From: StephenP
Category: Amis
Date: 9/7/99
Time: 9:13:33 AM
Remote Name: 195.171.125.1
...from Gooch's post on 23/8.
(Review by Francis Rozange)
Martin Amis is an important writer. The whooping cough of the moment (I'm not making this up, I guess 'coqueluche' is slang for cock-of-the-walk.) And 'The Information' wants to be a best-seller. Verdict...
Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry have been friends since university. Richard Tull, the wrong side of forty, past-it critic, impotent husband, father of twins and husband of a rather cute wife. He's had two rapidly forgotten novels published. The third, Untitled, has just come out. From its very first pages it provokes headaches and cerebral haemorrhages. Richard Tull does not like his readers: he despises them. His intense writing, his incomprehensible phrases, amount to monuments to his own intellectual superiority. Really superior.
Gwyn Barry is the author of a sentimental novel. Naive. Amelior's pure, honest and sincere characters do not know any human fault, they live in a sort of terrestrial paradise, they even know nothing of the temptations of sex. Amelior is a best-seller translated into dozens of languages. The cinema world has seized it and is preparing a film. And if the story changed a little? There would be a traitor and...and Gwyn Barry finishes his new novel, Amelior Regained.
Richard Tull, the dear and tender friend, sinks into pathological jealousy. He wants revenge, but he is condemned to mediocrity and all his efforts are turned against himself. Gwyn Barry gives interview after interview. Writing a book, he says, is like lovingly fashioning a piece of furniture, you have to sand it time after time. A brilliant metaphor. Perfect for explaining his work to a manual labourer who's a bit soft in the head. 'Do you do DIY?' a jounalist asks him. Of course. Gwyn Barry has a little carpentry workshop in his home. In fact, no, he doesn't do DIY, but he's had it put in, along with a handmade chair which he's deliberately knocked about a bit, in case anyone wants to see the famous workshop. Gwyn Barry's life is a Disneyland, reality is elsewhere. And the information, the information that comes at night...
Martin Amis is a brilliant writer. Prodigously talented. Much too talented. The first thirty pages of this novel are remarkable. An idea on every line. A style which make you shiver with pleasure. (unidentified quote)... then the style becomes less stunning, totally readable by the middlebrow reader without great effort. And because the 'anglo-saxon' best seller format is a big slab of 500 pages, Martin Amis lets himself go time and time again and writes us a big slab. Happily he gives us a way of skipping pages: as soon as he starts talking about astronomy, off you go. Readers aren't stupid, and they're not used to too much explication. The Information is not a great novel, the specification condemns it in advance (?), but happily one finds there all the mordant irony of Martin Amis. Without being a great book, it's a good novel, lively and bitter which is read with pleasure.
So there you go. Amis in 'alienation of smelly Cartesian snail-eater with too much blasted astrophysics' shock.
ps My favourite 'Wheaties, you're no Megabran' (cf thread passim) quote was during the vice presidential debate between Benson and Quayle. Quayle played the fresh-faced future-of-America card by essaying a mention of JFK. Benson stopped, looked him up and down and after a perfectly-timed contemptuous silence said, "Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy. He was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy." I thought for a delicious moment that Danforth was actually going to burst into tears.