I distinctly recall reading The Information when first published back in 1995 – it was like being dragged through the rough street of London, forced to breathe secondhand tobacco smoke and smell the stale liquor breath of the novel’s main character, forty-year-old book reviewer and greatest novelist in the world wannabe Richard Tull. Also featured are a motley crew of other literary types and British lowlife at its lowest, a police lineup of mates and thugs taking street names such as Scozzy, Crash, Belladonna, 13 and Darko. I was so emotionally drained after the book’s nearly four hundred pages, I had to take a break from fiction for weeks. One doesn’t read this Martin Amis novel so much as one lives it.
After my recent rereading along with listening to the audio book, most assuredly this is literary writing at its finest. Martin Amis renders memorable his blokes, buggers, dudes and dolts through searing description, lively dialogue, atmosphere, mood, setting, dramatic tension coupled with reflections on solar systems and galaxies, quasars and black holes, upward evolution and downward spiraling (especially midlife crisis), all with the mastery of a virtuoso performing Paganini.
Mr. Amis reports how the characters in a William Burroughs novel are “the ironist’s version of nature without nurture, like Swift’s Yahoos – filthy, treacherous, dreamy, vicious and lustful.” Curiously and perhaps even ironically (irony squared?) such a portrayal is a near perfect fit for the men and women in The Information, as if Martin Amis’ London has transformed itself into a late twentieth century Naked Lunch Interzone or one of Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night.
Additionally, Mr. Amis' biting satirical steak reminds me of yet another finely crafted tale, this one featuring a host of upper and lower class Brits along with one down-on-his-luck Septimus Harding - of course, its that well-known, much loved classic The Warden. Quite the feat Martin pulled off here – the improbable combination of William Burroughs American-style nihilism and Anthony Trollope British satire.
Back on our dastardly main character. From all accounts, Richard Tull could have been an absolutely first rate book reviewer and literary critic, another James Wood or Michiko Kakutani or Eliot Fremont-Smith, but Richard would never ever come close to being satisfied with such low status – book reviewing, the slum district of the literary world. He might as well write dust jacket blurbs for a publisher’s marketing department.
Richard aspired to be nothing less than another James Joyce. To this end he forged on with his latest unreadable tome entitled Untitled, a novel with sixteen unreliable narrators (sixteen!) and an entire chapter formulated as a burlesque of Alfred Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King. Sound like fun reading? It’s anything but fun; in point of fact, reading more than ten pages of Richard’s turgid, overwrought mess would make you physically ill, or even worse, inflict neurological damage. Exactly the fate of those unlucky ones in Amis' book who submitted themselves to the torture of Untitled. By the way, nobody at Bold Agenda, Richard’s New York publisher, actually read Untitled; they simply wanted to balance out their list of dime store pulps with a bulky British novel that, from all appearances, could be deemed serious literature.
In addition to being a failed novelist, Richard recognizes he could very easily be judged a failed man. Richard peers into the bathroom mirror and concludes nobody in the history of the world deserves the face he has: “His hair, scattered over his crown in assorted folds and clumps, looked as though it had just concluded a course of prolonged (and futile) chemotherapy. Then the eyes, each of them perched on its little blood-rimmed beer gut.” Debilitating and unflattering observations, launched both by the narrator and Richard himself, continue throughout the book regarding not only his face but also his tobacco-liquor-drug battered body, his twisted, cracked psyche, his (gulp) sexual impotence.
Meanwhile, his best friend, a Welshman Richard met back in college by the name of Gwyn Barry, writes to be read by the masses. And he succeeds, big time, with his latest, Amelior, a novel about a group of well-intentioned, problem-free young men and women who set off to establish their own rural community. Now, as Richard and many other readers with literary standards recognized, Amelior is nothing more than a watered down version of, say, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist or Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, as per Richard's reflections upon reading his friend's second novel (Summertown was Gwyn's first):
"If Richard had chortled his way through Summertown, he cackled and yodeled his way through Amelior: its cuteness, its blandness, its naively pompous semicolons, its freedom from humor and incident, its hand-me-down imagery; the almost endearing transparency of its little color schemes, its Tinkertoy symmetries."
But, hey Richard; hey highbrows literary types, Gwyn Barry's Amelior hit the best seller list at number nine. And what was Richard's response when reading the latest news of his closest and stupidest friend's rousing success? He strode out of his den into the parlor where his little twin sons, Marco and Marius, were watching cartoons and gave Marco a good whack on the side of his head. As Christopher Buckley wrote in his New York Times review, probably the one and only instance of child abuse in all of literature that contains a tincture of humor. And soon thereafter, Richard began planing his revenge on Gwyn Barry.
Midway through the novel the narrator himself pops up, bestowing a John Barth-like metafictional spin to this sprawling urban tale, a narrator bearing the name of Martin and possessing one particular physical trait worth emphasizing to readers – he stands not much over five feet. This snippet, including how he was humiliated whenever his older brother arranged a blind date for him with a young lady who turned out to be tall (the bad luck of Cupid's draw), is all we need to comprehend Mr. Amis bears a deep-seated seething resentment over the fact he didn’t shoot up like mum said he would back when he lived at home as a teenager; nope, Martin recognized he would forever remain a pipsqueak, one of the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz condemned (at least in his own mind) to bursting into song each and every time he entered a room or walked down the street: “I represent the Lolly pop Guild, The Lolly pop Guild, The Lolly pop Guild.”
Thus I have figured out the major reason why I found The Information such an emotionally draining read. It is a real double whammy – both the narrator and the main character spit their vitriol out on every single page. More acrimoniousness toward other people and the world you will not encounter. But, still, the writing is magnificent and gives the reader frequent occasion to shake one’s head and laugh out loud.
“Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven’t been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.”
― Martin Amis, The Information
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