Wabbit said:
It's like playing with an orchestra and claiming that the oboe is the most important factor so therefore I will neglect all other instuments!
Not at all! It's like playing with an orchestra and saying that the music is the most important factor... But seriously, how can language
not be the most important thing in a book? It's what everything else is made up of - story, characters, and so on. To adopt an Amisian repetition: it's the words. It's the words. I think a mistake some writers make is to believe you can do without a prose style, or voice, or that style is something that is tacked on on top of the story. It is (or should be) intrinsic to the book. For instance, how much less effective would the description above of the bereaved father be if Amis had just described literally that his eyes were red and he looked lost?
More red eyes, from
London Fields:
Three days ago (is it?) I flew in on a red-eye from New York. I practically had the airplane to myself. I stretched out, calling piteously and frequently to the stewardesses for codeine and cold water. But the red-eye did what the red-eye does. Oh, my. Jesus, I look like the Hound of the Baskervilles... Shaken awake to a sticky bun at 1:30 in the morning, my time, I moved to a window seat and watched through the bright mists the fields forming their regiments, in full parade order, the sad shires, like an army the size of England. Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as a cobweb. (...) Things have changed, things have remained the same, over the past ten years. London's pub aura, that's certainly intensified: the smoke and the builders' sand and dust, the toilet tang, the streets like a terrible carpet.
Really though, Wabbit, if you didn't like any of the quotes at
all then maybe Amis just isn't for you. You don't, as they say, have to like everything. If you did want to give him a go, I would probably recommend one of his shorter books,
Night Train or
Time's Arrow.
Money is widely agreed to be his funniest, though it's not necessarily easy to get into at first. (It's worth pointing out here that I read four Amis books before really deciding I liked him.)
Anyway, if you're still curious, here are some extracts from
Time's Arrow, which tells the story of a life lived backwards, or more accurately viewed backwards:
I can't tell - and I need to know - whether Tod is kind. Or how unkind. He takes toys from children, on the street. He does. The kid will be standing there, with flustered mother, with big dad. Tod'll come on up. The toy, the squeaky duck or whatever, will be offered to him by the smiling child. Tod takes it. And backs away, with what I believe is called a shiteating grin. The child's face turns blank, or closes. Both toy and smile are gone: he takes both toy and smile. Then he heads for the store, to cash it in. For what? A couple of bucks. Can you believe this guy? He'll take candy from a baby, if there's fifty cents in it for him.
The women at the crisis centres and the refuges are all hiding from their redeemers. The crisis centre is not called a crisis centre for nothing. If you want a crisis, just check in. The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them. Some require more specialised treatment. They stagger off and go and lie in a park or a basement or wherever, until men come along and rape them, and then they're okay again. Ah shit, says Brad, the repulsive orderly, there's nothing wrong with them - meaning the women in the shelter - that a good six inches won't cure. Tod frowns at him sharply. I hate Brad too, and I hate to say it, but sometimes he's absolutely right. How could the world ever fix it so that someone like Brad could ever be right?
It's all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation ... is easy, is quick. ... How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing toward me over the uneven ground.
Oh and another reason I like him is for his character names. Keith Talent, John Self, Clint Smoker, Nicola Six. Little Mart - I salute you!
)
