34 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer
A lit crit lion
bares his claws
‘When he puts his nose to a text, close up, there are few readers like him’: Martin Amis at home in London, 2003. Rexto see it (the description of Rambo as
“that lethal trapezium of organ meat”,
perhaps with apologies to Clive James,
is an incidental gem). Sending a literary
writer to report on the porn industry is
by now an old joke – but Amis (reprising
his horror-day riff from London Fields
to describe “stepping out of the porno
home – on to the porno patio with its
porno pool”, etc, and ending on a note of
muted gallantry) does it well. And The
Crippled Murderers of Cali, Colomb ia
is a compressed and properly reported
piece from South American gangland
where moral seriousness ( just) eclipses
linguistic virtuosity.
Like poles holding up the washing
line on which these gaudy items are
pegged are three sections – one at the
beginning, one in the middle and one
at the end – all called Twin Peaks. The
Twin Peaks are Bellow and Nabokov:
each “Twin Peaks” gives you an essay
on each. All good writers are reading
writers and Amis is a re reading writer.
On rereading, he still doesn’t think
Ada is up to much, for the same reason
Finnegans Wake isn’t up to much. He
says so twice. He’s bothered by all the
underage girls. He says so twice, too.
But, to his credit, he’s still re reading.
In the two years between the fi rst essay
on Nabokov (2009) and the second
(2011), he’s gone back and noticed that
Nabokov mentions the Holocaust three
times rather than, as originally stated,
twice, fi nding a paragraph in a 1943
short story. A postscript to an essay in
which he dismisses the “multitudinous
facetiousness of Melville” in passing
sees him admit that “after an interval of
half a century” he has reread Moby-Dick
with “gratitude and awe” and that hisAhead of his unsuccessful assault on
the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas ,
as described with wan good humour in
one of the essays here, Martin Amis had
dinner with Anthony Holden and James
McManus (“two of the top writer-
players in pokerdom”). McManus,
seeing him off after dinner, said: “Don’t
be intimidated, man! Remember –
you’re Martin fucking Amis!”
Being Martin fucking Amis: as a few
of these pieces make clear, it’s a burden
and an exaltation. Reading the very
entertaining poker piece, for instance,
you note that the author quotes the
compliment, but also that he spends
the rest of the article (which describes
the swagger of his ambition and its
abrupt defl ation ) undermining it. He’s
Martin fucking Amis; also, fucking
Martin Amis.
The Rub of Time is arranged
thematically: sections of political
commentary; sections of essays on
other writers ; reported pieces for
magazines; odds and ends of memoir;
an unexpectedly well-stocked and very
enjoyable section on sport ; and a few
squibs that maybe needn’t have made
the cut.
The reportage is some of the
best stuff here. For someone who
often doesn’t much seem to care
for journalists, Amis is a very good
journalist indeed. If anyone has
written a better, more penetrating,
more open-minded interview with
John Travolta, for example, I’d like
Insight vies with self-regard in an anthology
of Martin Amis articles, writes Sam Leith
ESSAYS
Here is something between the
querulous monologue of a Leavis in
the lecture hall and a dressing-down
in a provincial cop shop. “Are you
taking notes?” he seems to be saying,
or rather: “You will be taking notes.”
There’s a rhetorical voltage (as he notes
on page 54) to that maximalism, that
unwaveringly indicative mood – but you
weary of it too, a bit. The same certainty,
not always a virtue, is present in his
political pronouncements. He obviously
knows an awful lot – a surprising
lot – about post-revolutionary Iran,
for instance. But you wonder: can he
really know as much as it sounds like
he knows?
Perhaps he does. He’s Martin fucking
Amis. Fucking Martin Amis.To order a copy of The Rub of Time for
£17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 6846dismissal was “gravely inadequate”.
That’s conscientious.
When he puts his nose to a text,
close up, there are few readers like
him. An essay about very late Updike
charts, with unanswerably persuasive
quotation, the way Updike was “in the
process of losing his ear”. A semi-
offh and piece about screen adaptations
of Jane Austen is, in its attention to
the nuances of her language and its
fl attening in the screenplay, very far
from offh and. And he is superbly
good at capturing the nub of what’s so
interesting in DeLillo , deftly sectioning
the phases of JG Ballard’s career, tracing
the weirdly wonky process of Philip
Roth fi nding his voice or summing up
a mood in a glancing phrase: the “dank
crew of self-righteous anarchists” in
The Secret Agent, for example.
But there’s also, sometimes, a bullying
tone to his literary pieces. He seldomTh e Rub of Time
Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape £20 , pp356
Books
sneaks up on a thing or allows himself
to be tentative. He writes on page 54
that “evaluative criticism is rhetorical
criticism: it adds nothing to knowledge;
it simply adds to the history of taste”.
He doesn’t half go in for it himself,
though: “[It] is at the highest table that
Vladimir Nabokov coolly takes his
place”; “[Bellow’s] was and is a pre-
eminence that rests [...] on incontestable
legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to
waste your breath”; “In quality, Larkin’s
four volumes of verse are logarithmic,
like the Richter scale: they get stronger
and stronger by a factor of 10”; “There
can be no argument about the depth, the
complexity, and indeed the beauty of
[Iris] Murdoch’s mind”; “George Eliot
gave us one readable book”; “Milton
consists of Paradise Lost”. Professorial
fl ourishes – “we may refl ect”; “read it
with attention”; “we will return to...” –
enter the prose.In the master’s
voice... what
Isabel did next
There has always been a virtuoso cast
to John Banville ’s novels; he sometimes
seems at pains to prove himself capable
of any brilliant technical thing. From
the early channelling of unlikely voices- Copernicus, Kepler – through the
recasting of The Tempest in Ghosts , to
the Booker-winning homage to Beckett
and the looping cadences of memory
in The Sea , he is a writer who sets and
aces his own examinations.
He once observed of his ambition
that “when I speak of style, I mean
the style Henry James spoke of when
he wrote that, in literature, we move
through a blessed world, in which we
know nothing except through style ”.
In Mrs Osmond, Banville’s worthy
sequel to James’s The Portrait of a
Lady , he tries the master’s own style
on for size, imagines what it might
be like to see the world through
Jamesian eyes. Banville is not alone
among contemporary writers in this
ventriloquising desire – Colm Tóibín
and Alan Hollinghurst have both been
memorably seduced by those famous
unspooling sentences – but he makes
James something all his own.
On one level this book resolves some
of the questions that have plagued
anyone who followed the story of Mrs
Osmond – Isabel Archer as was – in
James’s novel. The Portrait of a Lady
ended with Isabel, the young heiress
seduced into an abusive marriage in
Italy with the hateful Gilbert Osmond,
out only for her money, escaping to
England for her cousin’s funeral , but
then apparently returning to Rome.
The ambiguity of this conclusion lay
in the question of whether Isabel
was going back to her previous
“entrapment” or had found the resolve
to end her marriage (perhaps to take
up the ardent off er of her stalker-ish
admirer Caspar Goodwood ).
Banville answers those questions,
though not until he has put Isabel
through a series of soul-searching
encounters and challenges. She delays
her return in London, and then travels
to Rome via Paris and Geneva and
Florence in the company of Staines, her
maid, which off ers plenty of scope forthe kind of interiority, the minute shifts
in temper and emotion in relation to
quietly changing circumstance, that
James made his signature. Banville
has lots of sly amusement with these
encounters, as Isabel visits her bank
in London to withdraw an “amazing”
sum of money in a leather satchel, or
seeks the advice of the spinster Miss
Janeway, a suff ragette and staunch
vegetarian who feeds her overcooked
broccoli and terse homily.
Banville is fully in stylistic character
in these exchanges, but tips the reader
just the hint of a knowing wink. Isabel
turns the questions that plague her
over in her head, like an undergraduate
with a Henry James essay to deliver.
“Had she been happy? At fi rst, perhaps,
but that contented fi rst had soon given
way to a lamentable second, which
state itself lately ended with such
violent abruptness that her nerves still
vibrated from the blow like the tines of
a tuning fork...”
There is an enjoyable archness
about this; Isabel sometimes seems
half-aware of herself as a character
in a novel, but Banville is also a great
storyteller. His book is not only an
impressive recreation of James’s
atmospheres and pacing, but also
full of minor cliffh angers and page-
turning suspenses that keep you
guessing at that perennial dilemma: “Is
independence a more important virtue
to Isabel Archer than duty? Discuss.”
Tim AdamsTo order Mrs Osmond for £12.74 go
to guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 6846FICTION
Mrs Osmond
John Banville
Viking £12.99, pp384John Banville is fully in stylistic character,
but tips readers the hint of a knowing wink.