Should Martin Amis have won the Booker Prize?

You can tell how much this bothers Amis by the number of times he tells us it doesn’t bother him. In two lengthy footnotes in his memoir Experience, he dismisses the Booker for turning writers into ‘something you can bet on’ and for lacking genuine prestige. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. As the only Booker judge prepared to bat for Inside Story (sorry I couldn’t do better, Mart), I can attest to the capriciousness of the process. But given Amis is one of the most admired and imitated writers of his generation, his self-pity does irritate. ‘When my first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award I told myself… get used to it. And that never happened again.’ 

Yet just as romantic failure was the muse of his godfather Philip Larkin, so for Amis it is literary failure. From the start, he has been cursed by his own good fortune. The son of Kingsley Amis was always likely to get his first novel published, as Martin admits. But why didn’t Money, his 1984 satire of the film industry, even get shortlisted for the Booker? (Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot did that year.) Perhaps the judges didn’t take to it; but there are other reasons. 

Satire is an inevitably divisive genre and his type of humour, highbrow but low-down, has tended to appeal to a certain, often male, reader of pretty much the same background as the author. In current parlance, he doesn’t just punch up but sideways and down as well - he has no problem mocking people less well-read than him. In Money, the whole joke was having a scumbag narrator who doesn’t read, speaking to us in a hyper-articulate prose style, for nearly 400 pages. Amis would also never win a racial sensitivity award, let’s say. (Until Lionel Asbo, Black characters in his novels are peripheral figures of fear or fun.) And then there are Amis’s women: either sex-pots or spoiled wives, with hardly any interior life. You can see why his work can rub people up the wrong way. 

His other issue was writing about a very London world inhabited by the same kind of people who sit on judging panels. Unfair, perhaps, but British prizes tend to attract news from elsewhere - Rushdie’s India, for example, or an England set safely in the past, like Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. It’s harder to convince a jury you’re doing something original if it feels like they’re being told what they already know. 

Which is why, for me, his best novel is his literary satire The Information. Richard Tull is a failed novelist and failing husband who copes with turning forty by trying to destroy his old friend Gwyn Barry, an effortlessly successful terrible writer. In one memorable scene, Richard and Gwyn play tennis. We observe the ‘hateful remains of Richard’s antique technique, its middle-class severity: the shovelled forehand, the backhand with his heavily lingering slice’ as he tries to scupper Gwyn, a ‘manoeuvrable little hacker taking the pace off everything, always obvious, never contrary, with no instinct to second-guess or wrong-foot.’ If we needed reminding of Amis’s linguistic virtuosity - and it is always worth being reminded - note the two unusual but perfect adjectives, ‘hateful’ and ‘manoeuvrable’. Though I rarely re-read a whole Amis novel, I often drop in on scenes like this to show me what can be done with descriptive writing. 

It would be far too simplistic to say that Gwyn is a cipher of Julian Barnes, though he is described with piquant sarcasm as an ‘uxorious’ man - the same word Amis applies to Barnes in Experience, when detailing their falling out over Amis leaving Barnes’s wife Pat Kavanagh, who had been his agent. But, in any case, Amis might claim Barnes threw the first punch. 

In his 1991 novel Talking it Over, Barnes presents a love triangle in which the charismatic Oliver betrays his meek best friend Stuart over a woman. Oliver sounds a lot like Amis. Introduced as a chain smoker, he remarks of Stuart’s wedding: ‘The ring glittered on its damson pouffe like some intrauterine device.’ He describes impotence as ‘like trying to ease an oyster into a parking meter,’ an Amis bar line, which he would reclaim four years later in The Information. Friendly teasing? Maybe, though it is startling to read the usually mild-mannered Barnes declare in his account of their snooker match, also in Esquire, that ‘beneath our relaxed admiration for one another’s work lies the… rage to kill.’ (Happily, the pair have now made up.) 

Is this anything more than what Updike called ‘higher gossip’? No, and yes. For those interested in male friendship and rivalry, in what success means and what we sacrifice to achieve it, Amis will always have a hold. Especially since his failing characters are not allowed the consolation of being morally superior to those above them in the pecking order. If anything, success makes Gwyn more generous and a better husband, while failure gnaws away at the spiritual core of Richard until there is almost nothing left. 

In a perceptive, half-admiring piece on the writer, Jason Cowley writes that an ‘essential loneliness underscores Martin Amis’s quest for absolute originality… What am I worth? How good am I? And one wonders what it has cost him, this relentless striving to be the best?’ 

Whatever such striving has cost the writer, it has also cost his readers. There was an alternative path for Amis, one that moves beyond mere brilliance. In Experience, the sheer weight of traumatic reality forces him into an attitude of rare humility towards other people. Rather than over-mastering them with his elaborate vocabulary, trapping them with grubby lyricism, he observes and reports with simple acuity. 

Amis is reflecting on the devastating revelation that his cousin Lucy Partington, who went missing in 1973, had in fact been abducted and murdered by the serial killer Fred West. His glance at the gruesome life of West is stripped of the yobbish humour so grating in the novels. Instead, he zeros in on a small, telling detail: ‘He would stroll around the house eating an onion like you’d eat an apple.’ 

Amis has since wondered whether he should even have written about his cousin’s murder. But I’m glad he managed to, as that creepily mysterious onion has stayed with me over the years. It also offers a hint of the writer Amis might have been. If only he had given similar weight to the fictional crimes he describes; abandoned his quickfire certainties; tamed his humorous spirit; if only he had quelled that earthquake imagination…