1980s and '90s
Amis's best-known novels are
Money,
London Fields, and
The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy." Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives.
Money (1984, subtitled
A Suicide Note) is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century." "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed," the novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. Time included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005. On 11 November 2009,
The Guardian reported that the BBC had adapted
Money for television as part of their early 2010 schedule for BBC 2. Nick Frost played John Self. The television adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete Campbell in Mad Men, Little Dorrit's Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall. The adaptation was a "two-part drama" and was written by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford. After the transmission of the first of the two parts, Amis was quick to praise the adaptation, stating that "All the performances (were) without weak spots. I thought Nick Frost was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. He fills the character. It's a very unusual performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely graceful, a pleasure to watch...It looked very expensive even though it wasn't and that's a feat...The earlier script I saw was disappointing (but) they took it back and worked on it and it's hugely improved. My advice was to use more of the language of the novel, the dialogue, rather than making it up."
London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined to come between the other two. The book was controversially omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989, because two panel members, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his women characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told
The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn't be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn't favour or bless that sort of treatment. Really,there was only two of them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement, but such was the sheer force of their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he regrets it to this day, he feels he failed somehow by not saying, `It's two against three, Martin's on the list'."
Amis's 1991 offering, the short novel
Time's Arrow, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Notable for its unique, backwards narrative - including dialogue in reverse - the novel is the autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp doctor. The unique reversal of time in the novel seemingly transforms Auschwitz - and the entire theatre of war - into a place of joy, healing, and resurrection.
The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography
Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences.
The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels," is envied by hisfriend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.
Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel
Night Train, is unique in that it is the first of Amis' books to use a female protagonist. Narrated by the mannish American Detective Mike Hoolihan, the story revolves around the suicide of her boss's teenage daughter. Like most of Amis's work,
Night Train is dark, bleak, and foreboding, arguably a reflection of the author's views on America. Amis's distinctively American vernacular in the narrative was criticized by, among others, John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor and friend, the late Saul Bellow.
2000s
The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the nineteen-seventies (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic uptick in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection).
In the year 2000 Amis published a memoir titled
Experience. Largely concerned with the strange relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, the product of an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
In 2002 Amis published
Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the material, and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend, Christopher Hitchens. Once (but no longer) a passionate and committed leftist, Hitchens' alleged sympathy for Stalin and communism was criticized by Amis. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the book in
The Atlantic, his friendship with Amis appears to have emerged unchanged: in response to a reporter's question, Amis responded "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."
In 2003,
Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was published. The novel drew mixed reviews, and was most notably denounced by the novelist Tibor Fischer: "
Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considered the book to be a great disappointment. Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling
Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanationfor the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for."
Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award.
Following the harsh reviews afforded to
Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to Uruguay with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.
In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis's published his eleventh novel.
House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also saw some consideration of the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman.
House of Meetings saw some better critical notices than
Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality while others felt that he was not suited to writing an ostensibly serious historical novel. Despite the praise for
House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in
The Independent, the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside two short stories - one, a disturbing account of the life ofa body-double in the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 11 September attacks - but late in the process, Amis decided to jettison both from the book." In the same 2006 interview, Amis revealed that he had "recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (the title was based on one of Donald Rumsfeld's characteristically strangulated linguistic formulations) in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of compulsive rapists on a town called Greeley, Colorado" and instead continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:
"The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child."
However, the new novel took some considerable time to write and was not published before the end of the decade. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection
The Second Plane, a collection with compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural isses resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to
The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. However, the collection sold relatively well and was widely discussed and debated.
2010s
In 2010, after a long period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision, Amis published his long-awaited new long novel,
The Pregnant Widow, which marks the beginning of a new four-book deal. Originally set for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back to 2009 and then 2010 as further editing and alterations were being made, expanding the novel to some 480 pages. A statement from publishers Johnathan Cape describes the content of the novel:
"The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester. Martin Amis, in "The Pregnant Widow", takes as his control experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is atragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of "Money" with the historical sense of "Time's Arrow" and "House of Meetings"."
The first public reading of the then just completed version of
The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 at the Norwich Playhouse as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. Amis was in conversation with the
Observer’s Robert McCrum, a long-time friend of his. At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Norwich Writers' Centre by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an aging man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically (something that has been interesting the press recently), but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction, and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form." Additionally, Amis "seemed quite happy reading the opening pages in the novel’s first public outing."
Further details concerning the novel's plot were revealed by
The Times on 10 May 2009, its reporter Maurice Chittenden writing that at the event "Amis said the book was originally meant to be based much more closely on his own life. However, he had introduced more fictional passages after realising the format was not working," and that he "[had] been working on the partly autobiographical
The Pregnant Widow for more than five years."
Chittenden writes that Amis said at the event regarding the length of the novel's protracted writing and creative gestation:
"In 2003 I tried for a couple of years [to make the novel more autobiographical]. I flailed about and it all felt awful. Bits were autobiographical but I had to completely rethink it. It was an uncontrollably long and pointless novel of 200,000 words. But the summer in Italy, I drew that out.”
In an 1 August 2009 interview with
The Afterworld, Amis clarified the nature of some of the content of
The Pregnant Widow and revealed that he is currently "writing two novels at the same time":
I started a novel [but] then I’m going to write a novella before I get on to it. But I was in big trouble a few years ago, with a huge, dead novel. And it took me a long time, and a lot of grief, to realize -- I thought I was clutching at straws -- it turned out it was actually two novels, and they couldn’t go together. So I wrote The Pregnant Widow, [that’s] one half of it, and the other half I started, and it will be very autobiographical, the next one.
Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of
The Information in 1995,
The Pregnant Widow once again saw Amis receiving mixed reviews from the press and sales being average at best. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a general expectation that Amis' time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize long list (as were efforts by his contemporaries Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie).
Amis's next project is a novella currently titled
State of England, and that will be followed by another full novel made up of some of the other half of the original draft of
The Pregnant Widow.
Amis and Katie Price
On 27 October 2009,
The Daily Telegraph reported that during a recent appearance by Amis at the Hay Festival in Wales, Amis had discussed his fascination with the glamour model turned celebrity author Katie Price (formerly known as Jordan). Amis went on to reveal that he "has honoured [Price] with a character bearing some of her traits" in his forthcoming new novella provisionally titled
State of England (also the title of a 1996 short story by Amis). Amis said that her character was named 'Threnody', and stated categorically that Threnody "isn't based on" Jordan but readers should "bear in mind" the model when they read the book. Furthermore, Amis said of Price: "She has no waist, no arse...an interesting face...but all we are really worshipping is two bags ofsilicone," though he admitted to having read both volumes of her autobiography.
Amis's remarks concerning Price and the rise of the "celebrity author" provoked wide discussion and much fierce debate with the press and literary circles, with
Guardian BookBlog writer Jean Hannah Edelstein accusing Amis of misogyny and implying that it showed insecurity on his part. David Lister in
The Independent thought that Amis was "refreshingly unafraid to challenge prevailing orthodoxies" but thought he had also been "a real fool". "In turning his critique of celebrity publishing into a personal attack on a woman's physical attributes in language that would have seemed chauvinist 40 years ago, let alone now, he has shown his true colours, won Jordan sympathy and lost the argument on celebrity novels,"Lister wrote. These are accusations which have been levelled at Amis before, most notably in 1989 when
London Fields was rumoured to have been excluded from the Booker Prize longlist for similar reasons after protests by judges Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, and exclusions from the shortlist for the Whitbread Prize the same year.
Independent Editor-At-Large Janet Street Porter also attacked Amis's remarks: "The truth is, he doesn't sell as many books as he used to...Whether Amis can cope with it or not, Katie Price sells millions of books to people who would not normally buy books." Street Porter went on to add that Price's novels were "pure escapism" (asking "...what's wrong with that?") and that in being "reduced to slagging off a woman who will never have read one of his own books, or even have heard of him, in order to drum up interest and grab a few headlines for his next opus", Amis was "signing up to the very culture he's said to despise." Porter signed off her piece saying that Amis shouldn't be "...such a rude snob."
Amis was defended by fellow novelist Tony Parsons. Writing in
The Mirror, Parsons opined that "...it is wrong to suggest that Amis is just jealous of Jordan’s sales figures. I think the real problem is the sheer excitement that Katie/Jordan generates among her readers. She encourages people to pour into bookshops in a way that the likes of Martin and I can only dream about." Despite the critical acclaim of literary fiction and high profile awards such as the Booker Prize, Parsons said that ultimately "Jordan, those two bestselling bags of silicone, has done more to promote reading in this country than anyone apart from the great J.K. Rowling."
Amis revealed a few more details about Threnody and his views on Jordan in an interview with Will Gore for the
Epsom Guardian prior to the release of
The Pregnant Widow:
“She is a minor character,” he explains. “It is not Jordan but a rather different type of woman who gets about as much attention. My character is a poet, not a novelist, on the side as well as being a glamour model.
“I think it is slightly depressing that Jordan’s autobiography is a best seller and people queue for five hours to meet her. What does that say about England?
“Snobbery has to start somewhere and if you can’t be snobbish about Katie Price you are dead, you’ve gone.”
Further details about
State of England and Amis's plans were revealed in an interview with The Times in late January, 2010 prior to the release of
The Pregnant Widow. According to the article, "[Amis has] nearly finished his next novel,
State of England, about chavs, which contains one character, Threnody, inspired by Katie Price and another, “my worst yet”, he says, based on Mikey Carroll, a crack-smoking lottery winner. “Lionel Asbo wins £90m on the lottery and does something so viciousI can't tell you what”. Amis clarified further by stating: “I’ve got the first draft of the next novel done...and another novel ready to go after that.”
Other works
Amis has also released two collections of short stories (
Einstein's Monsters and
Heavy Water), four volumes of collected journalism and criticism (
The Moronic Inferno,
Visiting Mrs Nabokov,
The War Against Cliché and
The Second Plane), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines (
Invasion of the Space Invaders). He also regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes, and contributes book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel
Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in their own right in
Standpoint magazine and
The Guardian, respectively.