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After a second failed marriage, Kingsley Amis spent his last years living in a peculiar ménage à trois with his first wife Hilly and her third husband, Lord Kilmarnock. Martin became a frequent visitor during these years, his relationship with his father always amicable and mutually respectful. As Jacobs writes, however, any discussions on the novelistic form were diligently avoided for the sake of peace. Although many of Kingsley Amis’ apparently once passionate views and opinions have developed, mutated, and even inverted over time, his beliefs concerning literature have remained firm. In the 1950’s, Amis’ return to the traditional traits of the novel, as established by the form’s founding fathers, marked a break from the modernist trend which had dominated the literary scene for much of the first half of the century. The decision to return to earlier models, a decision by no means exclusive to Amis, served to remove the novel from the sole interest of intellectuals and academics, and return it to popular culture and the masses. This apparent reversion came partly as a result of an increasingly common distrust and dislike of pretence and elitism, and partly through a concern for the novel form itself. As Norman Macleod remarks, "Amis’s quarrel with modernism is fundamentally over the technical unwarrantedness of the artistic crisis it represents and promotes , and how it hastens towards a foreshortened end the natural extension of the tradition." 13 The development of this "anti-experimental and anti-romantic, anti-ideological, and eminently realistic" trend has been well documented in a work by Rubin Rabinovitz. 14 Citing John Braine, Alan Silitoe, and John Wain, along with Kingsley Amis, as examples of mid-20th Century writers adopting a common neo-realist style, Rabinovitz draws attention to their basic principles in relation to those of James, Woolf, and Joyce:
In his study, Rabinovitz discusses a number of arguments against the experimental novelists, and in doing so provides several reasons why a new wave of writers should choose to abandon the modernist temperament and return to aged conventions. The modernists sought to produce something entirely new, as they experimented with narrative techniques, symbolism, ambiguity, and style. While some may consider these experiments and, arguably, developments essential to the history, and perhaps the ultimate survival of the novel form, writers such as Kingsley Amis and his close acquaintance Philip Larkin, would have passionately disagreed. Amis saw in the development of, and over indulgence in one’s own definitive style, for example, a paucity of ideas, and ultimately an "idiosyncratic noise-level in the writing, with plenty of rumble and wow from imagery, syntax, and diction." 16 Although the works of Kingsley Amis are distinctly his own, he makes no effort to "display too much individuality." Character development, acute and biting social observations, and, throughout his early novels at least, the "way he controls the development of an action … to create that combination of surprise and logicality," all mark Amis’ work as distinctive, as his own, yet we are never overwhelmed by any heavily stylistic idiosyncrasies. 17 Amis’ "style" is notoriously difficult to define, yet instantly recognisable, marking perhaps the greatest testament to his work in view of the philosophy behind it. In his study of Kingsley Amis, Norman Macleod attempts to distinguish the recognisable, though never distracting, characteristics of his subject’s style. Macleod eventually formulates a far from succinct appraisal and definition of Amis’ style, which rests largely upon linguistic observations, but in doing so he also places a useful emphasis on the fact "that each new work redefines and extends his range, and that each of his novels needs and finds its own stylistic specifications." In the same essay, Macleod refers to the remarks other critics have made on the same subject:
Cropper’s definition is perhaps the most noteworthy, loaded as it is with references to Amis’ most celebrated and intransigent trademarks. Although Kingsley has suppressed stylistic experimentation and idiosyncrasy, Martin has endeavoured to do just the opposite. The "Amis" referred to by Cropper, however, removed from the context of Macleod’s essay, could refer quite readily to either Martin or Kingsley. Patriarchal, or "blokeish," assumptions exist throughout the works of both father and son, as does learned discourse and comment accompany an often demotic voice. Although Cropper has inadvertently highlighted ideological similarities between the work of Martin and his father, the dominant philosophies behind their very different styles of fiction remain manifest. As Kingsley avoided the development and extravagance of style, Martin has persistently challenged the very notions and assumptions surrounding style and form. In a discussion between the two, broadcast in 1974, Martin observed:
In response to this Kingsley replied "Experimental prose is death." The many stylistic, thematic, aesthetic, and philosophical differences between the postmodern vein in which Martin Amis writes, and the brand of realism adopted by his late father, are overt and various enough as to suggest that not a single significant similarity exists between the woks of these prolific authors. Indeed, everything that the one stands for, as the above quote suggests, grates against and contradicts the other. If one assumes, as a great many do, that the postmodern is in many ways an extension, a conscious development of modernism, this immediately stands the work of Martin in opposition to that of his father. 20 While Kingsley and his contemporaries sought to overthrow the dominance of modernism in literature, Martin has reversed this process once more, picking up on the tropes and ideals of the early modernists, well aware of the limitations and delusions of realist writing, and developed his own postmodern aesthetic which will no doubt eventually spawn a new breed of reactionary writer seeking a post-postmodern form. In reacting against what are essentially literary polar opposites, father and son have perhaps destroyed any possibility of marked similarity emerging between their works. Discarding the logic, the order, and the temperament of the realist text, Martin Amis has sought to explore style, to experiment with narrative forms, and to "challenge the 'logocentric,' … the authority of the word, the possibility of final meanings or of being in the presence of pure ‘sense.'" 21 Throughout Martin’s work, we are presented with fictions which explore an abundance of differing themes yet rest on none. Postmodern writings "are calculated to engage the reader in a play of plural interpretations, so that the reader’s sense of a stable, reliable (fictional) world is disturbed.".22 Whereas Kingsley’s novels attempt to steer their readers down an often meandering path through their narratives, without challenge or ambiguity, the work of his son attempts to engage the reader in this so-called "play of plural interpretations." Martin’s 1989 novel London Fields, for example, covers contemporary fears of nuclear apocalypse; it pokes fun at the struggles faced by those living at both extremes of our social spectrum; we are given a rich and violent insight into the world of pro-am darts; while Richard Todd sees in it "the question of whether an honest portrayal of the inadequate aspects of male heterosexual consciousness can ever escape fantasies of domination and appropriation." 23 There is no single, simple way of reading London Fields. In writing novels such as London Fields, Martin has also avoided many of the realist tropes abundant in the work of his father. There is no strong emphasis on plot, as, essentially, it is only of minor significance. Characters are grotesque caricatures, rarely realistic, and descriptions are vague and ambiguous. Consider for example Keith’s "heavy Cavalier" in London Fields; is it "heavy" only in physical mass, "heavy" in its polluting emissions, or "heavy" in age or even colour? In contrast, as Diedrick writes, the classic realism of Kingsley
Throughout the bulk of his work Kingsley Amis has consistently turned his attention to the smallest details of everyday life in order to present his fictions as ‘real’, to render them as "realistic" as possible. While Joan Rockwell writes of "the novel being remarkably selective for emotional, rather than emotionally neutral events," Amis, in Take A Girl Like You describes in great detail, through a series of seemingly incidental observations, the various door-knockers to be found in the lodging house. 25 Despite his protestations in Memoirs, that he was never "much good at houses at the best of times," this focalisation of certain details within Amis’ work marks an attempt to bring the fictional world of the novel closer to our own physical world, in which we are invariably subsumed in a multitude of detail, whether noted or not. 26 Plot and the chronological unfolding of events are realist conventions also common to all of Amis’ novels. In Take A Girl Like You for example, Amis turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, written between 1747 and 1749, for a plot outline, again emphasizing his return to the foundations of the novelistic form. As Rabinovitz writes:
While much of Kingsley’s literary talent is spent on carefully weaving narrative events into a cogent and complete plot, whether entirely his own or inspired by the great novelists of previous centuries, we see in the work of Martin, as in that of a great many postmodern writers, a rejection of this chronological unfolding of narrative elements. In Time’s Arrow, for example, we see a complete inversion of this traditional narrative path, as the chief protagonist wakes from his death and re-lives his life in reverse. The novel illustrates one of John Mepham’s four definitions of postmodernism, as it "problematises reality … and unsettles the reader’s sense of reality."28 Although Amis overtly disturbs the generally accepted narrative structure in Time’s Arrow, by effectively turning it on its head, he deals with the same convention a little more playfully in London Fields. Whereas a Kingsley Amis, or any realist narrative will plough through the events of a narrative in a straight, continuous track, the events which make up the ‘plot’ of London Fields are experienced by, and witnessed through one character before appearing again from the perspective of another, the narrative taking a zigzagging course through its fabula. As Randall Stevenson writes, "readers can hardly remain passive consumers, or be seduced by covert ideologies of a text they have literally had to piece together, page by page, for themselves," as postmodern writers "introduce a comparable questioning of conventional patterns and expectations, often heightened by the novelist’s explicit commentary on their own activity." 29 This "explicit commentary on their own activity" is also present in the work of Martin Amis. Whereas realist writers gladly, and blindly ignore the fictionality, the literariness, of their work, postmodern authors will ensure that their texts "own up to their fictionalizing function." Referring once again to Kingsley’s one, and unsuccessful, attempt at reading Money, Martin is confident that he can point to the one page in the novel which, as Jacobs writes, would have his father "sending the book spinning across the room in exasperation" 30: "That’s where the character named Martin Amis comes in. Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to [my]self." 31 In The Rachel Papers, Success, Dead Babies, Money, and London Fields, Amis draws attention to the status of his work as fiction through involution. Invariably the writer appears in some capacity, sometimes literally, in all of these works. In Money we see the chief protagonist, John Self, meet a writer called Martin Amis in a pub. At first just another character, this fictional Martin Amis evolves into the author of the text itself. Self eventually acknowledges his own susceptibility to the whim of this controlling force, this "Martin Amis," who actually exists beyond the ‘reality’ of the fiction:
John Self’s initial confusion becomes manifest through this fruitless physical confrontation, over which the God-like Amis has complete control. Self’s inability to ‘connect’ with a single swing comes with the realization that all his actions are foreseen, engineered, and doctored by a force beyond his control and, up until this point, quite beyond his comprehension. This existential revelation ultimately brings about in Self a surprisingly liberating feeling, as Amis himself remarked in interview:
Victoria N. Alexander goes some way to explain why Amis should be so compelled to reveal himself as the controlling force within his fictions. As Amis puts it down to the natural evolution of the novel form, emphasizing that it is never with "any hobbyist attitude that one explores these things, it just feels inevitable that the illusion is broken, that one reminds the readers that they are reading," Alexander seems compelled to question her subject’s egotism. In a remark which would surely have amused Kingsley (Merritt Moseley fatuously remarking that "Amis is a typical English novelist (of his generation, anyway) in his lack of pomposity about his calling, his ready demystification of the writer’s art" 34), she writes that throughout Martin’s fiction, "the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief is discouraged, his awe of the artist writer encouraged," before suggesting that the "temptation to reveal himself [Martin] to his creation (to wink at the readers, to show-off really) is too great to resist." 35 This ‘wink at the reader’ appears in a number of Amis’ works, including the disturbing and grotesque Dead Babies. In a novel in which grotesque visions become boorishly abundant, author allies with reader to laugh at one of his most unfortunate comic creations:
In London Fields, Martin pokes fun at this postmodern tendency toward involution, in a way that could confirm or dispel Alexander’s concern with the size of his ego. Throughout the book, its narrator Samson Young refers to his "fictional" literary counterpart Mark Asprey, the bane of his professional life, only as MA. MA (Mark Asprey/Martin Amis?) is described as "the handsomest, the cruelest, and the best in bed (by far) …".37 Whether these passages arise out of authorial pride and egotism, or from deeper philosophical concerns, it is clear that Amis does touch on the traditionally postmodern questioning of reality. As Jean-François Lyotard comments:
Our own sense of reality, or lack of it, is disturbed and placed under question when the postmodern author has created his literary reality only to reveal it as fiction. Amis has often referred to his authorial role as God-like, in which he can ‘invent other realities’, only to do with them as he pleases: "In a novel you are the weather, you are the crowd scene, and you do have these illusions of omnipotence." 39 Amis’ work also subscribes to many other postmodern traits, Diedrick drawing attention to his work as pastiche, and his ‘central concern with self-consciousness, mediation and inauthenticity; Richard Todd to his ‘self-conscious yet faultless ear for … what Amy J. Elias has coined the term "junk noise’’; his tendency toward the macabre, the hopeless, and the disillusioned, illustrating A. Walton Litz philosophy that "relates the term postmodernism to the semanteme it contains in a particularly pessimistic way, suggesting that "like post-mortem or post-coital," it implies the fun is over." 40 Furthermore, Amis acknowledges the structure of London Fields as a postmodern joke, "in that the narrator is taking something down that’s actually happening, he’s incapable of making anything up." 41 Paradoxically, however, this particular "postmodern" joke has been played before, in 1741, by one of his father’s greatest literary influences, Henry Fielding. In Shamela, a parody of Richardson’s epistolary epic Pamela, Fielding’s narrator is also caught writing about events in progress:
Although Fielding and Amis are using this notion to very different ends, it does serve to obscure the boundaries between works considered classically realist, and those pertaining to be wholly postmodern. Just as parallels can be drawn, however tenuously, between classical realism and the fiction of Martin Amis, hints of postmodernist tropes and ideas become apparent in several of Kingsley’s novels. Literary self-consciousness is evident in Amis’ work, for example. In Take A Girl Like You, the text itself is only too well aware of its status as fiction, but makes desperate attempts to disguise its own fictionality. Early in the novel we see the heroine consciously gaze at herself as a fictional character trapped in a classic literary or cinematic cliché:
Long before the term "postmodern" was employed in relation to literature, "Harry Levin, Irving Howe, Fiedler, Frank Kermode, and Ihab Hassan first using the term in the 1960’s," Kingsley Amis was at least toying with the notion of involution.44 While formulating the principle ideas behind I Like It Here, Eric Jacobs writes:
Here, we would have witnessed a clash of the real and the fictional, a recognizable disturbance or unsettling of the reader’s sense of reality. As it was, I Like It Here featured a new character, Garnet Bowen, but remained heavily autobiographical. The "here" in the title does of course refer to England, as Garnet’s, or perhaps Kingsley’s reluctance to travel, and coarse xenophobia manifest themselves throughout the novel, supplementing an otherwise sketchy plot. The book was inspired by, and based largely upon a trip to Portugal, taken by the Amis family as part of the Somerset Maugham prize awarded to Kingsley for Lucky Jim. Despite Amis’ final decision not to include himself in the fiction, I Like It Here remained innovative, even experimental, as a new direction in the travel writing genre. As Eric Jacobs writes, I Like It Here avoided all that "Amis had previously objected to in travel-writing: their escapism and their style. … I Like It Here would be a new kind of travel book, if such could be devised, which would avoid the double pitfalls of overdoing the enchantments of abroad and overblowing the prose." 46 Just as the dominant ideology behind all Amis’ fiction rests upon realistic representation, I Like It Here strives to produce a realistic portrayal of travels abroad, Bowen concluding the novel with his down to earth, although all too pessimistic conclusions about foreign travel:
Despite his professed return to traditional literary forms, there are, therefore, instances of experimentation in Amis’ fiction. This is an issue taken up by Macleod who questions the very meaning of "experimentation," and whether it can be applied to the work of Kingsley, who, after all, ‘has been experimenting in subtle and restrained ways’ with many of his fictions, including I Like It Here.48 Although it is far from being recognizably postmodern, the "realist" work of Kingsley Amis does incorporate several trademarks of this later literary form. While he picks up on traditional conventions, Amis experiments and innovates to a degree, bringing a freshness to what would otherwise be a stuffy, tired regurgitation of dated forms. Malcolm Bradbury writes of the innovations in his work, innovations which "lay not in its form but its spirit, tone, and voice,' while Lodge writes of how Lucky Jim ‘introduced a distinctly new tone into English fiction." 49 While we find traces of the postmodern in pre-postmodern realist texts, in a breach of the temporal flow of things, traditionally realist tropes are also unavoidable in much postmodernist fiction. In his latest novel, Night Train, for example, we see in the work of Martin Amis the slow development of the postmodern form as it turns back to an emphasis on plot and character:
Furthermore, Martin has stressed that however he presents his characters, as grotesque caricatures, or as types, readers will still empathize with those characters, promoting verisimilitude in even the most postmodern texts. In the taking up of previous literary forms, and the unique development of those forms, it may well be argued that what Kingsley Amis has done for classical realism, Martin has done for postmodernism, the two meeting over several stylistic points throughout their careers.
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