PROSPECT: Politics Essays Argument

[Niall Martin]

At 11:12 1-08-97 +0100, you wrote:
>As quoted in Prospect magazine August/September 1997 in an
>article-come-interview with English author Martin Amis.
>
>"The task of the novelist is to interpert the present and the near
>future, to ask where we are heading, how we are changing?" Amis says
>through a haze of cigarette smoke. "I knew from an early life that i
>wanted to write about everyday life; that i wouldn't write, say,
>westerns or historical works. I would have been surprised if i'd set
>anything in the past, unless as i did in Time's Arrow, i wanted to
>explain something about the present. Looking at Thomas Pynchon's new
>novel, i ask my self can i read anymore pastiche, can i get through
>another novel that has as if it where, f's for s's and spells always
>a-l-w-a-e-i-s."
>
>Discuss
>
>JIM.W
>

Such a deliberately obtuse remark from a writer whose usually reasonably
astute suggests some form of personal animus or hidden agenda. Perhaps, the
target of this lame attempt at provocation is not so much Pynchon as Peter
Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, `historical' fictioneers who might be said to
have challenged Amis's claim to be the "London novelist". The London
chapters in M&D certainly owe more to the Sincroyd version of the cracked
capital than the one on which Amis built his literary reputation.

Or, alternatively, Martin has just decided it's time to assume his old man's
mantle of reactionary curmudgeon?

Niall Martin