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Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, 374 pages, $29.95 Reviewed by Jamie Maw If the information were a middle-aged man, you would be sorely tempted to leave him, and leave quickly. For he is obese, vain, and self-centred, carries the luggage from soured relationships gone by, and lives in a dark and fetid bedsitter that hugs the flyovers of London's Westway. Make no mistake, this is a man in full decay. But you might well have second thoughts. For he can be clever, witty, occasionally funny, and -- when he's really on -- even charming. The Information turns on a pointed spindle of rivalry between two middle-aged London writers. Gwyn Barry writes facile, coffee-table reveries of hope that are absolutely, fabulously successful. His friend and nemesis, Richard Tull, writes hopelessly cataleptic male-biters that are unreadable. Barry is well married to Lady Demi; advanced by a legion of PRs, chauffeured, interviewed, he is constantly in the public eye. Tull is impotently married to Gina; advanced only by his alcoholic libido, he tubes to his day job at the Little Magazine. Tull, silent except for the constant shamble of his inner voice, is a mere mote in the eye. Bitter and indignant at this inequity, Richard Tull sets about to ruin Gwyn Barry's life, professional, personal, whatever it takes. 
Although Amis publicly proclaimed that his protagonists, and the metaphor of their predicament, represented the "north and south of my writer ego", any discussion was soon overwhelmed by the verities of a real-life melodrama. Amis threw over his long-time British agent, the wife of his close friend Julian Barnes, for an American agent who secured a L500,000 advance and who was soon called "the jackal" in the London tabloids. Amis's peers cried out against him (in the case of A.S. Byatt, strenuously). He left his wife in favour of a younger American woman. He underwent some expensive dental reconstruction in New York. The vivisection of Amis continued in the British media; he had "gone American", which in the claustrophobic salons of literary London meant that he had opted for greed and self-congratulation. The bulk of the book, too clever by half and too long by a third, was said to manifest Amis's guilty conscience. Back to our story. The Information seeks to circumscribe the vast and flatulent untidiness of male middle age: indecision, competitiveness, impotence, petty jealousies, vanity, an eclipsing greed for posterity. And very soon, the book becomes what the author has wrought: indecisive, competitive, jealous, impotent, and vain. The writing is not only waylaid by detail, side issues, clutter; it is about them, and often and frustratingly obsessed with minutiae. Yet for all this detail there is little colour -- the writing, like Richard Tull, too often looks at its feet. You may have guessed by now that this is a book that, like its trove of overweight middle-aged men, is difficult to love. As runs true for much of Amis's fiction, The Information should have been left by an open window, to let in some fresh air. The darkness of Richard Tull and a cast of subsidiary characters could have used some clear light, if only to relieve their endless gloom. Cast in the outer London precincts of a too-dark Notting Hill and Holland Park, The Information becomes a sort of Lawnfires of the Surbanities; inciteful instead of insightful, for all of its bulk it lacks weight, and Martin Amis becomes Martin Aimless. Amis deploys a male metaphor of individual sports: tennis, snooker, and chess. All right then, more games than sports, and all played out at the Warlock, a downtrodden sporting club modelled on Amis's own Paddington Sports Club. This is how Amis attempts the essence of male competition and, at least during the interminable tennis matches, convinces us that love is, in fact, nothing at all. The metaphor stalls for the same reason: the author and his small-hearted characters are incapable of team sports, or even a respectable first serve -- they are too small, too petty, so the schadenfreude comes off as diminutive too. As a comedic writer, Amis is much better at the short, set piece; his non-fiction magazine articles are often muscular and hilarious. Other than A.A. Gill, Amis can be one of the funniest observers working in England today, and this makes the disappointment with his fiction cut deeper. We have become the unwitting victims of too much information; unformed and unedited, it assails us on an alarming array of modern appliances. I am reminded of this as a late-night talk-show host attempts to rein in his hyperbolic, meandering guest. She is going on and on, telling an endless, meaningless anecdote, eating up too much time in the segment. Finally the host reacts: "That clearly falls into the category of too much information, ma'am." So when a major international newsweekly declares that "Amis is one of the most gifted writers of his generation," and Amis corroborates the charge with "what the hell, I think I am the best of my generation," then we should be more than curious to know the questions he asks of himself and the answers he gives back to us. Just what is "The Information"? "The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer is so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time? What will our world eventually become? What mark will we leave to remember us by?" Just how long does it take to arrive at this conclusion? Just how long is it? Well, in the event that you are having a mid-life crisis you might be consoled to know that it will have long passed by the time you put The Information down. Infatuated with the sound of its own flabby voice, the ultimate irony of The Information is that it fails to inform. Jamie Maw is a businessman and writer who lives in Vancouver and London. He is currently feeling rather sadly misinformed. The Reader--Summer 1995 }
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