RIP Martin Amis

In the few short days of the celebrated British novelist’s posthumous fame, we got a taste of the outpour of obituaries and commentaries on his life — that is until the world and its short attention span lost interest

AFP

This May 31, 2003, file photo shows acclaimed British writer Martin Amis at the Miramax Book Convention Dinner Party at the House Restaurant on in Los Angeles, California. Amis has died aged 73 at his home in Lake Worth, Florida.

RIP Martin Amis

Bryn Haworth

last update on 29 May 2023

When news first came in that Martin Amis, the celebrated British novelist, had died at the age of 73, I braced myself for a torrent of obituaries and tributes.

It was not that I begrudged Amis all the encomia. He has long been a favourite author of mine. It’s just I was sure there would be such an abundance of ready-made obituaries, plus the reflections of friends or mere acquaintances.

This would be followed by the obituaries written by those caught on the hop, or by literature professors assessing his contribution to the English canon, along with a few doubters gingerly putting their heads above the parapet.

Of all the forces, love is the strongest...Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man under the weight of a feather.
Or it just lets everything go on as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. That’s the kind of force love is.
—Martin Amis, London Fields #RIP pic.twitter.com/NguryDmXDt
— Andrew Hill (@jazprose) May 20, 2023

These would then be countered by a host of over-informed fans, before the whole topic was up for grabs and people who hadn’t heard of him before his death was announced, or who had read only a few of his 15 novels, or browsed their blurbs in the airport the other day, or else hadn’t ever been near a single one of them, started with their mournful RIP messages on social media, and that would be it: consider the floodgates of grief well and truly open.

How wrong I was.

After an initial flurry of obituaries, the world barely had time to rotate on its axis five times before Tina Turner was monopolising the obituary pages.

In pictures: ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’ Tina Turner dies at 83

No novelist — particularly one with Amis’s concerns over posterity — should ever be allowed to rest in peace that quickly.

However, in the few short days of his posthumous fame, there were enough attempts made to mark the occasion of his passing for us to see how things might have transpired.

Let’s face it, the world’s short attention span is no great tragedy. The man gave the world 15 novels, an abundance of essays, interviews, reviews, introductions and prefaces, autobiographical reflections, gossip and table talk.

Most of us are lucky if we get an epitaph of one sentence. Which is why I shan’t, belatedly, be adding to the heap of inadequate obituaries. Instead, in the guise of critic which Amis himself so often adopted, and since he’s not around to give us his own opinion, I offer a brief review of the obituaries that did appear.

Premeditated obituaries

Unique among the sundry items a newspaper provides, obituaries tend to be written before the event. Perhaps this is why, while the world is still reeling from the shock, their authors can speak with such measured composure about the deceased.

Obituaries tend to be written before the event. Perhaps this is why, while the world is still reeling from the shock, their authors can speak with such measured composure about the deceased.

At the time of writing the subject might be fit as the proverbial butcher's dog, not worthy of the passing tribute of a sigh. With eulogies of this genre, Antony hasn't come to bury Caesar, but to praise him.

These conditions ought, then, to make for very fine writing, but in the case of Martin Amis, despite the advantage of foresight, his obituarists seem to have quailed at the task of matching their eloquence to an acknowledged wordsmith of the age.

They repeatedly refer to him as a great 'stylist' and 'wit'. It's enough to make any obituarist feel an acute sense of inadequacy.

Who then, in my humble opinion, wrote the best piece? Who played the part of Antony more convincingly than the late Alan Rickman? (Actually, this is no great test, since Rickman was a terrible Antony) Without a doubt, it was James Wood in the New Yorker, primarily because he quoted so well from the great stylist and cherished his wit.

The great British novelist Martin Amis, who has died at 73, had a true literary vitality that was high-spirited and farcical. https://t.co/swN8VnsaTe
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 20, 2023

Wood is a book reviewer by trade and says that whenever he was bored by his job, those 'wicked lines' about the book reviewer Richard Tull, from Amis's novel The Information (1995), swung into view: "He was very good at book reviewing. When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed." One such book, I suspect, was written by Geoff Dyer. I shall come to him in due course.

Since the sheer volume of Amis's outpourings may never be comprehended by anything less artificially intelligent than a chatbot, it is helpful of Wood to give us the following examples of what all the fuss is about:

Since the sheer volume of Amis's outpourings may never be comprehended by anything less artificially intelligent than a chatbot, it is helpful of Wood to have given us examples of what the fuss was all about.

'Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door.'

This has the signature air of hapless disarray that haunts Amis as it did his father, Kingsley. It is the comedy of bohemian dishevelment, and here it is again:

'Wearing only a cigarette, I fetched myself some orange juice.'

It's true, Wood makes a slightly strained comparison with PG Wodehouse, but he also says Amis 'wasn't really modern at all: stylistically, he came cackling and chortling right out of the eighteenth century.'

Now this is suggestive.

There are strong hints of Laurence Sterne, for example, a writer whose style struck Dr Johnson as irredeemably odd. There's also the focus on words as such, as opposed to plot or even characterisation.

Whereas words are transparent in Ian McEwan's works, in those of Amis they are not something he wants you to see past, as they carry all the fun, and this fun comes dressed not in motley, but in the guise of complaint.

Far from being an enfant terrible, as everyone tediously asserted when he first hit the scene, Amis began his literary career exactly as he would remain, a young curmudgeon.

Another thing that people habitually did was refer to Amis as a literary Mick Jagger. Incredibly, this is what the Antony who managed to be worse than Rickman repeated in his article for the Guardian.

Martin Amis, era-defining British novelist, dies aged 73 https://t.co/Vcnv0lyRkG
— The Guardian (@guardian) May 20, 2023

"Who is this Geoff Dyer?" I asked myself. Coincidentally, I was enlightened in this matter by James Wood, who must have had the words of Tull dinning in his mind as he reviewed a book called 'Jeff in Venice'. Wood claimed to have found the book funny. Perhaps, like the author, he was taking a brief holiday from his critical faculties at the time.

Never one to avoid wordplay, Dyer informed us that Amis was an exemplar of 'daylight yobbery' before giving us a feeble pun on 'yank'. But what really made me cringe was his account of meeting Amis.

So deeply affected was he by the encounter, that his wife assumed he'd been snorting coke. Actually, of course, he'd been passively smoking cleverness.

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