Author Martin Amis cast a long shadow over generations of English writers

The death of Martin Amis, aged just 73, may come as a surprise to some as the author retained the aura of enfant terrible deep into middle age

English writer Martin Amis — the son of another famous writer, Kingsley Amis — who died on Friday, proved his own talent was quite different to that of his father. Picture: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

Farewell to Martin Amis, who died on Friday at the age of 73.

It may come as a slight surprise to readers that the author of novels as various as Money, London Fields, and The Information was that age, given he retained a certain enfant terrible aura deep into middle age.

Perhaps that was a backhanded tribute to the strength of his influence: he cast a long shadow over a couple of generations of writers working in English.

Amis’s novels of contemporary London life feature wide boys on the make and mysterious femmes fatales, but the trademark fizz of his prose doesn’t always lend itself to a clear plot.

Plenty of commentators have pointed out that in those state-of-England novels, the reader is often better off enjoying the sentences rather than the story:

“The only way to get across the road is to be born there.”

“Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

“Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America.”

Well, maybe you need to put in the work with the meandering plots to get the benefit of the dazzling sentences.

His first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published 50 years ago, and he pointed out himself that “any London house would have published my first book out of vulgar curiosity”.

Famous novelist father

This was because his father Kingsley was also a novelist — so famous a figure in British life, in fact, that he appeared in TV ads for soft furnishings — so the perception of Amis jr as a prototypical nepobaby was established quite early.

His subsequent works proved his own talent was quite different to Kingsley’s — take Time’s Arrow, a shorter work about a Nazi doctor living his life backwards — and their relationship survived the father telling the son he couldn’t finish his books (later in life Kingsley claimed to prefer books which began with ‘A shot rang out’).

Summarising Martin Amis’s career would be a greater challenge if he hadn’t written Experience, a stunning memoir that mixes snapshots of his life — misadventures in gritty late-’60s London — with literary encounters such as the time Salman Rushdie invited him to step outside after an argument about the quality of Beckett’s prose (Rushdie pro, Amis con, but they made up immediately).

British writer Martin Amis at the Hay Festival Alhambra in Granada, Spain, in 2009. Picture: Samuel Aranda/Getty Images

Is it his best book? The evidence is strong. It’s threaded through with his memories of a distant cousin, murdered by Fred West, while there are accounts of major dental work which test the squeamish reader’s resolve. His father’s final decline is reported in detail.

Yet the book is also hilariously funny. Kingsley’s deterioration is marked by falls, and Martin writes of one mishap: “And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was a work of colossal administration.”

Readers looking to investigate Martin Amis would also do well to try The War Against Cliche, a collection of essays and reviews that features the review of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal with the immortal title, ‘Bob Sneed Broke The Silence’.

Amis, a huge fan of The Silence of the Lambs, skewers the pretentiousness of the later book; in another review he pinpoints the genius of another of his heroes, Elmore Leonard: “The essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle. What this means, in effect, is that he has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence.”

In recent years Amis sometimes drifted into controversy, with his views on Islam after 9/11 and his opinions on euthanasia (which look less outlandish given recent developments in Canada).

He never lost his eye for a good sentence, though: from Ulysses, he picked “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” as that book’s most beautiful sentence.

Joyce’s prose he described as an “incredible instrument, half wand, half weapon.” A good description for any writer.