Books
A warrior of words. The simple fact of his being the son of a famous writer lifted Martin Amis to the upper slopes of celebrity. His own haughty talent kept him there. But how good is he? By Robert Winder
Published 23 April 2001
The War Against Cliche
Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 506pp, £20
ISBN 0224050591
It is rather rare, and very nice, to be able to say of a new book that the author is absolutely right. What could be finer, or less glamorous? Martin Amis has declared war on the cliche in all its myriad shapes and forms (see: three in one sentence). And in framing this zesty collection of reviews and essays (many written for the New Statesman, no less) as a campaign against the ready-made - "not just cliches of the pen, but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart" - he applauds the opposite virtues: "freshness, energy and reverberation of voice". These are decent friends for any writer, and it is good to see someone sticking up for them.
Those cliches, though. In a reviewing career spanning 30 years, Amis has been quick to flinch: he is like a Jane Austen patriarch, quaking with nerves. Thus Brideshead Revisited is "a golden treasury of neoclassical cliches"; in Fay Weldon, "cliche spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart"; Cyril Connolly commits "many a reflexive cliche ('moody silence', 'a grip of iron')"; and in Michael Crichton, stale usages roam like dinosaurs: "Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, wandering free. You listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'." Occasionally, Amis looks beyond literature: even prejudices, he suggests, are cliches - "second-hand hatreds". This is all good sport, though with a bullying edge: sometimes you feel he ought to pick on someone his own size. It might even be neat to pass the cliche-meter over Amis's own prose; we could probably find a few if we looked hard enough. But not many. He is a purist.
None the less, Amis manages to attract, in equal and exasperating quantities, both hero-worship and derision. The simple fact of his being the son of a famous writer lifted him to the jagged upper slopes of celebrity: his own haughty talent has kept him there. His novels, meanwhile, have been at once lionised and disparaged - sometimes by the same people. His taboo-baiting wit and stylish disdain inspire both chuckles and indignation; his fondness for the modern world's mean streets, with their heavy-breathing crowds of yobby lowlifes, sex workers, TV junkies and media sleazeballs, strikes some as adventurous and authentic, others as an Oxbridge pose. Unlike his hero Saul Bellow, who tends to place professors at the centre of his work, Amis prefers garrulous no-hopers. But then he can't help satirising them. We all have a ball slumming it for a while, but . . . what then?
Yet more than almost any of his contemporaries, Amis writes things that you want to remember and repeat: he is original. However, the rough consensus does seem to be that, although he is a brilliant writer (no small thing), Amis's novels ship more water than they should. And this is troubling - because if brilliance is not enough, then what the heck is? Do novels really require stodgier, less flashy virtues? On this important point, alas, the jury is still brooding. Tolstoy was by no means a wag, but Nabokov was.
An aspersion often flung against Amis is that he retains, in his novels, the lofty and judgemental voice of the critic - a voice, as John Updike once said, built to sound wonderfully right about everything. It is true that Amis isn't really a dramatist: he doesn't do all the voices. He does just the one, and it is remarkable: waspish, throwaway, trenchant, perceptive, funny. It is the tone, more or less, of the superior book critic - and Amis, as this roomy portfolio shows, is certainly one of those.
He displays a set of interests ranging from straight-down-the-line English fiction (Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, V S Pritchett) to classics (Dickens, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Wodehouse) to chess, football, gender skirmishes, sex'n'violence and Americana in all its forms. He is fully engaged. And he doesn't just hit nails on the head (whoops): he does a little tap-dance on them just to make sure. If anything, his syntactical reflexes lead to disdain more easily than to approval. Reviewing Galapagos, he writes: "This is far and away Kurt Vonnegut's best novel since Slaughterhouse 5." Which sounds generous until he adds: "However, that's not saying very much." He can be full-on hostile, reminding us that chief among the pleasures of any book review is the frisson we get from the spectacle of unnerving rudeness. Desmond Morris's The Soccer Tribe, he suggests, is "an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false" - a wonderful example of an insult delivered in the blurb-grammar of a compliment.
Amis can be cheeky about the greats: Don Quixote suffers from "unreadability . . . and this reviewer should know, because he has just read it"; Joyce is "a teacher's pet". And for comic effect, he takes rubbish seriously. Of a book on Hillary Clinton, for example, he says: "It looks like a book and feels like a book, but in important respects it isn't a book. It's a pre-election pamphlet or a stump-speech." With alarming consistency, he delivers what he commends - freshness, heat, zeal. And he can even be a forthright admirer. For instance, he writes: "Bellow's first name is a typo: that 'a' should be an 'o'. " And when he rereads Lolita, it is with "gasps of continually renewed surprise".
Amis is anything but proud of all this. Indeed, he nurses a vexed contempt for book reviewers. A good part of his novel The Information satirised the way they (we?) snuffle around the work of their (our?) superiors, and he is at it again here, seizing almost any opportunity to bare his teeth at "blurb-transcribing sots". In the foreword, he takes a swipe at "the buckled figure of the book reviewer"; and one review - of Thomas Harris's disastrous Hannibal - is really a critique of the supine critics who applauded the novel. (He can't have read all of the reviews: alert readers of these pages will surely remember the unforgettable thumbs-down it received from a critic obliged by modesty to remain nameless.)
At first, it seems odd that someone who has written 500-odd pages of reviews should be so unforgiving, and it would be easy to trick this up into some meaningful internal conflict - Amis the proud novelist renouncing the easy victories of mere commentary. However, it emerges that what he is against is not reviewing as such, but bad reviewing. This chimes with the title and premise: Amis loves to act the cynic, but he is tough on people who don't care about books. This souvenir volume urges everyone to be as vigilant and inventive as he is.
It is a worthwhile aim, that's for sure. But excuse me . . . I'm getting dizzy. Writing a book review of a collection of book reviews that take book reviewing as a theme: we are steaming in a tight circle here. The war against cliche is all very well, and deserves to be won (fat hope), but it can hardly afford to become a buoyant end in itself. Amis has more style than anyone, and enough ammo to stalk larger game - or do I mean that he has bigger fish to fry? Many of the grandest things in life and literature - falling in (and out of) love, children, despair, death - are cliches. Avoiding them leads to novelty but not, on its own, to novels. Besides, reviews as good as these are unusual: they are, as the saying goes, only one a penny. And reviewing, however rude, is in the end affable: it implies the existence of an ongoing civic conversation about books, an existence that sometimes seems shaky.
Why undermine all this? Amis should just take a graceful bow, and prepare to duck all the flak that would surely follow.
Robert Winder's reviews appear monthly in the NS
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