, crystallises something that I have felt but not pinned down - “What oft was thought,” as Pope unimprovably put it, “but ne’er so well exprest.” Or, as someone else once said, good writing tells you what you didn’t know you already knew.

I preferred the father’s work. And so, famously, did the father. What Kingsley found fault with in his son’s prose was its squirming performance element, the author drawing attention to the writing rather than to the story. In one novel, for example, there is an incidental character called Martin Amis, who interacts with a main character called John Self. It’s all too clever by half, because Martin Amis himself was too clever by half. The cleverness gets in the way.

For me, the best of his books, and the one I keep going back to, is a collection of essays and, in particular, book reviews. Those reviews are precise, perceptive, exquisitely written, very funny and bang true.

Here’s how he starts a review of an anthology of supposedly humorous writing.

“A sense of humour is a serious business; and it isn’t funny, not having one.”

Note the seemingly casual tone. Here is the voice of a thinking man in the pub. But see how exactly he skewers the paradox, skewers it twice, indeed, in just 17 words.

“Watch the humourless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter.”

How superbly observed that is. And how well said. In the wrong hands, adjectives are dangerous things, but look at “cocked and furtive”. Beat them for precision if you can, the fresh precision that gives delight.

“The humourless … are handicapped in the head, or mentally ‘challenged’ as Americans say … The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time.”

He might have been writing about Trump and all his acolytes.

The title of the collection is The War Against Cliché. It’s a war never won. But Martin Amis fought it to the last and he laughed as he did so. Rest his bones.