The slow birthing of Yellow Dog:

"If Money says something about the kind of person Amis was when he wrote it, then you have to assume he wasn't counting his blessings at the time. It's wonderful for Amis that he is so content these days, but for those of us who relish his misanthropic bite, this development raises a troubling question: what kind of novels can we expect from the snapshot-wielding doting daddy before us? The worst-case scenario presents itself with depressing clarity: a literature of burping babies, domestic wrangles, trips to the all-night pharmacy.

'Just to reassure you,' Amis says, gesticulating with his scraggy cigarette, 'the novel I'm writing is very much the same stuff. There's a guy in it called Clint Smoker, who works for a newspaper that's rather like the Daily Sport, called the Morning Lark. There's also pornography in it, and an East End gangster, and a parallel royal family. The king is Henry IX, and he has a daughter who is kind of entrapped in a sexual thing by . . . I don't want to give too much away.'"

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Just a couple of months ago, I finished another memoir, but it's the political one. And it turns, in fact, into a short biography of Stalin. It sounds weird. My father was a Communist for 15 years -- during the war and after -- and [the memoir] is about that great lacuna in Western thought, of the indulgence of communism, and, in fact, our irrational desire for a perfect society.

And now I'm back on the novel that I put aside 2 1/2 years ago. I'm 30 pages in. It's about masculinity again, with the usual high-low characters. It's even more extreme than usual, in that there's a royal family in it, as well as a criminal family. But, like all writers, I'm having to completely relocate myself after Sept. 11. I can tell you, it's a totally new feeling where you have to fight to shed yourself of distraction. You always have to do that. But now it's a real battle to get to the novel. To get past all the other stuff that you pollute yourself with over the breakfast table -- like reading the newspapers -- and you have to convince yourself that what you're writing matters.

Luckily, I know it will now be a novel about what it feels like to be living in our current era, which established itself on Sept. 11. It will be called the Age of Security, but now we'll feel it is the Age of Insecurity. Everything is qualified now. Everything is contingent. The verities that you depended on a few weeks ago are gone -- and gone, I think, for our lifetimes. So it's a weird process. You go up there and you have to convince yourself that this matters. And then you get going. And you do, in fact, forget about the 21st century -- although you're writing about it -- but you've escaped into your fictional world. And then, after an hour, you suddenly realize you haven't been thinking about whether your kids are going to get anthrax, and there's a sort of weird, guilty feeling, which I think is going to be the condition for a long time.

I did call my latest book The War Against Cliche. These things do matter. "The War Against Cliche" matters. And it's their victory if they seem to stop mattering. So that's the great adjustment that we all have to make -- that what we cared about before is still just as important as it was.

Observer: You mention once or twice [in Koba the Dread] the idea that if you put two people together, and give one absolute power over the other, torture quickly ensues.

M.A. Yes, the thoughts of torture will be more or less automatic, I think.

Observer: How much was the Fred West element of Experience still in your mind?  

M.A. This convulsion in my writing life is a lot to do with that, with my cousin, and having a horrible, inverted kind of link with this little one-man death camp. Both Experience and this are kind of wrestling with that. I never thought for a minute that fiction was at all trivial; it’s a very high pursuit, but I just couldn’t ... didn’t feel playful enough. You have to feel playful to write fiction.

Observer: So you called a two-book moratorium on fiction?
  
M.A. I’m only cautiously positing that as an idea in retrospect. You certainly don’t say, Right -- two books off!  

Observer: Even Night Train was a departure from your familiar terrain. Is your writing driven by a fear of predictability?  

M.A. A quest for novelty? I don’t think it can be, because the novel I’m writing at the moment has a character called Clint Smoker. It’s so me, it feels like I’m going through my hoops.

Observer: How big’s that going to be?

M.A. Not very long, and more comic than I’ve done for a while.

Observer: Right back to the lightness of The Rachel Papers?
  
M.A. No, more like Money, perhaps. Where you give various characters and ideas their head, but not a long novel. You can say of Graham Greene that he wrote about the same things but he just got older as he did them. The perspective is like a shadow moving across a lawn.

Observer: What is the changing perspective?

M.A. Time. Age. Mortality. That can make you all frisky as well. A terrible sort of giddy, senile friskiness comes over us. I can tell I’m doing some new things in the one I’m writing now because it’s tough; you know you’re trying to coax the language into maximum effect.  

Observer: What’s the novel called?

M.A. I haven’t got a title yet. Maybe Men in Power. One of the main characters is the King of England, Henry IX.

Observer: Now?

M.A. Yes, but it’s a slightly different universe. His father was Richard IV and his grandfather was John II. So in numerical terms the next one up from the three worst kings. It’s a tripartite novel. It’s on a sort of three-character loop, but then it changes halfway through. I’m assuming the reader will be wondering intensely how these three characters are connected. One of them’s Clint Smoker, who works for a paper well below the Sun in its intentions and strategies.  

Observer: The Sport?

M.A. The Sport is so marvellous in its own way that it’s hard to satirise.  It’s already satirising itself. The third character’s an actor who’s also a bit of a writer, who gets hit over the head in the first chapter. He’s been attacked, deliberately, for something he’s done, and it all is connected.

Observer: How far on are you?

M.A. One hundred-odd typed pages, second draft sort of thing, another 50 in long hand. It won’t be much longer than 250.

Observer: How do you write?

M.A. I do a lot of longhand. I’ve come to think that the process of writing a novel is finding out about the novel. When you’ve done your year or two of longhand and you go back to start at the beginning again, you’re amazed by how little you knew about it. You’ve got some little throb or spark that gives you a sentence or a situation and for the next few years you’re just finding out more about the novel.  

Observer: How much do you write a day?

M.A. Sometimes I write so fast I can hardly keep up. And other days I’d be hard-pressed to write the dosage instructions on a Nurofen packet.

Observer: You don’t force out 1,000 words every day?  

M.A. No. I’m very impressed by writers who can do that, but it’s much more of a groping business. If I’m having a day where I don’t feel I can write the instructions on a Nurofen packet I won’t sit there staring. I’ll read and I’ll be alone. I think that reading, being alone, waiting, is a huge part of it all.

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