Martin Amis

Sir Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels Money and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Amis's work centres on the excesses of late capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature. He was portrayed by some literary critics as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness.” He was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis. Amis influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

His stylistic innovations – marked by ironic detachment, baroque sentence structures, and postmodern narrative experimentation – shaped a generation of British writers. His novels are often credited with revitalizing the comic novel in late 20th-century Britain.

Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in Florida in 2023. A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times after his death: "To come of reading age in the last three decades of the 20th century – from the oil embargo through the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the way to 9/11 – was to live, it now seems clear, in the Amis Era."

Early life and education Martin Louis Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford, England. His father, novelist Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He had an elder brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally – for whose birth Philip Larkin composed "Born Yesterday" – died in 2000 at the age of 46. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford. The following year the family moved to Swansea where he would spend his childhood years, his father having taken up a lectureship at Swansea University. The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim (1954) sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, where his father lectured for a year.

Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s, including an international school in Mallorca,

His parents marriage ended in divorce in 1965, precipitated by his father’s well-established relationship with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom he married later the same year. They had set up house in the Maida Vale area of London and were part of a “literary bohemia” which formed the backdrop to Amis’s largely unsupervised and dissolute adolescence. In 1968 the household relocated to the Lemmons, a Georgian villa in Barnet on the outskirts of London. His father said Amis was not a bookish child and "read nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen".

He did, however, form a positive relationship with his step-mother having become, at her behest, part of the household, moving away from the chaotic living arrangements in his mother’s house. Her friendship with the film director Alexander Mackendrick led to the young Amis being chosen in 1965 to play the part of John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica And in order to enhance his prospects of a university education, she provided him with reading recommendations (she introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often named as his earliest influence) and arranged a place for him at Sussex Tutors, a crammer boarding school in Brighton where he gained the required GCSE and A-level qualifications for sitting the University of Oxford entrance examination.

He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a congratulatory first in English, "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers".

After graduating from Oxford in 1971, Amis wrote reviews of science-fiction novels under the nom de plume "Henry Tilney" (a nod to Austen) in a column for The Observer. Instead he continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:

The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child. Instead, Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the war on terror. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be excessively stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The work sold relatively well but was not well received, particularly in the United States.

2010s and 2020s In 2010, after a period of writing, rewriting, editing, and revision dating back to 2003, "by far the longest writing-time of all [his] books", Its title is based on a quote from Alexander Herzen: "The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass."

The first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. At this reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Writers' Centre Norwich by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an ageing man, in a prelude to a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel autobiographically, but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form." The narrator is Keith's superego, or conscience, in 2009. Keith's sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally, described by Amis as one of the revolution's most spectacular victims.

Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow was met by searing criticism, accusations of sexism, and guessing the real-world identity of its characters. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews, and a widespread feeling that Amis's time for recognition had come, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize longlist. In 2010, Martin Amis was named GQ writer of the year.

In 2012 Amis published Lionel Asbo: State of England. The novel is centred on the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout and persistent convict; for the benefit of his US readers, Amis explained the origin of the latter's surname in an interview with NPR. It is set against the fictional borough of Diston Town, a grotesque version of modern-day Britain under the reign of celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic events in the lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and Lionel's fantastic lottery win of almost £140 million. Much to the interest of the press, Amis announced that the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody" (quotation marks included), had been created to honour the British celebrity Jordan, whom he had a few years earlier summed up as "two bags of silicone". In an interview with Newsnights Jeremy Paxman, Amis said the novel was "not a frowning examination of England" but a comedy based on a "fairytale world", adding that Lionel Asbo: State of England was not an attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English" and viewed the nation with affection. Reviews, once again, were mixed.

Amis's 2014 novel The Zone of Interest concerns the Holocaust, his second work of fiction to tackle the subject after Time's Arrow. In it, Amis endeavoured to imagine the social and domestic lives of the Nazi officers who ran the death camps, and the effect their indifference to human suffering had on their general psychology. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and a 2023 film, "loosely based" on the novel, premiered to acclaim at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix.

In December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first, a collection of journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016, was published in October 2017. The second project, a new untitled novel which Amis was working on, was an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens. The finished product, Inside Story – his first novel in six years – was published in September 2020.

Other work Amis released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water) and five volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché, The Second Plane and The Rub of Time).

Amis regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and contributed book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.

University of Manchester In February 2007, Amis was appointed as a professor of creative writing at the Manchester Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, where he started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school. The Manchester Evening News broke the story saying that according to his contract Amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers.

In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year. Of his time teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, Amis was quoted as saying, "teaching creative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire". He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and tolerant contingent".

Personal life In 1974, by his own account, he later described his new status as "like getting a telegram from the mortuary". where Fonseca's father had been born. Upon returning, he said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reported that he was disquieted by what he saw as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States. In 2012, Amis wrote in The New Republic that he was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill. He also had a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, United States. Amis was a life-long smoker.

Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for services to literature, and the knighthood was backdated to the day before his death.

Views

Writing On writing, Amis said in 2014: "I think of writing as more mysterious as I get older, not less mysterious. The whole process is very weird ... It is very spooky."

Interviewed by Sebastian Faulks on BBC television in 2011, he said that unless he sustained a brain injury, it was unlikely he would write a children's book: "The idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable ... I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write." The "brain injury" remark caused opprobrium among various children's authors, although the poet Roger McGough wagered that "if I gave him £100 to write a children's book I bet he'd do a good one".

Nuclear proliferation Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."

Geopolitics In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the more dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis of Evil, but that Iran was Britain's "natural enemy", suggesting that Britain should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence".

Electoral politics In June 2008, Amis endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president of the United States, stating: "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world." When briefly interviewed by the BBC during its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election, Amis displayed a change in tone, stating that he was "depressed and frightened" by the US election, rather than excited. Blaming a "deep irrationality of the American people" for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis said the Republican Party had swung so far to the right that former president Ronald Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the present party – and invited viewers to imagine a Conservative Party in the UK that had moved to the right so much that it disowned Margaret Thatcher. He said: "Tax cuts for the rich, there's not a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!" In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Amis said that the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union was a "self-inflicted wound" that had left him "depressed".

Islam and Islamism On the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine about community relations in Britain and the alleged threat from Muslims; he was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children ... It's a huge dereliction on their part."

The interview provoked immediate controversy, much of it played out in the pages of The Guardian newspaper. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for this particular quote, saying that this view is "ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug... but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world". In a highly critical Guardian article, entitled "The absurd world of Martin Amis", satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employed "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran" to incite hatred.

Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating: "We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being ... Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived... But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination ... Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Mohamed Atta."

On terrorism, Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder", and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."

His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet "Blitcon" (British literary neoconservative) from Ziauddin Sardar, who labelled Amis as such in the New Statesman. (The New Statesman article also assigned the "Blitcon" label to Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.)

Agnosticism In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". He added that "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated" and "so over our heads" that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.

In 2010, Amis said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe ... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us ... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."