Martin Amis Heavy Water (1998)
Never having paid much attention to literature, or at least what is generally held to be literature, I tend to discover authors more or less by accident, excepting those whose books have robots and spaceships on the cover. This is probably why Martin Amis has pretty much passed me by until now. I'm aware of his being the spawn of Kingsley, but then I only read New Maps of Hell relatively recently, and then because it discusses books which have robots and spaceships on the cover. I've heard of London Fields, although I'm not sure why, and have mostly encountered the name of Martin Amis in relation to Will Self, usually in dismissive terms suggesting that Self and Amis think they're all lush because they use long, fancy words but really they aren't lush because they're just stuck up and think they're clever and better than the rest of us. I think this means we're not supposed to read their works because only people who've spent at least five years working on the bins are allowed to write novels; which is bollocks because Will Self at least has patently produced some crackers.
Anyway, it seemed time I gave Martin Amis a shot and I found this one - short stories, which I always think is a good place to start.
Assuming there has, at some point, been fuss, then I can certainly see what it was - or possibly is - about. I assume Amis being so often paired off with Will Self is, aside from their both having gone to good schools, down to their respective fictions being, if not Swiftian, then something in that direction, and in this case so much so as to allow for The Janitor of Mars, which is science-fiction as much as anything and reads as though he's taking the piss out of Stephen Baxter. Despite frequent playdates within the same reviews, it would be difficult to mistake Amis for Self or vice versa. On the strength of the stories here, Amis is a lot more direct and it would probably be difficult to accuse him of self-indulgence with any conviction. Thematically, the two of them inhabit similar territory, but probably not to the point of it being worth discussing.
The last two in this collection of nine were a little underwhelming: What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a phonetic approximation of some regional dialect, and the story doesn't quite reward the effort of translation; and Straight Fiction inverts established gender preferences to comic effect - Hollywood stars exposed as secret heterosexuals etc. etc. - but doesn't quite live up to the promise of the gag. The rest, however, are fucking astonishing. Amis' writing grips the reader like hands physically emerging from the open pages to grasp you by the shoulders. He intrigues from the first sentence, presenting such peculiar combinations of people and the lives they've ended up living that you can't not want to find out where the fuck it's going to go, because there's nothing predictable, nothing promising specific conclusions, not even in the inversion narratives of the aforementioned Straight Fiction, or Career Move which swaps mumbling poetry circles for Hollywood glitz and bullshit without so much as a knowing smirk. Although the last two don't quite pay out in full, everything here does something fucking weird whilst communicating the same in terms so immediately accessible, even populist, as to be dizzying.
I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get here, but never mind.
Never having paid much attention to literature, or at least what is generally held to be literature, I tend to discover authors more or less by accident, excepting those whose books have robots and spaceships on the cover. This is probably why Martin Amis has pretty much passed me by until now. I'm aware of his being the spawn of Kingsley, but then I only read New Maps of Hell relatively recently, and then because it discusses books which have robots and spaceships on the cover. I've heard of London Fields, although I'm not sure why, and have mostly encountered the name of Martin Amis in relation to Will Self, usually in dismissive terms suggesting that Self and Amis think they're all lush because they use long, fancy words but really they aren't lush because they're just stuck up and think they're clever and better than the rest of us. I think this means we're not supposed to read their works because only people who've spent at least five years working on the bins are allowed to write novels; which is bollocks because Will Self at least has patently produced some crackers.
Anyway, it seemed time I gave Martin Amis a shot and I found this one - short stories, which I always think is a good place to start.
Assuming there has, at some point, been fuss, then I can certainly see what it was - or possibly is - about. I assume Amis being so often paired off with Will Self is, aside from their both having gone to good schools, down to their respective fictions being, if not Swiftian, then something in that direction, and in this case so much so as to allow for The Janitor of Mars, which is science-fiction as much as anything and reads as though he's taking the piss out of Stephen Baxter. Despite frequent playdates within the same reviews, it would be difficult to mistake Amis for Self or vice versa. On the strength of the stories here, Amis is a lot more direct and it would probably be difficult to accuse him of self-indulgence with any conviction. Thematically, the two of them inhabit similar territory, but probably not to the point of it being worth discussing.
The last two in this collection of nine were a little underwhelming: What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a phonetic approximation of some regional dialect, and the story doesn't quite reward the effort of translation; and Straight Fiction inverts established gender preferences to comic effect - Hollywood stars exposed as secret heterosexuals etc. etc. - but doesn't quite live up to the promise of the gag. The rest, however, are fucking astonishing. Amis' writing grips the reader like hands physically emerging from the open pages to grasp you by the shoulders. He intrigues from the first sentence, presenting such peculiar combinations of people and the lives they've ended up living that you can't not want to find out where the fuck it's going to go, because there's nothing predictable, nothing promising specific conclusions, not even in the inversion narratives of the aforementioned Straight Fiction, or Career Move which swaps mumbling poetry circles for Hollywood glitz and bullshit without so much as a knowing smirk. Although the last two don't quite pay out in full, everything here does something fucking weird whilst communicating the same in terms so immediately accessible, even populist, as to be dizzying.
I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get here, but never mind.
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