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Martin Amis: An Obituary

By Cosmo Adair.

Martin Amis (1949 – 2023) was an English novelist

I once went to a van Gogh show at the Tate with a girl. I had an adamantine crush on her and I’d tried every possible mode of flirtation. But she wasn’t interested; in fact, she couldn’t have been further from being interested. But we went to the Tate. This is an odd place to start a piece on Martin Amis, I know. But please – bear with me … 

By the time we were in the third room of the exhibition, and the sombre Prisoner’s Round (after Gustav Doré) was whitewashed by industrial lighting, I began to stammer out a few words. “Th-the impasto, you know — so marvellously done, and after Doré as well … Really, incredible. It reminds me, you know, of something Di–Dickens once wrote. ‘A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned …’ Oh fuck. Sorry. Forgotten it.” I couldn’t work out whether she was bored or whether she had seen through my act. Possibly both. “God, Cosmo,” she said. “You really like van Gogh, don’t you?” And she rolled her eyes. Her lack of interest was palpable. I shut up. After the exhibition, I feigned a commitment in East London so I could go to a different tube station. I had to end this torture quickly. There was only one thing in my head. “FUCKING MARTIN AMIS.”

I read The Rachel Papers when I was a sixteen year-old who had recently started reading ‘proper’ books. I was in the Holiday Inn Express, a few miles from London Gatwick, and stayed up until four in the morning reading in the hotel bathroom. This was the shit. The prose was electric. But not only was this a manual for writing; it was (I thought, naively) a manual for life. The above idea was taken from the novel — although the novel’s hero, Charles Highway, delivered his lines at the Tate’s William Blake show much better than I did. Like Charles, I had visited the exhibition the day before, had written notes and devised a sequence of intelligent witticisms which I could spring on the girl, as if spontaneously. Life can sometimes resemble fiction — but my own attempt couldn’t have been further from the book. 

Charles Highway (‘It’s such a rangy, well-travelled, big cocked name and, to look at, I am none of these. I wear glasses for a start, have done since I was nine’) was like me … except, of course, the regular sex and his superlative retention of poetry. And at that time, those were the only things I wanted in life — regular sex and a superlative retention of poetry. In fact, back then, both of those things were interchangeable — and if The Rachel Papers had taught me anything, it was that one quite easily follows the other. 

So, I would walk around my bedroom in recitation (‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness banes, no – FUCK – pains my senses.’), thinking I was Charles Highway or even Martin Amis, and would survey my future. I supposed that, like Charles and Martin, 1) I would be some Casanova of the literati, and 2) that I was a genius. I wanted to be Martin Amis (hair-cut, dress-sense, prose style, etc). Most blokes I knew looked up to, I don’t know — Harry Kane, Alex Turner, Richard Branson? But I looked up to Martin Amis and that — if I wasn’t already arrogant enough — made me even more convinced of the two aforementioned suppositions. I even copied Charles Highway’s technique of arranging the books on his bedside table and floor before a visitor comes. (‘The coffee-table featured a couple of Shakespeare texts and a copy of Time Out — an intriguing dichotomy, perhaps, but I was afraid that, no, it wouldn’t quite do … After a quarter of an hour I decided on Jane Austen, the mellow Persuasion, face down, open towards the end, by my pillow.’) I was relentless in my desire to be Martin Amis — and I took Charles Highway to be a teenaged Martin Amis verbatim. 

I revisited The Rachel Papers a few years later, when I was a little more mature. I was now aware, of course, that The Rachel Papers is very much a send up of the kind of guy I was so desperately trying to be. There was one sentence which really stuck out on this rereading: ‘Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.’ It’s such an apt description of any young person’s romantic characterisation of themselves as a writer. 

Since then I’ve read more of Martin Amis’ novels. His unique cocktail of the lowest of low culture with the highest of literary styles is astounding. His entourages of characters are amongst some of the finest in post-war English fiction: the likes of Keith Talent, the murderer of London Fields, of whom Amis writes:

‘Keith didn’t look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer’s dog. (No disrespect to Keith’s dog Clive, who had signed on well before the fact, and whom Keith didn’t in the least resemble anyways.’)

And John Self, who is ‘addicted to the 20th century’:

‘My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of — junk, I’m just junk.’

And Richard Tull, the failing literary novelist, so envious of his friend’s success:

‘These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him, so he drank and smoked a lot.’

There are moments when you’re reading Amis novels which rank among the most sensual literary works in the English language. But his ingrained cynicism sometimes makes for a soiling experience: it’s that Dominoes feeling of utter delectation followed by grave sunkenness. He was the greatest prose stylist England produced in the last century. And his influence is everywhere — from Zadie Smith and Will Self, to some of the lamentable crap I churned out and called fiction in the first lockdown. His vocabulary, his eye for the zeitgeist, and his arrogance are unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. And it seems a terrible shame that such a deserving novelist never won so much as a Booker or a Nobel Prize before he died — only the Somerset Maugham award in 1973 (his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, had won this award some twenty years prior, making them the only father-son combo to ever win the award). 

I could say much more. But writing — now, more than ever — in the shadow of Amis, it seems a crime to even write a sentence. To read him is to become aware of the crass and error-ridden sentences which we all churn out on a daily basis. My only advice is that you read him. It seems apt to finish with this: 

‘Writers don’t realise how good they are because they are dead when the action begins: with the obituaries. And then the truth is revealed 50 years later by how many of your books are read. You feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: Time.’

And so long as we’re not a semi-literate society, which only thinks and writes in dictation to ChatGPT, then I hope there will still be people reading Martin Amis, encountering the same levels of joy, awe, and (at times) sunkenness as his novels have made me feel.

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