Martin Amis

 

Martin Louis Amis, who has been one of the most prominent English Writers since the 1970s, is the son of Sir Kingsley Amis. His step-mother was a novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. In 1983 he was listed as one of the "Best Young British Novelists' by Granta magazine, along with fellow authors such as Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. 

 

Amis’s writing is notable for its dark humour and surprising moral undercurrents, and a recurring, but not exclusive, interest in metropolitan life in contemporary England. In the context of London settings, Amis explores the darker aspects of English society, in particular the violence implicit in some areas of youth culture, and the cruelty arising from envy between friends and between different classes. 

 

His first novel, ‘The Rachel Papers’ (1973), a story of adolescence, won the Somerset Maugham award in 1974 and was filmed in 1989. His second novel, ‘Dead Babies’ (1975), about a group of young people indulging in sex and drugs over a weekend, as also filmed, in 2001.

 

‘Success’ (1978), and ‘Other People: A Mystery Story’ (1981), were quickly followed by one of his best-known novels, ‘Money: A Suicide Note’ (1984), which satirises the amoral value system of Britain in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. There is a postmodern element in all of Amis s fiction, and Money includes an appearance by the author in a self-reflexive excursion into metafiction. This twist is advanced by the name of the first- person narrator, John Self - adding a dimension of self-parody. But Self, a typical Amisean antihero, should not be taken entirely as a self-portrait. In ‘Experience’ (2000) Amis comments:

“It would be a ferocious slander of Martin Amis (who was, incidentally, a minor character in this book) if I called Money autobiographical. It certainly wasn't higher autobiography. But I see now that the story turned on my own preoccupations: it is about tiring of being single; and it is about the fear that childlessness will condemn you to childishness.”

 

In 1987 Amis published a volume of short stories, Einstein's Monsters, which considers the dangers of the nuclear age, and the sense  of impending apocalypse was continued in his next novel, ‘London Fields’ (1989), which, like much of his fiction, was set in contemporary London.

 

‘Time's Arrow: or Nature of the offence’ (1991) is the only one of Amis s novels to date that has been Short-listed tor the Booker Prize. The novel is narrated by what appears to be the soul of a man who is initially called ‘Tod Friendly', although as the novel progresses it is revealed that Tod is a pseudonym. Tod's life story is told backwards, from death to birth, and the reader eventually learns that he had been a doctor at Auschwitz. Amis Said that he inverted time, by beginning at the end, ‘because Auschwitz is a psychotically  inverted world and one of the bedrocks of Nazism was the complete inversion of the doctor's role.’

 

‘The Information’ (1995) is based on the differing fortunes of, and rivalry between, two male friends who are both novelists. As a novel about novel- writing, it self-consciously exploits the technique of metafiction. It also mocks the publishing and writing industry, and humorously sabotages the possibility of friendship between authors.

 

‘Night Train’ (1997) marks a departure in style, being a pastiche of American detective fiction. ‘Yellow Dog’ (2003) is set in England and the United States and is typical of Amis's work in its sharp humour, its interest in class difference and privilege, and its focus on criminal behaviour.

 

In 2002 Amis published his autobiography, ‘Experience’, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. Other non-fiction works include ‘Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million’ (2002), which analyses the effects of Stalin's power, and also examines his father's attitudes towards Communism.