As a member of the same household and as a reader of his books he [Kingsley] has influenced me. It’s more a kind of humour really than anything else. I’ve always thought that if our birth dates were transposed then he would have written something like my novels, and I would have written something like his. 51

The above statement goes some way to acknowledge the influence father has had over son, and the potential for concordance between their works. At the same time, however, by commenting on their birth dates, Martin has also acknowledged the more dominant forces of the very different social and literary trends which were contemporary to each writer as their respective careers began. Just as different literary trends and movements have partially dictated the style and form of their novels, very different political and social ideologies have also influenced the content and tone of their work.

During his years at Oxford, for example, Kingsley would develop an interest, of fluctuating intensity, in politics, while cultivating his passions for alcohol and sex. Indeed, by the time he was eighteen, Amis was already recognizable as the character of Lucky Jim Dixon, a fictional creation who wouldn’t come into published existence for another fourteen years. The frequently made association between Kingsley and Jim has been a constant source of irritation to the author, but there must have once been enough similarities to warrant the connection.

Many of Kingsley’s early opinions and lifetime experiences made some sort of appearance in his debut novel, although he would rather remain distanced and distinct from its hero, or rather non-hero, Jim Dixon. Lucky Jim, appearing on British bookshelves for the first time in 1954, is the novel most often turned to for a model of 1950’s English fiction, emphasizing the extent to which Kingsley’s voice is the voice of a generation. The novel, as Paul Fussell writes, made Kingsley "the object of intense social admiration."52 Questioning the uncertainties faced by a young man striving for the nicer things in life against a torrent of adversity and apathy, Lucky Jim struck a universal chord with a new wave of novel readers. While established literary figures, Somerset Maugham included, were quite appalled by Amis’ work, others appreciated the honest and anti-elitist qualities of Lucky Jim, whose chief protagonist relies on the virtues of commonsense over pretence, and serendipity over hard work.

Like Kingsley, Jim has arrived at his current seat of employment in an unnamed provincial university, from the ranks of the lower-middle classes. Unlike his creator, however, Jim has only a superficial, if not accidental, interest in the field of medieval history on which he is supposed to be lecturing. It is through his efforts to secure himself a permanent position at the university that Jim comes into contact with the bourgeois prejudices and pretences of the university establishment, personified by Professor Welch. Through a mix of frustration and discontent, a hatred toward the professor is born, only to intensify as the novel proceeds along its farcical, and often bitter narrative. The dislike and resentment Jim directs at his prospective employer brings with it a hate not just for Welch himself, but for everything the professor believes in or finds enjoyable. The apparent philistinism displayed by Jim throughout the book, so loathed by Maugham et al., is not a mark of his true character, or that of Amis’, but rather representative of his dislike for Welch. Amis is far too well read to promote philistinism with any great sincerity. While it is true that he attempted to promote jazz music, the James Bond novels of Ian Flemming, and science fiction as a literary genre, Amis employed high-brow media to do so. Furthermore, any comic will admit to the fact that a subject cannot be ridiculed unless thoroughly researched first, and as Amis pokes fun at more literary and cultural icons than the man in the street could name, it would be impertinent to consider him as any form of philistine.53 As Martin Amis has observed, Kingsley, like Dixon, would "be for something because he was against the people who were against it."54

Just as Dixon stands in opposition to all that Welch stands for, rather than Welch himself, Bradbury remarks that Jim is not necessarily: "against contemporary British society or culture, but against genteel high culture, aestheticism and bohemianism, the hangover of Bloomsbury." 55

Amis’ attempts to dispel the previous dominance and lingering marks of the Bloomsbury era are quite clearly present in the tone and attitude of Lucky Jim, which earned itself a generally appreciative reception from the new British reading public as a result. For David Lodge, despite his affection for modernist writing, Lucky Jim "established precisely the linguistic register we needed to articulate our sense of social identity, a precarious balance of independence and self-doubt, irony and hope."56 Merritt Moseley goes on to cite Walter Allen, among other’s, who could relate to and admire Jim Dixon, not only for the way in which he has become "the hero of a generation in the everlasting battle between the generations," but also for the bracing freshness of his "irreverence, his powerlessness, his comic (though bloodless) rebellion against the forces of ‘the establishment’, which disgusted him and frustrated his desire to have nice things." 57

From voicing the 50’s generation, Kingsley’s tone changed with the times, adapting to social developments, until his novels were shouting the issues of 60’s contemporary England. Amis’ 1968 novel I Want It Now, for example, discusses sexual liberation, racism, and feminism, while illustrating the anti-American, and anti-rich feelings rife in many corners of society at the time. Ronnie Appleyard, a rising television celebrity with a shallow moral outlook and even shallower aspirations, is the device through which Kingsley unleashes some of his most pointed satire. As the narrator informs us, Ronnie

had no feelings for old people as such beyond a mild dislike, never wasted his time sweating about the H-bomb, and would not have cared a curse if the British army were to set about re-occupying the Indian sub-continent, provided they did so without calling on him for assistance.58

Despite Appleyard’s dubious morality and careless disregard for current world issues, he does have the capacity to highlight faults greater than his in those even he considers to be bastards, notably the mega-rich. In the year that The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and in a time when the "moral intonations of the 1950’s gave way to the freer, franker, and often more frantic liberationist attitudes of the 1960’s," it is love that eventually reforms Ronnie.59

While Ronnie’s reformation stands, as dubious as it may appear, Kingsley is able to use Appleyard as a tool, a moral yardstick, through which he is able to highlight the gross failings of the novel’s other characters. Although Malcolm Bradbury considers the final attack on the established English aristocracy as being ‘slight and trite’, Appleyard does uncloak Lady Baldock and friends as superficial, self-absorbed, and above all dated. In part, however, Ronnie’s entanglements with the Baldocks only serve to bring other topical issues to the fore. It is during the company’s stay at ‘Fort Charles’, for example, in which Amis promotes racist ideology as being the sole interest of irrational bumbling idiots:

"Balls. What you’re saying is balls. Rubbish, nonsense, tosh, junk. And also extremely offensive, barbaric, inhumane, foolish, ignorant, out-moded, and in the circumstances unforgivably rude." 60

Gender issues are also raised in the novel, through the exploration of these heavily flawed fictional aristocrats, in the character of the androgynous Simona/Simon/Mona Quick. Throughout the novel we see Simon come to terms with her sexuality, to feel comfortable and empowered by her own femininity, and ultimately liberated from the over-bearing and frightfully out-moded matriarchal figure of Lady Baldock.

Ultimately, however, as Bradbury remarks, what is important about I Want It Now

is that Amis clearly is seeking, generally, to widen the confines of the social and moral novel, and attempt a new range, one that will capture the flavour of contemporary culture in its fashionable, frantic, elusive turnover.61

If their birth dates were transposed, then perhaps Martin would have written something like Lucky Jim or I Want It Now. Just as these novels voiced the concerns and happenings of the generations into which they were born, Martin’s fictions have also encapsulated the essence of definable periods of the late 20^th century, most notably the 1980’s. The influence of recent historical developments has shaped the literary concerns of Martin Amis, just as they have done his father. Diedrick, however, introduces Martin’s social and political concerns into his discussion of Amis and postmodernism, as he reminds us that ‘aesthetic postmodernism can never be separated from, is always implicated in, political postmodernity’.62 By turning to the work of Sven Birkets, Diedrick observes that many postmodern writers are pre-occupied with three historical conditions in particular:

the existence of the ‘actual and psychological’ fact of the nuclear age and the possibility of human annihilation that has dominated power relations and political agendas since WWII; the cumulative effects of the Western world’s shift from ‘industrial mechanization to information processing’; and the saturation of Western societies by electronic media, ‘particularly television.’63

Throughout the work of Martin Amis, we can find instances of all three of these major postmodern pre-occupations. Martin is, or has been, notoriously pre-occupied with the threat of nuclear apocalypse. The issue was covered most strikingly, some say too excessively, in London Fields, and also in Einstein’s Monsters.

Born in 1949, the younger Amis considers himself a child of the nuclear age, taking upon himself a share of the burden of this great responsibility. He has commented that his birth date coming after the dawn of the nuclear age marks a major difference between his political ideologies and those of his father. London Fields is loaded with references to the nuclear age, and the omnipresent fears of apocalypse, from "Enola Gay," the name given to the B-52 bomber which delivered the atom bomb to Hiroshima, to the nameless disease, afflicting Samson Young, which resembles radiation poisoning. From its very beginning, the novel professes to be primarily concerned with the "death of love," but we soon learn, as Diedrick points out, ‘that nuclear terror is the main suspect." 64 In the novel, the narrator gives us Nicola’s philosophy:

She had this idea about the death of love … Which began with the planet and its coup de vieux. Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven’t been around for very long. And we’ve turned the earth’s hair white. Jesus, have you seen her lately? Hard to love when you’re bracing yourself for impact. 65

Towards the novel’s end Amis also includes a disturbing, and, perhaps once quite feasible, prophetic vision of the first nuclear strikes in a world wide conflict. The vision comes from the apparently omniscient character of Richard, "un-married, childless - he loved nobody," the cold and distanced harbinger of bad tidings: "at the moment of full eclipse, … as the Chancellor made his speech in Bonn, two very big and very dirty nuclear weapons would be detonated." 66 Through the character of Guy Clinch, Martin also preaches to his readers about other contemporary environmental concerns. In pondering his child’s need for fresh air, for example, Guy shoulders a degree of responsibility for polluting his atmosphere:

Hard to explain that one away, hard to justify it - to the young (Guy meant), to those who would come after. How would you begin? Well, we suspected that sacrifices might have to be made, later, for all the wonderful times we had with our spray cans and junk-food packaging. We knew there’d be a price. Admittedly, to you, the destruction of the o-zone layer looks a bit steep. But don’t forget how good it was for us: our tangy armpits, our piping hamburgers.67

As London Fields illustrates Birket’s first pre-occupation, it can also be used to illustrate his third. In his work on the Booker prize and contemporary British fiction, Richard Todd "underlines the point that Keith Talent is entirely a construction of the rhetorical tricks by which tabloid media reporting covers up for its own imaginative sterility." 68 To illustrate his point, Todd turns to a chapter in the novel, in which we see Samson ask Keith about a local football match. Keith’s ensuing description of the game is riddled with the unmistakable language of a sports commentator:

Reveling in space, the speed of Sylvester Drayon was always going to pose problems for the home side’s number two. With scant minutes remaining before the half time whistle, the black winger cut in on the left back and delivered a searching cross ... 69

This comparatively short quote from Keith’s highly stylized speech is surely indicative of the way in which modern culture has indeed become saturated with the influence of mass media.

    Amis’ earlier novel Success can be used to illustrate Birket’s second postmodern concern. As Western civilization moves from the industrial age to that of the microchip, information processing, and the extremes of capitalist ideology, Martin has explored the issues associated with this massive cultural shift. In his 1978 novel, Success, we see a clash of established aristocratic wealth and attitudes, against the considerable force of the new rich, riding the capitalist wave, personified by Gregory Riding and Terence Service respectively.

    The "success" to which the title of the novel refers, seems to be the dubious success of Terry, as he finds himself the unlikely recipient of a run of good luck. Throughout the book, Terry often refers to his job, a city job in which he first finds himself bemused and unsure:

I don’t really know what I do here. Sometimes I want to say, ‘What do I do here - just in case people ask?’ I don’t know what I do here, but then no one really does. 70

As the narrative progresses, however, this job materializes into a highly lucrative profession. The exact type of profession remains a mystery, Amis only hinting at the entrepreneurial explorations of what were later to be known as "Yuppies":

I sell things - so much is obvious. I think I buy things too. It’s all done by telephone; we talk about "items." I am required to say things and to listen to things. Some of these things often strike me as possibly evasive or misleading or not quite 100 per cent true. But I shall say whatever I have to say to sell whatever it is I sell. 71

While Terry’s seemingly complicated telephone dealings ultimately empower him with substantial wealth, Gregory’s family money disappears, and his apparently lucrative and promising job at an art gallery also comes to an end, revealing itself to have been no more than a poorly paid, prospectless position at a quiet, 'hopeful" gallery. To complete the reversal of fortune, Gregory is finally revealed to be an impotent, emotionally disturbed neurotic, happy to "help mother," and to walk in the woods "drenched, dripping with dreams and death." 72

Lucky Terry ultimately finds himself victor over the bourgeois attitudes of the Ridings, who had always made him feel at the least subservient, at the worst worthless. While Mr. Riding’s eventual death represents the crumbling death of the aristocracy,

Greg’s father has gone broke, ... broke scares him. Broke broke his heart. His heart attacked him again. And they think its going to win this time,"

Terry’s ‘success’ is representative of that achieved by the newly empowered lower echelons of society, working to destabilize class and cultural assumptions. 73 After a lifetime of perceiving himself as something owned, ‘Mr and Mrs Riding signed what was presumably a receipt’ when he was handed over to their custody from the authorities, it is capitalist ideology that finally brings about his self-identity and liberation. 74 These same ideologies, however, eventually consume his own humanity, turning him into an incarnation of the ‘capitalist monster’, subsumed in his own wealth and greed:

"Fuck you."

"Fuck me? Fuck me? You’d better watch what you say, tramp." I knelt, and added in a whisper, "I could do what I liked to you, you dumb hippie. Who would protect you? No one would notice or mind." ... I kicked him clumsily on the side of the head...75

Just as Amis satirizes the tired aristocracy and their views of the poor, as they tend to ‘squint through the undergrowth of others’ needs and desires’, he also questions the ethics and stability of the new class of super rich.76 Terry’s success, Amis’ Success, works to question the notions of high and low culture and class, in a time when boundaries between them were becoming highly obscured, thanks, in part, to new opportunities presented by the information processing revolution and the Thatcherite era.

While contemporary social issues can be found in the works of both authors, the difference lies in the fact that Kingsley refuses to be an overt social commentator, while Martin does not. A concern for his characters and the unfolding of plot will ultimately outweigh any great contemporary social worry in the work of Amis senior. Despite the critical attention given to Lucky Jim and others, one must suspect Kingsley’s political sincerity. As a young man at Oxford, Amis senior became an apparent promoter of communism, but, as Eric Jacobs implies, this political stance may have had its alteria motives:

The orthodoxy of the left included permissiveness about sex, and left-wing girls were apt to be earnest in their duties, including their duty to sexual freedom. ... It was through the Labour Club that Amis contrived to do what he had been wanting to do for several years--lose his virginity. 77

From communism and Lucky Jim Dixon, Kingsley has become an established and well known supporter of the Conservative Party. There are several reasons why this political turn-about may have occurred. Martin, for example, suspects that after having to support a family on an assistant lecturer’s wage in Wales before finding fame, notoriety, and incredible wealth, would make any man, his father included want to hang on to as much of that new found wealth as possible. Reading Memoirs, however, one suspects that the shift may have had something more to do with Kingsley’s sexually orientated infatuation with Margaret Thatcher:

She can trap me for split seconds into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220. The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexy beauty, and that sexuality is still, I think, an underrated factor in her appeal. 78

As William Van O’Connor observes, Amis has remarked that ‘the intellectual, in comparison with the steelworker or the banker has no political interests to defend except the very general one of not getting himself bossed around by a totalitarian government’.79

Kingsley’s attention does shift from exploring the interests of the lower classes to those of the upper classes, but this is only a reflection on changes in his life brought about by considerable wealth, not a marked change in political philosophy. Several aspects of the unattractive Professor Welch, for example, are evident in the make-up of Richard Vaisey, the hero of Amis’ 1992 novel, The Russian Girl. Vaisey is a lecturer of Russian at an unnamed London university, deeply entrenched in his archaic teaching philosophies, and out of touch with the values professed by the department’s new generation of teaching staff. Unlike Welch, but also in complete contrast to Jim Dixon, Vaisey, married to the wealthy and beautiful Cordelia, lives in a salubrious London suburb and is the friend of a hugely wealthy Czech entrepreneur, who seems intent on passing himself off as an English aristocrat. The exploration of these upper-class inventions are not representative of a conscious shift in sympathy from the financially insecure and socially oppressed to those of wealth and influence, but rather indicative of Kingsley’s own changing experiences; The Russian Girl is, after all a tale essentially of love and literary integrity. Just as the heroes in his novels tend to be of a similar age to him at the time of their creation, the social situations which arise in his fictions adapt and develop in line with Amis’ own evolution.

While any political revelations appearing in Kingsley’s work are purely incidental, or at the least secondary to the importance placed upon character development, we see in the work of Martin a deep, and genuine concern for topical issues. In an interview with David Aaronovitch, Martin has expressed his deep felt anxieties about the once very real threat of nuclear apocalypse, and the "certain amount of hatred and resentment" he feels that Mrs. Thatcher and her extremist ideologies have "enlivened in the writers of the country." 80 In the same interview, Aaronovitch has suggested that Martin Amis has indeed been a chronicler of the Thatcher years, but questions the writers direction now that this particular era has come to an end. In response, Amis replied:

In a sense we lived our childhoods under a desk, as in a nuclear drill, hoping that this desk lid was going to save you from the end of the world. Now I know this completely formed me, this great shadow that was hanging over the world, an omnipresent death that might suddenly engulf us all in an afternoon. 81

Now this shadow has passed we may well see a brighter, more hopeful fiction from Amis, but as his political views change, in line with human progression as opposed to his own life experiences, there is never a question of his sincerity.

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