Amis and Son: Two Literary Generations
Neil Powell
Macmillan, 448pp, £20
And still the torrent continues: Martin's memoirs, Kingsley's letters, Kingsley's authorised biography, Martin's effusions on the post-9/11 world, and now, into a market that is flooded if not quite saturated, comes Neil Powell's book - the first, so far as I know, to contemplate a comprehensive study of both oeuvres, Amis père and Amis fils. But what was contemplated and what is presented to the reader turn out to be different things. In his preface, Powell says that he began Amis and Son with the aim of exploring "the way in which two novelists of adjacent generations who set out with apparently similar intentions - to write comic or satirical fiction about the way we live now - end up with such disparate results".
This sounds like the plan for a book that would be well worth reading: after all, think what you like about the Amises. Or perhaps, just as likely, you don't think about them at all. Yet they were, between them, the dominant presence in the British comic novel in the second half of the 20th century; and they provide lots of material for comparison and contrast. They share a number of preoccupations - the war between men and women, Americans, the way words sound when distorted by drink or class pretensions - but expressed using vastly different methods. Kingsley (as Powell points out, this chummy-sounding use of first names is hard to avoid), distrustful of show and cleverness, stuck mostly to domestic, realist settings and style, which often masked the scale of his ambition. At his best, the comic business camouflages contemplations of and protests against loneliness and mortality of a sanity and eloquence that can be stood beside Larkin or Beckett without looking stupid. His son never masked his ambition, measuring himself publicly and conscientiously against the greats of modern literature, and plumping for a deliberately grotesque, overconceived style of comedy in which cleverness and show drown out everything else.
Plenty to work with, then. But right from the start, it's clear that, as Powell more or less admits, the plan came unstuck. There seem to be two central reasons for this. The first is that, though Powell cites Martin's remark that the "fit" reader "regards a writer's life as just an interesting extra", it's the life that he takes as his organising principle. The main body of the book is a biographical account of Kingsley, punctuated with comments on individual books that are sometimes shrewd, sometimes sketchy. For anyone who has taken more than a passing interest in the Amises in recent years (and that presumably includes most of this book's potential readers), this means a trudge through material familiar through repetition: south London upbringing - Oxford and Larkin - marriage, academia, penury - Lucky Jim, success, divorce, remarriage, divorce - right-wing views, drink, phobias.
Simply because he hasn't lived as long or written as much as his father, the section on Martin was bound to be shorter; but Powell abridges things further by ending his account of Martin in 1995, the year of Kingsley's death. His justification is that after this "Martin's work begins to move off in new and (so far) confusing directions"; but the somewhat abrupt termination points to the other fundamental problem he faced in writing this book: he just doesn't like Martin's work very much - at any rate, not after Money, in 1983. This is made explicit in the concluding chapter, in which, after fulminating quite effectively against the admittedly awful Yellow Dog, Powell admits to being "ultimately defeated" by Martin's fiction. Early on, he quotes from Lucky Jim. Jim Dixon, miserable as an academic historian, asks a colleague: "Haven't you noticed how we all specialise in what we hate most?" Powell sees this as self- justifying foolishness. Having finished Amis and Son, I wonder whether Dixon hasn't hit on a central truth about the human condition.
When Powell hits his stride, he can be an observant and cutting critic, though too ready to phrase objections in moral terms. He makes a persuasive case for Christopher Isherwood as an important influence on Kingsley's style. He is good on what is wrong with Lucky Jim (principally the fact that Jim himself is, viewed objectively, a rather unpleasant character; then again, the book's achievement is that, most of the time, it's hard to muster the objectivity to notice). He is also a useful advocate for some of Kingsley's more easily disliked novels - One Fat Englishman, Take a Girl Like You, Jake's Thing, Stanley and the Women - showing how far hostile critics have mistaken narrative voice for authorial point of view.
His advocacy would have been strengthened, however, by more awareness of the books' critical reception - he doesn't seem to know, for example, about Marilyn Butler's mildly notorious defence of Stanley and the Women, in the London Review of Books, as a disguised feminist novel. And he has blind spots, dismissing the middle-period novels The Anti-Death League and The Green Man out of hand. To my mind, both contain, for all their failings, an experimental spirit and an engagement with the terror at the bottom of things that set them above some of the social comedies Powell admires.
Similarly, he proves a surprisingly sympathetic reader of Martin's squalid but extremely funny early books - Dead Babies, Success - and even of the tricksy Holocaust novel Time's Arrow; but I wish he'd found more to say about the later Night Train, and even Yellow Dog. Again, Powell doesn't pay enough attention to secondary material: he states baldly that Bellow and Nabokov are bad models for a young writer, which seems plau sible but needs backing up. And he evidently didn't have the nerve to sit through the Martin-scripted science-fiction film farrago Saturn 3, which provided the basis for a good deal of Money. I finished Amis and Son liking Powell a great deal - he is clearly a sensible, decent man; but the book itself is a missed opportunity.
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