Einstein's Monsters by Martin Amis

Martin Amis has written (1987) a polemical essay and 5 potent short stories dealing with nuclear weapons in a manner in which could only have been conceived by him. Some of these short stories paved the way for his future novels, e.g., Time's Arrow. In the Author's Note, he states "Einstein's Monsters, by the way, refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's Monsters, not fully human, not for now." This is a book about nuclear anxiety.

In the Introduction, entitled "Thinkability", he starts out in a marvelous fashion "I was born on August 25, 1949: four days later, the Russians successfully tested their first atom bomb, and deterrence was in place. So I had those four carefree days, which is more than my juniors ever had. I didn't really make the most of them. I spent half the time under a bubble. Even as things stood, I was born in a state of acute shock. My mother says I looked like Orson Wells in a black rage. By the fourth day I had recovered, but the world had taken a turn for the worse. It was a nuclear world" (p. 1). Amis explores the twisted logic behind nuclear arsenals. "What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons ? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons ? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons ? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons ? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons" (pp. 2-3).

Martin and his famous father Kingsley have long disagreed on nuclear weapons. "I argue with my father about nuclear weapons. In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers. They emplaced or maintained the status quo...My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given" (pp. 13-14). However, one notion père and fils shared was to "épater les bien-pensants" (p. 15) (shock the right-minded), I did say polemical. The notion of thinkability implies that earlier generations actually felt that winning a nuclear war was thinkable. "Let no one think that it is thinkable (p. 16). Wat to know what nuclear winter would be like ? "Mars gives us a plausible vision of a postnuclear world. It is vulcanized, oxidize, sterilized. It is the planet of war" (p. 21). Each of the 5 stories below imagines a different "unthinkable" post-nuclear future.

"Bujak and the Strong Force" is highly allegorical. The time is 1985, the narrator is a Jew named Samson (a foreshadowing of London Fields) whose ancestors were killed in concentration camps, who has abandoned writing, yet "This is the only story I'll ever tell, and this story is true" (p 38). Samson's Japanese wife Michiko, lost relatibes in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Bujak is a neighbor and patriarch, a widower who lives with his mother Roza, hus daughter Leokadia, and his granddaughter Boguslawa. The neighborhood referred to the the muscular Bujak in nuclear terms, as a "deterrent" (p. 41). Nevertheless, he returns from a trip to find his family murdered (his own personal holocaust), two vagrants asleep in his home, but he refrains from killing them. Deciding not to kill them, he fails to fulfill the reader's expectation. From Bujak's standpoint "All peculiarly modern ills, all fresh distortions and distempers, Bujak attributed to one thing: Einsteinian knowledge, knowledge of the strong force" (p. 46). Bujak's explanation is also that of Amis, it is the "hidden denominator" (p. 48). Samson recalls Bujak as "Einsteinian to the end, Bujak was an Ocillationist claiming that the Big Bang will forever alternate with the Big Crunch, that the universe will expand only until unanimous gravity called it back to start again. At that moment, with the cosmos turning on its hinges, light would begin to travel backward, received by the stars and pouring from our human eyes. If, and I can't believe it, time would also be reversed..." (pp. 58-59). A few details follow that are consequent to time reversal, laying the foundation for Time's Arrow.

"Insight at Flame Lake" is alternately narrated by12-year old schizophrenic Dan, whose father, a nuclear physicist ("one of the Fathers of the nuclear age," p. 68) committed suicide, and his uncomprehending uncle Ned, who invited Dan to spend the Summer at the lake with his wife Fran and newborn daughter Hattie. Dan stops his meds and becomes delusional, and is convinced that the baby can talk ("I don't think that Fran or Ned suspects for a moment that the baby can talk" (p. 73) and that "the baby has schizophrenia" (p. 70). In the end, Dan takes his own life, Ned fails to recognise the hopeless world of "distortions and malformations" (p.68) that Dan inherited, leaving him few options besides suicide. One can make the case that since Dan's "urine contains bufotenine, a chemical originally isolated from toad venom" (p. 68) and passed on genetically from his father, an inherited form of nuclear-aggravated schizophrenia led to Dan's death.

"The Time Disease" is the first postapocalyptic story in the book. The nuclear exchanges that have led to nuclear winter have led to the eponymous epidemic in which the aging process is reversed, restoring energy and vitality. People are dying of youth. "Twenty-twenty, and the time disease is epidemic...We all think about time, catching time, coming down with time" (p. 80). In this inverted world, feeling of any kind causes pain. It is a world of numbness, endlessly boring TV shows and books, reminds me of people riding the commuter trains home from work, expressionless. The short story focuses on the TV-producer narrator's (Lou Goldfader) ex-wife, Happy Farraday, a leading Daydrama star, who is taken ill with the disease. Naturally, she seduces him, yet at the story's close "I show no signs of coming down with time" (p. 97).

In "The Little Puppy That Could" Amis, employing a very saccharine tone, plays on the myth of Andromeda, who was to be bound and sacrificed to a sea monster, only to be saved by Perseus. The young girl in the story, Briana, changes her name to Andromeda. In this postapocalyptic world, where villagers possess "no deep memory" (p. 118), the village is terrorized by a homovorous dog, who feasts on humans once a week, acting as a "Natural Selector" (p. 126). This monstrous hell-hound oozes "saliva...capable of dissolving human bones" (p. 110). Andromeda takes in a puppy that "seems to have wandered off the pages of a children's story, recalling "The Little Engine That Could" (Diedrick). The puppy is the "antimatter or Antichrist" (p. 129) to the dog. A weekly lottery to choose a sacrificial human results in Andromeda "going to the dog." Ultimately, the puppy (Perseus) outmaneuvers the dog, yet both vanish in the flames, as matter and antimatter. R. Falconer (N. Tredell, The Fiction of Martin Amis), makes the case that the puppy acts spontaneously while the dog does so by habit. But spontaneity is associated with genetic memory. The puppy wins its victory when its memory is aroused. A post-apocalyptic time reversal is implicit - "Many human beings...were mildly dismayed to find themselves traveling backward down their evolutionary flarepaths" (p. 109), playing to the puppy's advantage.

In this story of a post-holocaustal future where the sexual status quo has been deformed, men have become interchangeable - Tim and Tam and Tom (p. 118) - subject to the role of monstrous matriarchs, who demand to be pleasured. Now that fertility is a scarce commodity, the world is held hostage by the womb, not the penis. A. Mars-Jones (N. Tredell, Op. cit.), points out that this inversion is a testimonial to the author's revulsion at a world of women with male privileges. At the end of the story, Andromeda, in the form of transformed puppy, has found herself a real man "his arms were strong and warlike as he turned and led her into the cool night. They stood together on the hilltop and gazed down on their new world" (p. 134). A. Mars-Jones adds "The Bomb has made men effeminate and women repellently assertive. Now a proper polarization of the sexes will make possible some sort of renewal."

"The Immortals" is the last story, where "Apocalypse happened in the year A.D. 2045" (p. 139). The narrator, one of the last human survivors of a nuclear holocaust, is indestructible, a permanent observer of the cycle of human history who witnesses its final achievements of autodestruction. In the words of D. Profumo (N. Tredell, Op. cit.), "Cynical, sophisticated, and blase, he seems to enjoy the god's-eye view of the Wandering Jew, Orlando, or a Struldbrugg. But it transpires that this is all a hallucination suffered by a "second-rate New Zealand schoolmaster who never did anything or went anywhere and is now painfully and noisily dying of solar radiation along with everybody else" (p. 148). This is a world that embodies the death of all children, past and future.

Death of children is a common theme in Einstein's Monsters - the murder of Bujak's granddaughter, the suicide of Dan, the near-deaths of Hattie and Andromeda. Falconer observes that Amis plants a surprise twist in each story: Bujak does not kill the murderers, Dan does not kill Harriet, the 'time disease' is youth, the puppy becomes a human being, the immortal is not so.

Experience by Martin Amis

Don't approach this book (2000) of memoirs thinking you are going to get a free ride. Oh no. Amis writes this like his novels, you must come to the table with your thinking cap. "Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel" (p. 224). I would not recommend reading the memoirs without having read his novels up to The Information. It is hardly an autobiography. It is generally agreed that the book was written in response to his father's death in 1995, that would be Kingsley Amis, famous British author. A large fraction of the content is about his father. "Why should I tell the story of my life ? I do it because my father is dead now, and I always knew I would have to commemorate him. He was a writer and I am a writer; it feels like a duty to describe our case - a literary curiosity which is also just another instance of a father and a son" (pp. 6-7). But his musings of his father are from his personal reference points. Diedrick (Understanding Martin Amis) makes the observation that Martin and his father viewed themselves as playing a curatorial role as guardians of the English language. Martin observes his father's intimate fondness of the Concise Oxford Dictionary - "When it [COD] was nearby and he was praising it..., he would sometimes pat and even stroke the squat black book, as if it were one of his cats" (p. 285n). The book opens with the interrogative "-Dad." (p. 3), establishing the patriarchal focus and preoccupation of the memoir that follows. When the trajectory is completed, at his father's death, Martin states "It is 1995 and he has been there since 1949" (p. 345), Martin's birth date (not his father's), a telling way to delimit.

The balance of the book deals with his childhood and admission to Oxford, with inevitable discussion about the gruesome and well publicised murder of his cousin Lucy Partington. Last but not least, he also has a daughter Delilah, who was born following a brief affair with Lamorna Seale in 1974 and with whom he had no contact until she was 19. This twin loss (Lucy and Delilah) is what he refers to as his "missing" (p. 3). It has been said that his personal life is denser than his novels. Some reviewers called Experience exhibitionist. It seems there are times when the reader is given priority over his friends, in revealing personal details, like Julian Barnes. Comments are often made that Martin Amis is the Mick Jagger of literature.

One of the more interesting discussions has to do with his Madison Ave. dental reconstruction, which the media believed was sponsored by his publisher as part of his lucrative book deal for The Information. He dispels this in a footnote (p. 210n). It resurfaces later (p.346) "the Fourth Estate is still agog about my dental work."

Both Martin and his father were married twice (so far). Kingsley was married to Hilary Ann Bardwell (1948-1965) and Elizabeth Jane Howard (1965-1983). Kingsley moved back in with Hilary after Jane left him in 1985 (p. 296). Amis was married to Antonia Phillips (1984-1993) and Isabel Fonseca (1996-present), the book dedicatee. At one point, Martin goes to his father for advice, at the time he is leaving his 1st wife - "only to him I could talk about what I was doing to my children. Because he had done it to me" (p. 99). Astute readers will note how little lip service is given to M.A.'s first wife, Antonia. There is a poignant scene at the Cape Cod home in Horseleech Pond (location of the Heavy Water story "What Happened to Me on My Holiday") when Amis leaves his 1st wife and 2 boys "All this is going to go. All this is going to disappear. This will fail. I will fail. I said to myself, Look at it: Look at what you've done...There is your wife, crying in the drive. Beyond her are your boys on the patch of grass..." (p. 269). It was Kingsley who said "It's only half a life without a woman" (p. 28). While on the topic of wisdom related to love, it was Martin who said "love has two opposites. One is hate. One is death...love re-alerts you to death" (p. 187).

The book is divided into two parts (1) Unawakened and (2) The Main Events. "Unawakened" is in the sense of unaroused (p. 349), innocent. The "Main Events" are what constitute the mad rush of Experience. The basic structure of the book is alternating letters from "Mart" and random memoirs, no chronology followed. Most of the letters are addressed "Dear Dad and Jane." This changes in 1971 "So Dad has dropped out, rather hurtfully in retrospect" (p.250). The letters are extraordinarily open and read much like the character Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers. The letters are all innocence. Martin was upset by the discovery that his father was having an affair with the woman that would become his 2nd wife. When Martin and brother Philip pay an unexpected visit to his father "He was horrified to see us. We had busted him in flagrante delicto....It would have been an impossible heresy for me to admit that any woman was more beautiful than my mother. But I could tell at once that Jane, while also being beautiful, was certainly more experienced. And experience accounts for the well-attested attraction, to the Young Man, of the Older Woman" (pp.144-145).

Much ado (no pun intended) is made on the part of the author with his persona Osric (from Shakespeare's Hamlet - Hamlet calls Osric the "water-fly," a comic who flits aimlessly across the water's surface). Osric is the courtier sent by Claudius to invite Hamlet to participate in the duel with Laertes. Osric, as well as Polonius, engages with Hamlet in the elaborate, witty discourse, fully consistent with Baldassare Castiglone's 1528 work, The Courtier. This work outlines several courtly rules, specifically advising royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. It's Martin in a nutshell. He also identifies (p. 153) with Kinch (nickname meaning "knife" attributed to Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Ulysses) and Pnin in Nabokov's book of the same name.

Amis' mother, "Hilly" had a sister Miggy Partington. The Partington clan is very close to Martin Amis as a youth. While the Amis clan was "city" the Partington clan was "country." When they mixed, "the lion lay down with the lamb" (p. 135). Amis, in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1998 (Feb 5, http://www.charlierose.com/), revealed he was a cousin of Lucy Partington. In the interview, Amis reveals that this event played a major role in his novels embodied in themes of vanished girls. The novelist Maureen Freely "noted the punctual arrival...of a stream of lost or wandering daughters and putative or fugitive fathers" (p. 280). She was the daughter of Miggy Partington, sister of Martin's mother (Hilary Bardwell). Amis recounts "On the night of 27 December 1973, Lucy Partington was abducted by one of the most prolific murderers in British history, Frederick West. We know what happened to her after death. She was decapitated and dismembered, and her remains were crammed into a shaft between two leaking sewer pipes, along with a knife, a rope, a section of masking-tape and two hairgrips. But the terrible imponderable was what happened to her when she was still alive" (pp. 62-63). Interestingly, the family did not know who the killer was until 5 March 1994. Lucy's sister Marion kept a diary, with entry "Saturday, March 5 10:15 phone call from the police saying they would like to come over to talk to us [Marian and her mother]. They have some 'news' for us' (p. 66). This revelation about the serial killer catapulted Amis from innocence to experience rapidly in what would be a perfect storm of horrifying events, culminating in the death of his father in November, 1995. He comments "1994 and 1995 had not gone out of their way to persuade me that I was immune to disaster" (p. 287).

Hari (The Independent) in reviewing Amis' subsequent memoir Korba the Dread, makes the case that Amis believes Fred West's evil stems from literary failings. "The death of Lucy Partington represents a fantastic collision...It is what happens when darkness meets light..." (p. 172). Amis quotes two paragraphs by Fred West and LP. The 1st is illiterate and garbled, the 2nd is intelligent and about literature. The tragedy of LP's killing happens when the man who wrote the first paragraph comes up against the woman who wrote the second.

His daughter Delilah also figures into his novels, but indirectly, in that her mother "hanged herself" (p. 280) when she was 2 years old. This clearly resonates in Success and Night Train. The recollection of Amis' meeting with Delilah as a 19 year old is typical of his novels where information is not always forthcoming. We learn "One letter caused me to sit down suddenly when I was halfway through the first sentence....I took the letter from my jacket and passed it across the table [to Isabel]" (p. 276). We assume the letter is from Delilah. It's not. Two pages later, "[Patrick Seale] was also the author of the letter in my jacket pocket" (p. 278), her step-father. Reading Experience is like doing a crossword puzzle. Amis has much to say on suicide - "suicide was a heavier undertaking than murder. The murderer kills just one person. The suicide kills everybody" (p. 281). As a writer, "because of what I do all day,...suicides...are antithetical" (p. 281), meaning he is a creator.

Through the course of the book he makes some insightful comments on writing. "Because that's what novels are (among other things): not almanacs of your waking life but messages from your unconscious history. They come from the back of your mind, not from its forefront" (p. 218n). Amis recounts his father's famous drinking binges and the belief in enhanced insight into the writing and reading of great literature while inebriated, quoting an English novelist ""In vino veritas - I don't know," Anthony Powell once said to me, "but, in scribendo veritas - a certainty"" (p. 337), which translates as "I tell the truth by writing." This phrase shows up (p. 327) in a cell phone text message from k8 in Yellow Dog (2000). The poet Philip Larkin (friend of Kingsley) figures heavily in the book as a strong influence on Martin. I love this brief anecdote "in his room before dinner he gave me, or maybe just showed me (was it a present for his niece ? I already had it, anyway), a copy of the Rolling Stones' live LP, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out. We agreed that it had clear strengths - particularly 'Stray Cat Blues' " (p. 239).

He gives little away of his own love life. For example he casually mentions his first love "I was lying in the arms of a Sephardic Jewess in Golders Green. When the invasion began, on 5 June, she went off, hectically, to give blood for Israel. And at that moment I knew that this was love: first love..." (p. 264). We never learn her name.

Another "rictus" sighting (p. 165).

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

This is Martin Amis' first novel (1973), and rather autobiographical at that. One can clearly see the seeds of genius in the incredible vocabulary and word command as well as the sense of humor in this dramatic monologue. There is an extraordinary candor about bodily functions. Modern readers will also pick up on a clearly articulated misogyny. Amis has always attributed this to his characters, rather than himself. His 4th book, Other People, from the woman's vantage point was a reaction to such comments from critics. Ironically, this freshman effort won England's Somerset Maugham award, the only novel of Amis to have such a distinction. The American writer Jacob Epstein plagiarized much of the book in Wild Oats, an account of which was published in Thomas Mallon's Stolen Words. The novel is dedicated to his girlfriend Gully (Alexandra Wells), but according to his memoirs (Experience, p. 264) Rachel was modelled after his first love, whose name he never reveals.

The Rachel Papers is the story of events in Charles Highway's last few months as a teenager. Indeed, the 24 chapter headings span the last 5 hours of his 19th year. Quite simply, he wants to enter two things - Oxford and his latest girlfriend, Rachel. Both are within his reach, but will require work. Both efforts are so calculating that they extinguish the passion that originally motivated them. Rachel's surname Noyes (No, then Yes) betrays the fact that it will take him two tries to consummate his relationship with her. Of course, in the end, he loses interest in her rapidly. As he comments to his father Gordon (a dead ringer for his own father, Kingsley Amis) "why does it take so long coming and so little time going ?" (p. 225). His life is lived vicariously through his beloved literature. William Blake is used as seduction material, he even mentally recites scrambled lines from T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" and "Ash-Wednesday" (pp. 165-166) to delay orgasm.

Diedrick points out three important literary allusions (Understanding Martin Amis). John Keats' poem The Eve of St. Agnes is a sensuous rumination on the relationship between romantic-desire and self-deception. As soon as Madeline and Porphyro consummate their passion, wind and sleet assail the windowpanes of Madeline's chamber, portending future troubles. Right after Rachel reveals to Charles that she has lied to him about her father, Charles reports that "the wind outside, which has been strong all evening, started to make cornily portentous noises, cooed from behind the cellar door, fidgeted with the window-frames" (p. 212).

The chapter subtitled "The Dean of St. Patrick's," is a reference to Jonathan Swift. The unnamed poem that shapes this chapter is the once-infamous "Cassinus and Peter," a satirical portrait of a Cambridge undergraduate driven to hysteria by his discovery that his beloved "Celia, Celia, Celia shits!" When Charles notices a stray pair of panties, he says "after I had been kissing and sniffing at them for a while I turned them inside out. I saw: (i) three commas of pencil-thick pubic hair, and (ii) a stripe of suede-brown shit, as big as my finger." (p, 185). This is a turning point in the book as Charles has a graphic reminder of Rachel's bodily nature. Diedrick elegantly nails it "Despite his longing for authenticity, his Keatsian desire to embrace pure sensation, few of Charles' experiences are direct ones. In one of his many moments of self-criticism, he indicts himself for this," "I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self" (p. 184).

There is a reference to Kingsley Amis' first book, Lucky Jim. His favorite maxim is "nice things are nicer than nasty ones." Charles has clearly read Lucky Jim, because he replaces it with "surely, nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets" (p. 91). Diedrick points out that we are seeing Amis' own literary manifesto - one part exorcism of his father's precedent, one part declaration that his own province is the comedy of the grotesque.

One criticism of the book is that the serious emotional scenes are inadequately realized or curtailed. Glibness and calculation so dominate his accounting of his relation with Rachel, he fails to imbue it with emotions that are true. When Rachel first rejects him, he says "I felt completely hollow, as if I were a child" (p. 88). This reaction is not what the reader expects.

Another "rictus" sighting (p. 164).

Other People: A Mystery Story by Martin Amis

This book was published in 1981 and serves as a bridge of sorts between Amis' "apprentice trilogy" and his "London trilogy." It represents a quantum leap in narrative structure. Other People is a novel of existential mystery - the first half of its title alludes to Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit, with its famous line "hell is---other people!" Stephen Jones (http://www.martinamisweb.com/) cites comments by Cropper that describe the structure as a double helix or Möbius strip - an insightful analogy in that the book is cyclical in time, yet the prologue and epilogue are inverted. The geometry analog speaks to the precision and rigidity with which Amis has calculated his narrative structure. We need to examine the plot in order to understand what is meant by this.

A few insights first from Diedrick's Understanding Martin Amis. Amis adopts the techniques of the "Martian School of Poetry," so called because Craig Raines published a poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home." Amis published the poem "point of View" in the New Statesman (12/14/79), a year before the appearance of the book. The poem's first stanza shockingly inverts perceptual and moral norms by imaging how deviants see other people. "Policeman look suspicious to normal/murderers. To the mature paedophile/A child's incurious glance is a leer/Of intimate salacity; in more/Or less the same way, live people remain/As good as dead to active necrophiles." The poem appears as prose in the book (pp. 186-187). According to Diedrick, the poem enacts in miniature the denaturalizing of a conventional understanding that characterizes the novel as whole. Further, this alien viewpoint has roots in Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wiliam Wordsworth. According to Coleridge, Wordsworth sought to "give the charm of novelty to things of every day." There's more. Symbolically, Mary is linked to the protagonist of Coleridge's supernatural poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." After the Mariner sins by killing the albatross, he enters the realm of "Life-in-Death," where he suffers the consequences of his past transgressions. He is delivered from this state of purgatory near the end of the poem, only to be consigned to an eternal repetition of his experiences by telling his story to listeners brought under his spell.

The book begins with a young woman, Mary, who later adopts the surname Lamb, reviving from death in a hospital. It opens "Her first feeling, as she smelled the air, was one of intense and helpless gratitude. I'm all right, she thought with a gasp. Time - it's starting again. She tried to blink away all the water in her eyes, but there was too much to deal with and she shut them tight. Someone leaned over her and said with a voice so close that it might have come from within her own head, 'Are you all right now?' " (p. 13).

She is a 100% total amnesiac. She has no memory of her past and no comprehension of bodily functions. Everything she knows is on the most literal level. Amis does a brilliant job of rendering the world from her amnesiac perspective and writing in an "awkward" and lean style to showcase that literal aspect of discovering life. He writes as if seeing the world through her eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch, and mind. Stating the obvious is never obvious. The familiar seems hauntingly strange. Like Raine's Martian, Mary sees the world from an alien perspective. Daily, she must reinvent herself. Early on in the book, she discovers her mouth while taking a drink - "She poked the small bottle into the hole in her head - her mouth, that wet and curious private part, a thing that seemed to have no business there, too vital and creaturely against the numb contours of her face...Was there anywhere else like that in your body, a place where you could feel from the inside and outside at the same time ?" (p. 32). Mary breaks free from the hospital and falls in with a motley collection of tramps, squatters, and fringe elements. She quickly learns about life's daily ablutions, men's desire, and fear.

Ultimately, a Mr. Prince enters her life, in the guise of a policeman. He is the narrator of the novel. He leads her into the dark labyrinth of her past. He reveals to her a resemblance to a teenager who was murdered (deservedly), Amy Hyde. He arranges for her to visit Amy's childhood home, where she begins to recognize benchmarks from her past. Ultimately she realizes that she is Amy Hide. Prince becomes more than a mentor, he becomes her lover. But in typical Amis fashion, we soon learn that he is also her murderer. In the last few pages of the book, she accepts that she must die at his hands, only to awaken in her home. "Her first feeling, as she smelled the air, was one of intense and helpless gratitude. I'm all right, she thought with a gasp. Time - it's starting again. She tried to blink away all the water in her eyes, but there was too much to deal with and she soon shut them tight. 'Are you all right now, Amy' her mother asked." (p. 222). This mimics the beginning of the book.

Amis has said that "The simple idea of the book - as I point out several times in the text - is, why should we expect death to be any less complicated than life ?...The novel is the girl's death, and her death is sort of a witty parody of her life...At the very end of the novel she starts her life again, the idea being that life and death will alternate until she gets it right" (Jones).

The Prologue and Epilogue are key to understanding the book and were misinterpreted or not understood by reviewers. The Prologue is written in the past tense, narrated by Prince. "This is a confession, but a brief one. I didn't want to have to do it to her. I would have infinitely preferred some other solution. Still, there we are. It makes sense, really, given the rules of life on earth; and she asked for it. I just wish there was another way, something more self-contained, economical, and shapely. But there isn't. That's life, as I say, and my most sacred duty is to make it lifelike. Oh, hell. Let's get it over with." The Epilogue is written i the present tense. "This is a promise. I won't do anything to her if she doesn't want me to. I won't do anything to her unless she asks for it. And that's not very likely, is it, at her age ? That's not very realistic? Still, at least she's legal - just about, I'm pretty sure...I feel as though I've doe these things before, and I am glazedly compelled to do them again. But perhaps all things like this feel like that. I'm - I'm tired. I'm not in control any more, not this time. Oh hell. Let's get it over with" (p. 224).

The repetition of these paragraphs suggest an unending cycle. Thus, the last section is not a flashback, but a continuation of the narrative sequence. Also, "This is a promise" parallels "This is a confession" suggesting that parallelism is capable of slight changes on each circuit. The Prologue, written in the past tense suggests the end of events, while the Epilogue in the present tense suggests the beginning. Putting them in the "wrong" order suggests the narrative is cyclical. Jones opines that the circularity of the narrative suggest that all 3 parties (narrator, reader, and character) have a distinct lack of control. It would appear that Amy is fated to repeat her life, and Prince to narrate it indefinitely, with only a slim chance of Amy breaking the cycle and "getting it right this time."

Success by Martin Amis

This is the 3rd book in what is loosely referred to as Amis' Apprentice Trilogy (The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success). It is the story of two feuding foster brothers, Terry Service and Gregory Riding - their relationship foreshadows the feuding Oxford roommates in The Information and also introduces the concept of "narrative doubling" that plays a key role in Amis' future work. The book consists of 12 chapters (January - December) in which each chapter is partitioned into two halves consisting of 1st person narratives from Terry and Greg. Greg is an obnoxious high brow, works at an art gallery, and hobnobs with all forms of socialites and miscreants. His Bayswater flat mate is Terry, a "yob" (working class), who is the adopted son - we learn early on that his father Ronald murdered his mother and 9-year old sister (Rosie) and he was adopted by the wealthy Riding family. The brothers ultimately trade places, one is abject, the other ascendant. At the center of this story is a dark secret which ties in Ursula, Greg's birth sister, with the two protagonists. I won't spoil it.

Reviewers have pointed out some sloppiness in word choice, e.g., "his polychromatic teeth...now taper darkly off into the metallic hecatombs of his jaws" (p. 184), but hecatomb does not mean mausoleum, but rather animal sacrifice. Well, is it Greg or Martin that made the mistake ? Easy to blame the character. Powell complains (in N. Tredell's The Fiction of Martin Amis) that use of the local slang word 'tonto' for 'mad' is a "random instance of overstrained contemporaneity," restricting the range of the novel.

Critics have called Amis misogynist based on the clearly misogynist behaviour of the narrators, a criticism which stuck with him and may have precluded a Booker Award for London Fields. However, literary cognoscenti defend Amis as not representative of his characters.

Another "rictus" sighting (p. 221).

Time's Arrow: or the Nature of the Offense by Martin Amis

Every time I start a Martin Amis novel I feel I'm in for a literary adventure. This is no exception and many consider it his greatest book, having been nominated for a Booker Prize when it was published in 1991 (after London Fields). It is about the Holocaust and the life of a Nazi war criminal (doctor) at Auschwitz, who tried to break away from his horrific background. There is one catch, the book is written in reverse, a veritable "tomb to womb" trajectory. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse 5 is the precursor of Time's Arrow, based on an interview with Amis. Vonnegut's hero watches a World War II movie forwards and then backwards. Backwards, one glimpses Utopia. I have taken good advantage of some very insightful scholars' (James Wood and Brian Finney) comments to be found on http://www.martinamisweb.com/. Dealing with such a charged subject as the Holocaust, Amis has included an afterword, betraying some nervousness about the subject. Here we learn that the alternative title The Nature of the Offense is attributable to Primo Levi (Auschwitz survivor) and that a key source was the book The Nazi Doctors. It has been said that this book took great literary courage.

The book begins with the "birth" from death into life, of Tod Friendly (auto accident). Note "Tod" means death in German. We travel backwards through time from the country to New York City to the Vatican to Auschwitz. The narrator as homunculus living in the protagonist's brain (his soul, a reverse doppelgänger) seems to have little cognizance that time is running backwards. Yet the narrator is aware that he is inexorably traveling toward the revelation of a dreadful secret. "He is traveling towards his secret. Parasite or passenger, I am traveling there with him. It will be bad" (p. 63). At first, getting used to the reversal of time is a bit exhausting, but very amusing. Going to the bathroom involves sitting on a dirty toilet and sucking up excrement - "Corporeal life is not without its minor indignities. We still take it in the ass every morning, along with everything else" (p. 43). The narrator finds it so odd that Tod's female relations usually start with 15 minutes of shouting, infidelity, and recrimination, followed immediately by sex, the frequency tapers off to just kissing and hand holding and ultimately no interaction. "...here's the weird thing about these relationships with women: you get everything on the first date...An hour or two here, max, is all it takes. Oh mercy. You can go up to a woman on a street corner and start yelling at her and ten minutes later she's back at your place doing God knows what" (p. 51).

Food is vomited daily, not ingested. Garbage men spread rubbish across the streets, which is picked up by citizens. Kennedy's assassination is triumphantly transformed into a hero's welcome on his return to life in the streets of Dallas (p.81). When time is reversed, doctors wound, they do not heal. Tod is a physician, as a doctor patients are treated and they leave the office in pain. "You want to know what I do ? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don't mess about. We'll soon have that off. He's got a hole in his head. So what do we do ? We stick a nail in it" (p. 76). The narrator gradually is demoralised by the hospital setting. "For we, we, we!- we demolish the human body...Here we are in our fatigues, delivering our damage" (pp. 74, 75). This is an intriguing foreshadowing of the inexorable arrival at Auschwitz, where evil is turned upside down.

When Tod moves to New York, he assumes a "new" name, John Young. At one point, the doctor takes a ship across the Atlantic, the narrator notes that "we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we are successfully covering our tracks" (p. 99). Of course, that is precisely what the doctor is doing. An important point becomes clear in the novel - that the narrator retains his memory from the start (Tod's rebirth), but the doctor can't remember anything as none of it has happened yet, his memory is from an earlier time, the narrator's memory never overlaps. We learn this on the ship heading for Europe "John's feeling tone is buoyant: he seems wonderfully relieved" (p. 99). But for the narrator "I didn't get away with it. I came too close...I can remember it all" (p. 100).

Arriving in Lisbon, he changes his name again to Hamilton de Souza. They move on to the Vatican, another name change. His German name is Odilo Unverdorben (p. 111) meaning "uncorrupt, innocent." Before too long they arrive at the Kat-Zet or KZ (short for Konzentrationslager (p. 118). Odilo works with "Uncle Pepi," clearly Josef Mengele. The narrator believes that Unverdorben performs miraculous resuscitations for his Jewish patients at Auschwitz - "Entirely intelligibly, though, to prevent needless suffering, the dental work was usually completed while the patients were not yet alive" (p. 121).

Amis' Utopian version of a dystopian event is at the core of the book. According to Wood, "the test of Amis' vision...it's capacity to go beyond the mere novelty of inversion - is what he does with Auschwitz. Shockingly, Auschwitz in a backwards world becomes a good place. History flows sweetly from 1945 to 1939, and the Jews are healed in Auschwitz...When Amis' benign Nazi looks at his prospering Jews, and asks, 'Our preternatural purpose ? To dream a race," he means the Jews, not the Aryans. Such ironies are almost unbearable, and yet this is not tasteless - how can it be more tasteless than Auschwitz itself ?...By reversing the narrative, Amis not only moves us with a vision of what might have been in some benign world, but hints also at the very moral delusion of the Nazis. Did not these evil men believe precisely that they were doing good, dreaming a race, turning back history and time ? The Nazis first attempted to turn the Holocaust into a Utopian narrative, not Amis...In moments like this, Amis' novel seems to me to transcend its own virtuosity."

According to Finney "Amis relies on three different perspectives for this section to work. There is Odilo's perverted misinterpretation of the Hippocratic oath. There is the naive narrator's celebration of Odilo's seeming miracles of healing. And there is the modern reader's sinking knowledge of what really went on a Nazi death camps."

The American post-hardcore band Thursday wrote a song called "Times Arrow", based on the novel. It appears on the "Common Existence" album. The Canadian indie rock band The Weakerthans wrote a song called "Time's Arrow", based on the novel. It appears on their 2003 album Reconstruction Site. Both songs can be found on Youtube at the time of this post. Readers may recall Brad Pitt's Academy Award-winning The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), but note that in the movie, only BB gets younger while the world still ages.

The Information by Martin Amis

This is the 3rd book (1995) in Amis' so-called "London Trilogy." Martin Amis is considered Britain's number one, top drawer, literary heavyweight. He received a £500,000 advance (and free dental work) for this "literary novel," an unheard of sum, creating great friction with his peers. These sums are more accepted for mass-market novelists like John Grisham (Amis pokes fun at Grisham's The Client or The Firm with this book's title). Moreover, in the art imitates life department, he dismissed his long-time British agent, the wife of his close friend Julian Barnes, for an American agent. This book has all the trappings of a book written by such an esteemed author, but it disappoints the casual reader. Much of the book seems an exercise in the author's cleverness, and it is indeed clever, and funny, and sexy. Jamie Maw calls the book "inciteful instead of insightful...and Martin Amis becomes Martin Aimless." This read is purely for Amis fanatics. A deep dive exploration of this book is endlessly rewarding. I'm providing as many clues as possible, since there appears to be little in the way of web accessible scholarly analysis.

The story of this literary rivalry revolves around two 40-year-old (p. 4) novelists (one day separates their birth dates, same as Tull's sons) who shared a room at Oxford. One, Gwyn Barry, has become wildly successful writing bland and optimistic books that present no challenge to the reader and glorify mediocrity, the other, Richard Tull, has too much information to write well, and is incapable of writing a successful work himself (not unlike Sam in London Fields). Richard has a job writing reviews for Tantalus Press (in Greek mythology, Tantalus suffers an eternity of unfulfilled desire). He brings upon himself endless miserable luck. Richard, the protagonist, spends 374 pages trying to undermine Gwyn's success, of course, Gwyn deserves it. Tull can't fathom the success Gwyn has lucked into writing "trex." "Gwyn's trex was loved by the world; his trex was universal" (p. 126). Ah, what is trex ? In the UK, Trex is a vegetable oil brand, like Crisco. The internet is awash with disgruntled readers who can't figure out just what Amis means by "trex." In fact, Amis does define it implicitly late in the text - "slapping some slice of trex into a frying pan" (p. 335). In the end, Richard's scheming will exact a heavy toll on himself and his family.

Martin Amis appears through the novel as an omniscient narrator. He tells a story of male mid-life angst over innocence lost, dreams deferred, and fears unallayed (see Diedrick's Understanding Martin Amis). Consider the novel's opening line "Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams" (p. 3). Much of the book is highly autobiographical. He pokes fun at himself changing agents when he notes "Gwyn Barry had switched agents, controversially taking his custom from Harley, Dexter, Fielding to Gal Aplanalp" (p. 40). When Richard summarized the books he has written "Aforethought was first person, Dreams Don't Mean Anything strictly localized third; both nameless, the I and the he were author surrogates...." (p. 125) Amis is talking about The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and subsequent novels.

Gwyn (like Guinea, equivalent to 21 shillings or £1.05) Barry is married to aristocratic Lady Demeter de Rougement (p. 79), "related to the Queen" (p. 188), daughter of the Earl of Rieveaulx (p. 101). She has a shady history of cocaine binges and promiscuity. She is taking driving lessons from a fellow aptly named "Crash," who is tied in with a group of thugs (Darko, 13, Belladonna) led by Steve Cousins, known as "Scozzy." Tull inadvertently falls in with these guys and makes a plan to hire them to "fuck Gwyn up" (p. 25). Amusingly, Cousins is perhaps Tull's only book fan (p. 110), seen on a train reading Dreams Don't Mean Anything. Tull quizzes him about first novel Aforethought, "What big thing happens exactly halfway through Aforethought?" Scozzy responds "It goes into the - into italics" (p. 113). Alert readers will recognize this as a reference to Amis' book Money.

Richard hatches a big plan to "seduce Gwyn's wife" (p. 122), but later that plan falls flat, likely due to Richard's chronic impotence, 'small' detail. An effort to hook up Belladonna with Gwyn fails when Richard realizes in a very postmodern moment in the book, Belladonna says "[Gwyn] loves me," Richard, "You mean you think he loves you," "It's the way he like looks at me," "When does he look at you?' "When he's on TV" (p. 133). Ah, Tull realizes that he's been had. Later, Richard's plan gets waylaid ("He had called off Steve Cousins" (p. 210)) when Tull joins Gwyn on a U.S. book tour in response to Gwyn's U.S. award - the "Profundity Requital," with stops in New York, Wash DC, Miami Beach, Chicago, Denver, LA, Boston, and Provincetown. There is great hilarity in this Part Three of the book, especially when they do a book signing in adjacent rooms in Boston. Gwyn has SRO crowds seeking autographs for his 3rd book Amelior Regained, and Richard has a few people show (He took the lectern to a Krakatoa of applause: from next door" (p. 277)), one with a copy of the book entitled Untitled, which he returns to Richard, because he thought it was so bad. Tull has been asked by Gal Aplanalp, publisher for both Richard and Gwyn, to write a Profile for Gwyn. Gwyn's wife figures centrally in his Profile, as she keeps saying that Gwyn "can't write for toffee" (p. 327). Richard fails to pick up on her malapropism, but Gwyn does later, when he realizes she "means peanuts, love. Not toffee" (p. 351). Demi equates "can't write for peanuts" with "deserves to be paid properly." it's easy to miss this comic device.

When interviewed by the 3 judges (Lucy Cabretti, Elsa Oughton, and Stanwyck Mills) (p. 96) for the Profundity Requital, he takes every opportunity to badmouth Gwyn in the areas of racism, sexism, and criminality. Each judge finds Gwyn's book bland, yet through Tull's effort to discredit Gwyn, the judges latch onto his beliefs and renew interest in voting the award to him. Tull is thrilled that the judges seem disinterested, more fuel for his Profile. Ironically, Richard plans to use the proceeds of his Profile to fund the violence against Gwyn (p. 316). Gwyn is totally narcissistic. The narrator uses the word "Condescension" when referring to an episode in which Gwyn pays a visit to Pamela, his young assistant - "the willing, the indulgent dilution of one's own superlative being, for the delight and enrichment of simpler lives" (p. 296). Ultimately, all the women in the book fall under Gwyn's spell.

Amis infuses the book with astronomical lingo, particularly with respect to the life cycle of stars, like our sun. For example, "A yellow dwarf is a terrible thing to be called, probably because - more pertinently - it is a terrible thing to be. A terrible thing. Poor, poor yellow dwarf. I would like her to know that yellow dwarfs are good. I owe my life to a yellow dwarf, as do we all - the one up there: the sun" (p. 89). Later, "Richard sometimes tried to anthropomorphize the sun and planets - or to solar-systematize his immediate circle", and he assigns his wife, Gina, as Mother Earth, Gwyn as Jupiter, etc. "He knew who he was. He was Pluto; and Charon was his art" (p. 169). Pluto is the God of Death and Charon is the ferryman who conveys the dead to Hades. This obsession with planets and spheres can be attributed to Borges' short story "The Aleph."

It is well known that Borges had a large influence on Amis. It is no surprise then that Borges' short story "The Aleph" appears in the book with great significance. "Richard...was thinking about a story: "The Aleph," by Jorge Luis Borges. About a magical device, the aleph, that knew everything: like the Knowledge. about a terrible poet, who wins a big prize, a big requital, for his terrible poem" (p. 165). The reference to Gwyn Barry is obvious. Daneri is a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail. Likewise Richard is famed at his own pub, The Warlock, for his skill at a video game that tests cultural knowledge. "Who was said to be the last man to have read everything ? Coleridge...Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day" (p. 178). But as Diedrick points out, Richard is like Tantalus, striving for a cultural mastery that always exceeds his grasp.

While we're on the topic of Borges, another short story plays a key role in the book, The Circular Ruins. It is important to understand the story. An experienced wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard tries to create another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and wiser. After time, though, the wizard can no longer find sleep, and he deems his first attempt an inevitable failure. After many sleepless nights, the wizard dreams of a heart; vaguely at first, but more and more clearly each night. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. His creation is sent to a distant temple of the god Fire, and becomes famous as, because it is not real, it can walk through fire unharmed. The wizard hears of this, but at length he awakes to find the ruins ablaze. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizard notices that his skin does not burn. "With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another." Now, Tull receives a review manuscript from a poet Keith Horridge (note that forename recalls Keith Talent from London Fields), containing 3 poems, "Ever", "Disappointment", and "Woman." But there is a subtle catch, in a cover letter Horridge says that "Woman...is a departure for me, and possibly breakthrough. Here for the first time I cast off all influences and speak in my own voice" (p. 318). Tull recognizes that the lines are lifted from "something impregnably famous like..."The Circular Ruins"...He looked at Horridge's shining margins and saw all the thumb prints and palm sweat. And it came to him" (p. 319). It was plagiarism. Of course, this sets in motion Tull's grand idea to scheme against Gwyn Barry, as discussed below. But there's a bigger picture, just as the magician discovers in The Circular Ruins that he was "a mere appearance, dreamt by another" so all literature is derived from earlier works (the so-called Canon). Amis is making a statement about the thin line that separates intertextuality (i.e. borrowing themes from previous literature) from outright plagiarism. In contradistinction, The Information values its own intertextual relation to Borges (and many others).

Let's continue to explore the plagiarism motif. Tull has been working an a book entitled The History of Increasing Humiliation. "It would be a book accounting for the decline of the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers,then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin" (p. 92). Keen Amis cognoscenti will notice that Tull is stealing these lines from Amis' Moronic Inferno (p. 5), a reverse plagiarism ! Just as Richard is a fictional author who steals work from an actual writer (Martin Amis), he will invent a further fictional author to make the charge of plagiarism against Gwyn Barry.

We are on a roll here, because the descending status of literary protagonists ties into the ubiquitous astronomy theme. The next paragraph parallels "The history of astronomy. The history of astronomy is the history of increasing humiliation. First the geocentric universe, then the heliocentric universe. Then the eccentric universe - the one we're living in. Every century we get smaller. Kant figured it all out, sitting in his armchair. What's the phrase ? The principle of terrestrial mediocrity" (p.93). The parochial nature of our desires is scaled against the vastness of the universe. The recurring theme of yellow dwarfs, like our sun, which is waning, belittles our ever so brief time on the planet. The last line of the book "And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night" (p. 374) confirms that all the complex knowledge that we gather cannot prolong or render our existence more than trivial.

Amis has a style built upon "extended withholding of information" (p. 38 of Danish Masters thesis by Græsborg and Lind (2000) of Aalborg Univ., see reference below in London Fields blog). Of course the withholding of information is so dramatically ironic as it applies to our subject novel. According to the Danes, this technique is used "to create tension and excitement, forcing the reader to consider the novel on a page by page basis, constantly revising whatever expectations have been built up." This approach was mastered in London Fields but plays in The Information as well, most notably in regards to a certain fender bender invoked by one Agnes Trounce, Gwyn's elderly neighbor on Calchalk St. Gwyn is introduced as "the target is driving along, feeling relatively happy, immeasurably happier, certainly, than he is going to feel in about ninety seconds. These moments will in retrospect appear golden-age, prelapsarian. So that's right: he doesn't have a care in the world. Intense and lasting cares are arriving, brought to him by Agnes Trounce" (p. 147). We soon learn that Ms. Trounce has backed into Gwyn's car in a Morris Minor. After a few harsh words are exchanged, "two young men, big lads, who have been lying low in the back of the Morris suddenly extend their bodies into the street" and next we learn "And in the other car the target's head, by this time, is jerking and crunching around between the door and door frame. It was just a motoring dispute....." We don't know who was involved or what really happened, we will not learn the details until later (p. 307, and later, p. 349), when Richard types in a piece for his Profile relating to Gwyn's hospital stay "Retrograde amnesia at first suggested major closed-head injury....Signs of trauma are painfully apparent - but Gwyn Barry is out of Intensive Care." Now we have some real information, but not all. The details are revealed when the scene is replayed in detail "Nobody," said Steve Cousins, coming forward and reaching under his coat for the car tool , "and I mean nobody, calls my mother a cunt" (p. 342).

Recalling the role of narrator as 1st person in London Fields, there is a curious entry of the narrator in The Information, just when Steve Cousins secretly enters Gwyn's house at night. Oddly, he does no harm. This authorial intrusion takes the form "I said I wasn't going in there, not yet. But here I am. I can't control him, all his life. They couldn't control him. And I can't control him. And Richard Tull won't be able to control him" (p. 170). It seems to be one of many entry points in the book for the narrator. Later, Scozzy relates to Richard that there was an intruder in Gwyn's house, careful not to reveal that it was himself (remembering that Richard has him under hire) (p. 185). Some of the author's intrusions are lengthy, consider "It so happens that I know quite a lot about dating - down at that end of the scale. As a man Who stands five-feet-six-inches tall (or five-feet-six-and-one-half inches, according to a passport I once had), I know about dating and size....Thirty years ago my very slightly older but very much taller brother would sometimes arrange foursomes for my benefit: my brother's girlfriend would be asked to bring a girlfriend along - or a sister. And I would wait, in a doorway, while he made a rendezvous and then report back saying, "Come on, She's tiny" - or else (shaking his head), "Sorry, Mart" (p. 207). Cannot be more explicit than "Sorry, Mart."

So just what is the information in The Information ? Never explicit, always implicit. At one point, Richard gives a clue "Richard had information on Demi now, and information always points to the vulnerable - the hidden" (p. 190). As Richard completes the plagiarized version of Amelior, he notes "Had he become Gwyn Barry ? Was this the information " (p. 327). The clarifying revelation of what "the information" actually is, never materializes. Tull's devious plan is to write an "original" version of his rival's best-seller novel by manufacturing the evidence that will indict him, in hopes that Gwyn Barry will be accused of having plagiarized Tull's work.

The novel has a very dark and disconcertingly ambiguous ending. Abandonment is the theme upon which the novel ends. Let's first examine a story within the story, viz., the relation between Richard and his two sons, brothers born on both sides of midnight (neither identical nor fraternal twins), Marco and Marius (p. 4). Amis tells of the relation between Richard and the young boys with great sensitivity. Of course, the book is dedicated to his own sons, Louis and Jacob. Marco had a mild "learning disability" (p. 49) and for such he was identified as an artist. At the very end of the book, Richard's relation with the underworld catches up with him. The 7-year old Marco is "kidnapped" by Scozzy, while left unattended. Richard later sees his son alone on the street. "He realized that he still had the vacuum cleaner in his arms, across his body, round his neck. Richard was still Laocoön, engulfed in coils and hoops...Father and son started hurrying toward each other. Marco wasn't crying, but Richard had never seen him looking so unhappy" (p. 372). The reader never learns explicitly what happened to Marco inside Scozzy's van. By the way, the draped vacuum is evocative of Laocoön (priest of Apollo) - he and his sons are killed by serpents after warning the Trojans not to enter their city. So this is how it all had to end, with Richards malicious plans come home to roost. His story is a human story, what he calls "the journey from Narcissus to Philoctetes" (p. 145), the Greek warrior whose wound would not heal.

In the end, The Information is a tragicomedy (or melodrama), avoiding a tragic ending. The seasons are out of sync "But we haven't had much luck with our seasons. Not yet, anyway. We did satire in summer, and comedy in autumn, and romance in winter" (p. 362). Spring beckons tragedy. Yet when the story ends, we observe "the anti-comedy of the apple blossom loosening in the wind" (p. 371). The ending is melancholic, not tragic.

Early in the book, Tull considers giving up smoking. "Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking....It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette" (p. 79). Julian Loose (in N. Tredell's The Fiction of Martin Amis) referring to Amis' prose waxes "such passages are so enjoyably overwhelming, so addictively all-consuming, that you feel you want to read a novel by Martin Amis, even when you are reading a novel by Martin Amis."

"Rictis" sighting (p. 371).