Martin Amis

By John Walsh

His father Kingsley said, “I wish he would just once write a sentence like, ‘Then they finished their drinks and left.’” Martin Amis would rather eat bees than risk being so boring. At 62 he is still the most exciting living British writer for anyone concerned with vivid prose. Ian McEwan can be more formally exact, Iain Sinclair more jaggedly musical, Salman Rushdie more wildly imaginative. But you settle into an Amis novel, or essay, confident that he’ll cut to the heart of the subject with withering intelligence. “He has a style”, wrote John Carey, Britain’s leading literary critic, “as quick and efficient as a flick-knife.”

Amis’s fiction aims to excite, to confront and argue, but in a cool modern idiom. His words race around the reader like pack-hounds, harrying and snapping. His sentences seldom luxuriate in baths of description. He can whizz through catalogues of sexual misbehaviour and violent excess, but always offhandedly, as if you, the reader, know this stuff already. He used to be a sucker for the Risky Flourish: the last line of “Dead Babies” (1975) is, “His green eyes flashed into the dawn like wild, dying suns.” A damaged romantic occupies his vivid brain, along with a deranged Jeremiah, a chronicler of masculine despair and a cartographer of transatlantic excess. In “The Information” (1995), critics detected a mellowing, a gentler tone, a new chattiness. Perhaps horrified, Amis amped up the grimness to take on suicide, porn and Stalin’s gulags and give them all a dark, atonal music.