Showing posts with label Martin Amis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Amis. Show all posts

Friday, 7 September 2012

Why I Loathe Confessional Writing

I have a confession to make: I despise confessional writing. I know it's awful of me as a weak liberal, but I loathe pieces in which the author ruefully acknowledges that that it was awful of them as a weak liberal to do whatever slimy thing they've done. When I was reading Lionel Shriver's piece on how, when a friend of hers got cancer, she abandoned her, but isn't proud of herself, I abandoned reading pieces by Lionel Shriver. Awful of me, I know, but I was too weak. I wasn't brave or unflinching, to give two of the buzz-words that are applied to this kind of writing.

A difference between right-wing hacks and liberal hacks is that while the former do little to persuade even themselves that they're anything other than malodorous, the latter think that saying something abhorrent or doing something abhorrent is redeemed if you pontificate upon how abhorrent it was of you in your piece, and how all of us - not just the author of the piece - are complicit in this abhorrence, for this is an abhorrence symptomatic of our times.

Anne Enright's endlessly detestable piece on the McCann family for The London Review of Books - available here http://toodumbtolivearchive.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/disliking-mccanns.html but currently subscription-only at its home at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/anne-enright/diary (not the first time it's disappeared from there) - is a paradigm. From the words "distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic and disliking the McCanns is an international sport", the piece assumes we are all complicit in the author's obnoxiousness. Praised by Sam Leith ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643503/Anne-Enright-was-spot-on-about-McCann-mania.html ) as "spot-on" and "darkly funny", it gives us the horrible image of Enright using Google Earth to study the hotel in Portugal in order to work out how the kidnapping was feasible while chatting with her husband about whether the McCanns were wifeswappers and staying up late at night to look for further YouTube interviews with the couple.

I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone. In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to say to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry.’

Actually, she's worse: those people who say such foolish things don't put them on paper for others to see, including the victims. 'Literary' prose stands revealed in this piece as no better than corporate jargon or tabloid-speak: it has its own set of cliches, it panders to the expectations of readers used to this sort of thing, it relates only to itself and not to other human beings or the outside world, it occupies a specific slot within the media, it's deeply callous. The final sentence is "Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns", concluding a pattern that Enright has woven throughout the piece, which is there to tell us this is an essay and not a column, as the smudgy sheen they put on videotape in late-90s-onwards tv programmes is there to tell us this was done on film (perhaps one day the former, too, can be done at the touch of a button). It's those little frowns, those  self-deprecations and qualifications, turns at the corners of  sentences that are so nauseauting: "I'm not proud of it", "I thought I was angry with them for" "it’s part of our mass paranoia" "I am otherwise inclined". "I have never objected to good-looking women". "Maybe I should believe in myself more" "I had physically to resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check", one-sentence paragraphs (often the sign of a scoundrel) a whole paragraph consisting of "if."  They don't make Enright anything other than a literary rubbernecker.

Forgive me, but let's look at it in more detail:

In one – completely unverified – account of her interrogation, Kate McCann is said to have responded to the accusation that the cadaver dog had picked up the ‘scent of death’ on her clothes by saying that she had been in contact with six dead patients in the weeks before she came on holiday. My doctor friend doubted this could be true of a part-time GP, unless, we joked, she had ‘done a Shipman’ on them. Then, of course, we had to row back, strenuously, and say that even if something had happened between mother and child, or between father and child, in that apartment, even if the child just fell, then Kate McCann was still the most unfortunate woman you could ever lay eyes on.
[...]
During the white heat of media allegations against Madeleine’s parents, my husband came up the stairs to say that they’d all been wife-swapping – that was why the other diners corroborated the McCanns’ account of the evening. This, while I was busy measuring the distance from the McCanns’ holiday apartment down the road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles). I said they couldn’t have been wife-swapping, because one of the wives had brought her mother along.

‘Hmmmm,’ he said.
 [...]
‘She was only a slip of a thing,’ I said.

I did not say that the body might have been made more pliable by decomposition. And I had physically to resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check (get in there now, sweetheart, and curl up into a ball).
[...]
Who needs a cadaver dog when you have me? In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone.
[...]
It is not that we blame them – if they can be judged, then they can also be forgiven. No, we just dislike them for whatever it is that nags at us. We do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or holding hands on the way into Mass.
[...]
Most of the animosity against the McCanns centres on the figure of Madeleine’s beautiful mother. I am otherwise inclined. I find Gerry McCann’s need to ‘influence the investigation’ more provoking than her flat sadness, or the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcissism that flecks her public appearances. I have never objected to good-looking women. My personal jury is out on the issue of narcissism in general; her daughter’s strong relationship with the camera lens causes us a number of emotions, but the last of them is always sorrow and pain.


We can see all the prejudices of a tabloid mind here: prurient speculations about the McCanns' sex lives; wondering whether they killed their child; the obscenely irrelevent matter of Kate McCann's good looks; wondering why they don't accept their daughter is probably dead; unverified sources; pawing at whatever scraps of juicy new internet gossip you can get; hating someone you've never met because of media coverage, all of them with that recurring note, that constant emphasis, that constant damned assumption that this is the kind of thing we all do. It "makes harridans of us all." Yes, Enright knows her dislike of the McCanns is preposterous, and that expecting them to go away and grieve is nonsensical as well as callous, and she knows you know, but she's only being honest. Yes it's bad to do things like this, but it's the way of the world, our sin not mine. Only that reassuring preciousness in the language -  the "'Hmmmm,' he said" getting a paragraph to itself - distinguishes it as "literary", a step up from Jon Gaunt, and that endless veering from the McCanns to the more important matter of the inside of Anne Enright's head ("I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am of losing them to a random act of abduction. I have an unhealthy trust of strangers.") Good to know that Enright has no problem with attractive women, though. I have one with ugly prose.

Following 9/11, the literary editor Robert McCrum foolishly argued -  in a piece available here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/23/september11.society -  that:

swamped as we've been with a tidal wave of quite unbear able reality, it's the writers of fiction, contemporary masters such as Ian McEwan in Britain and Paul Auster in the US, who have come up with the words of comfort and clarity we crave in the midst of shock and desolation. People sometimes dismiss fiction as mere entertainment, but at times like this there's no question that novelists at their best have a privileged access to truths about the human condition denied to others. Partly, this is because they have a detachment that reporters, caught up in the maelstrom of events, cannot equal. Journalism is history's first draft, and the journalism of novelists, while not always to everyone's taste, can supply the insights that people need at a time like this.

In Enright's "liking the McCanns" prose we can see the worst effects of that very approach to writing. The belief that you can take a real-life situation and render it "literary" results in sentences about other people's suffering which are more interested in how that sentence should be structured. This is why George Orwell argued that good prose should be like a windowpane. Compare the piece with Christopher Hitchens's report on the victims of Agent Orange, or how Orwell himself writes on those living in poverty, and the latter's account of a hanging. Both are great stylists, but because they care more about their subjects than their literary standing, they leave you caring about the victims and wondering what can done about the situation, rather than nodding at the inevitability of our callousness and insularity, grateful it at least allowed a novelist to alleviate the horror by churning out exactly what literary periodical subscribers expect from literary prose. Martin Amis's non-fiction has moved from one pole to the other. The first three collections of essays by Amis are the work of an alert, interested, empathetic journalist (take a look at his fine, moving piece on the AIDS crisis in The Moronic Inferno). The Amis behind Experience, Koba the Dread and The Second Plane, who writes about others' suffering but cares about nothing other than his own phrasing ("Fred West will only get one sentence from me [...] Here is that sentence") is much less worth having.

Literary hackery, like tabloid hackery, is a factory. The difference is that it's where the alternatives to the mass-produced are mass-produced; where the alternatives to the churned-out are churned out. Novelists are much better at writing novels than anyone else, but the idea that we understand events like 9/11 or Madeline McCann's abduction all the better once we've read Martin Amis describing his "species grief" at the "worldflash" of a terrible future, his replacement of the word terrorism with horrorism and how Anne Enright felt when she woke up trivialises the those events as surely as it overrates those authors (and sadly, Amis's outburst about strip-searching Muslims and not letting them travel until they "get their house in order", his reliance on Neocon sources like Mark Steyn and Amis and Ian McEwan's awesomely daft attempts at political symbolism in their respective novels Yellow Dog and Saturday are just three things out that didn't bear out McCrum's prophecy of an invigorating novelistic response to 9/11).

Confessional writing doesn't wait until violence or tragedy takes place, though. Zadie Smith's inexplicable piece for The New Yorker on the way she treated a poverty-stricken friend she lent money to -
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_smith - has already been roasted by Edward Champion here
( http://www.edrants.com/zadie-smith-the-literary-material-girl/ ) and little more can be said, except that once again Smith thinks that pontificating on bad behaviour stops the reader from gagging on that bad behaviour. Furthermore, she is only aware of half of what she actually did wrong. She seems to think her sins are impatience for the paying of the debt, and thoughtlessness in not realising her friend had no internet connection with which to contact her. She seems unaware of the question of why she needed a loan paid back in the first place if it was, in her words, "no skin off my nose", or whether the friend deserved to have her problems paraded in The New Yorker in this way (as Champion points out, withholding your friend's name isn't sufficient if you're famous: anyone who knew them both could identify her).

Over in Britain, the broadsheet reaction to the killing spree and death of Raoul Moat brought to the mind the storm over James Bulger's murder. In the latter, the pontifications of more liberal, up-market hacks determined to make a career for themselves was almost as vile as that of the tabloids. The career of Blake Morrison owes a lot to it as does that of Andrew O'Hagen. Regarding the latter, have a look at this narcissistic essay for The London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n05/andrew-ohagan/diary  - the first piece of writing he ever had published - and the obscene mixture of prurience and facetiousness in the subsequent letters exchange, in which a bunch of people with the time to write long letters to The London Review of Books expand a discussion of infanticide to jokey criticisms of each others' letters (those endless quips about "eating my hat") and the merits of Richmal Crompton's William books. At least they're keeping themselves amused, and O'Hagen's got a career out of it.

Morrison used the same murder (in his book As If, as well as  pieces for The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/feb/06/bulger.ukcrime) whenever the case resurfaces) to ruminate on everything from the nature of evil itself to his own shortcomings as a parent and as a heterosexual man. His pieces combine deeply distressing details from the murder itself - although they don't seem to distress Morrison as much as they distress me: at one point he mentions a particularly horrific detail and adds that it was withheld at the trial to spare James Bulger's family suffering, but doesn't bother to tell us why he felt otherwise, just as Enright is untroubled by describing Madeline McCann as "probably dead" - with flippant gags like this: "As Larkin might have put it, parental anxiety began in 1993 [the year of the murder], between the Children's Act and Eminem's first CD."

Reading the moment in As If where Morrison, narrating the trial in the present tense, notices both Jon Venables and Robert Thompson are putting on weight; remembers that he and his sister were fat at their age; and reminisces about divebombing in the swimming pool in Majorca in front of derisive holiday-makers, it's not surprising that a few years later we'd reach a stage where Martin Amis, in a non-fiction book on the Stalinist Purges, would compare the screams of his baby daughter to the screams from the Gulag. By the time we reach the chapter describing Morrison's own baby daughter, we're treated to the saccharine prose of Tony Parsons's smarter brother:

 The whorled, Danish Pastry of an ear, the stretched skin above the lobe so paper-thin the sun shines through

the silver seal of a milk-blister on an upper lip

 A gleaming, gappy grin, a last little spit out of pink
where she lies, a dairy squiggle, on the floor

 there she lies, a fizz of cream on the floor.
 

Prose like this supports McCrum's claim that creative writers address the troubles of the world in a way the rest of us can't: specifically, they cutesefy a troubling issue and reduce it to an opportunity for putting hyper-sugary, comfortingly literary - rather than startling, convincing or moving -  combinations of words together and exploring the author's past. I certainly couldn't write like that. Morrison is right to be horrified at the words of John Major at the time of the killing - "we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less" - but narcissists understand nothing either, not even themselves.

   Morrison was quick to let us know what he thought of the Virginia Tech massacre, too -  this piece appeared in The Guardian just three days later http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/apr/19/internationaleducationnews.highereducation
opening with this absurdly blinkered and impertinent paragraph:

I can't have been the only writer dismayed to learn that Cho Seung-Hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre, was a literature student. Few people today believe the idea, passed down from Matthew Arnold through TS Eliot and FR Leavis, that the study of books can civilise and humanise us. But it is alarming to think that majoring in English might have contributed to Cho's problems or even inspired him to become a mass murderer.

The sheer insularity of literary hackery can be suffocating sometimes. As if the subject Seung-Hui was studying was of any fucking relevance. The delusion that literature ought to make people less likely to shoot one another has been around since Joseph Brodsky's claim that it is more problematic for someone who has read Dickens to shoot people than for someone who has not (a recurring bugbear mentioned neither for the first nor for the last time on this blog); here Morrison repeats that thoughtless insult to non-novel-readers and then inverts it. The "only writer" to think this way? We can only hope.

  During the Raoul Moat coverage, one non-tabloid journalist ruefully confessed to finding herself rooting for Moat, wanting him to escape because she found it hard not to think of him as the underdog. When I say I empathised more with the policeman he shot and blinded, the girl he wounded and the family of the man he shot dead, it might seem pious, but let me stress I don't regard this - and the fact that I've never "disliked" the McCanns - as evidence of a high character: I regard them as the norm. Hacks like these rely on assumptions: on the belief that we all inevitably fall prey to the worst aspects of modern culture, that we're all addicted, that we're all obsessed, that we're all complicit. Scummy thoughts and ideas are allowed to become norms rather than embarrassments.

The late Gordon Burn's piece on Jade Goody,
http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/gordon-burn?cat=books&type=article
similarly, was barely preferable to OK magazine's tribute, which put "In Loving Memory 1981-2009" on its front cover before she had actually died. Burn's piece isn't interested in pricking the balloon; it attributes the manipulation of Goody to a global cultural state of affairs rather than an unpleasant tv programme. If we took the latter view, we could think of practical ways to prevent demonic circuses like the one that sprang around Goody happening again (not letting Peter Bazalgette become head of the UK Arts Council, not commissioning anything like Big Brother again, boycotting tabloids, working out how to promote such a boycott), but the view Burn takes is that this what life is like the 21st Century, predicted by Roth, Bellow, Foster Wallace and Mailer, and that we are all complicit in making and keeping it that way. It's a piece which expresses no interest in changing anything.

It's time to to start saying No: Every other person doesn't feel this way, it is your fault rather than the cultural climate, and your honesty doesn't redeem it. Why not start checking your behaviour at the time rather than publishing an essay on it a few days later? Ask yourself why you slow down for car crashes.
Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Friendly Fire in The War Against Cliche: A Look at the Endless Recycling of Martin Amis




Martin Amis has little time for repetition. All writing is a war against cliche, he argues. This is from his memoir Experience:

Earlier on I called Jacobs's book 'mysteriously' repetitive. The quote above is from p.313. On p.314 we get: 'one cause of change may be simple exhaustion, like an art form running out of steam." And on page 315 we get: "Exhaustion, like that of a literary genre running out if steam, played its part.' The proofreader must have been mysteriously repetitive too.

Unfortunately, if we apply this scrupulous attention to recurring details that Amis found lacking on that occasion to his own cultural contributions over the years, we find the war against cliche is strafed by friendly fire...

On John Updike's approach to writing sex scenes:

Updike tags along , not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom. Indeed, he sends a Japanese camera crew in there after him.
 (The Observer, 1987)
 http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1828&dat=19870921&id=DCAfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=bqcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5057,3508611

The Updike approach, where you send a kind of little Japanese film crew into the bedroom..."
(University of Manchester debate on literature and sex with Will Self and Carol Maver, 2009)
http://media.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/humanities/mp3s/ahc/21st_century_writing/amisselfmavor.mp3
 (16:10)
He sends in a little Japanese camera crew into the bedroom, and the bathroom. Where is this getting us?"
(Literary festival in Paris, 2010) http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/20/martin-amis-politics-britain-irrelevance?cat=books&type=article

He sends a little Japanese camera crew into the bedroom
(Jaipur literary festival, 2011)
http://kafkesque.blogspot.co.uk/2011_01_01_archive.html?m=1


On Pride and Prejudice

I wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion (to Pride and Prejudice) — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.”
("Miss Jane's Prime", The Atlantic, 1990, reprinted in his book of essays, The War Against Cliche, 2001) http://www.martinamisweb.com/pre_2006/austen.htm

...the inartistic feeling that I have that if the novel has a flaw, it's that we don't get a 30-page sex scene describing their wedding night [...[ Why do we so like the idea of Darcy and Elizabeth? We want them to get together. [...] the reason for this particular keenness of our erotic and romantic interest, I think, is that they are made for each other - she will loosen him up, he will have a sort of countervailing effect on her - but also sexually made for each other...
(University of Manchester debate on literature and sex, 2009) http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/site_content.php?name=Previous_Podcasts  (10 minutes in)

[Pride and Prejudice] had but a single flaw: the absence, towards the close, of a forty-page sex scene
 (The Pregnant Widow, 2010)

I always used to think that there’s only one flaw with Pride and Prejudice, and that is the absence of a 30-page sex scene between Elizabeth and Darcy. Although of course that wouldn’t have worked either. And I finally realised why you have this feeling, and this is the great achievement of the novel: here you have two characters who were made for each other, and it’s such a perfect fit, you know she’s going to make him a little more relaxed, a little less stuffy, bring out the playful side of him. And he’s going to make her not only rich, because, let’s face it, there is a vulgar appeal to that, but he’s going to make her serious as well as lively, perhaps curb her high spirits… But a marvellous osmosis is going to take place between these two people.
(Hay Festival, Mexico, 2011)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/8825242/Martin-Amis-intoxicating-free-the-novelist-life.html

On teaching creative writing:

Don't identify with Elizabeth Bennet or Mr Darcy. Identify with Jane Austen. See what she is trying to do.
(interview for The Telegraph, 2007) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1566006/Martin-Amis-leaps-back-into-the-ring.html

[try] to identify with the author not with the character, to see what he is trying to do.
(interview with The Sunday Times, 2007) http://www.martinamisweb.com/interviews_files/millar_suntimes.pdf

I don't look at any of their creative stuff. All I do is teach great books, from the very authorial point of view; don’t identify with Mr Darcy or Elizabeth, identify with Jane Austen, that’s the way we sort of do it, which is the way you should do it anyway.
(interview for the  Independent, 2007)
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/martin-amis-also-talked-to-johann-hari-about-a-range-of-other-subjects-here-are-his-comments-775090.html

When I teach literature I always tell them, these would-be writers (we don’t do workshops, we just read great books), I say, “When you read Pride and Prejudice, don’t if you’re a girl identify with Elizabeth Bennet, if you’re a boy with Darcy. Identify with the author, not with the characters.” All good readers do that automatically, but I think it’s helpful to make that clear. Your affinity is not with the characters, always with the writer.
(Hay literary festival, Mexico, 2011)


On Terry Eagleton

He is a marooned ideologue who can’t get out of bed in the morning without guidance from God and Karl Marx.
(Financial Times interview, 2007)
(Letter to The Guardian, 2007) http://www.guardian.co.uk//world/2007/oct/12/religion.immigration?mobile-redirect=false

"an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx"
(Open letter to Yasmin Alibhi-Brown, The Independent, 2007) http://www.martinamisweb.com/interviews_files/ma_response_eagleton.pdf

On writing something lighter:

"If writing is freedom, then you don't want to shackle yourself to existing conventions and indeed existing characters. If I had a severe brain injury, I might take it on."
(Asked by Charlie Higson whether he would write a James Bond novel, "Amis, Amis and Bond", Radio 4, 2007) http://m.beemp3.com/download.php?file=2453817&song=Amis%2C+Amis+and+Bond
(25:30)
 

"Salman Rushdie made a good distinction just after the fatwa was pronounced on him. He said 'I'm writing a children's book.' I said 'why are you doing that? I wouldn't think of doing that, I don't think, unless I'd had a serious head injury.' He said, 'well, I sort of have.'"
(debate on terrorism at the University of Manchester with Maureen Freely and Ed Husain, 2007) http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/site_content.php?name=Previous_Podcasts  (59 minutes in)

"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable."
("Faulks on Fiction", BBC2, 2011)
quoted here:


On fiction and climate change

"[...] when you've reviewed your fifth novel running that begins with this sentence: 'Heaving a heavy sigh and scratching his nose, Splork led the camel out of the igloo, and looked out at the conflagration that was heading towards him'... "
(University of Manchester, panel on literature in the 21st Century, 2007)
 15:30
"I’m dying to read Ian [McEwan]’s book. And he’s done it the clever way, which is not to have the first sentence being “Splork tied his camel to the rail outside the Igloo and looked south.” No, it’s some guy who goes to all of these conferences. "
(Interview for Prospect Magazine, 2010) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/martin-amis

On the novelist's declining powers:

Medical science has granted us a new phenomenon: the octogenarian novel. And one thinks, with respect, of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein and Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest; yet no one would seriously compare these books to Humboldt's Gift and Harlot's Ghost. Updike was 76 when he died. And for many years he suffered from partial deafness. I don't know (perhaps nobody knows) whether the two afflictions are connected, but the fact is that Updike, in My Father's Tears and Other Stories, is in the process of losing his ear.
[... [
"Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land."
The first sentence ends with the words "his land"; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov - who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce."

 (Review of John Updike's My Father's Tears and Other Stories for The Guardian, 2009)
 http://www.guardian.co.uk//books/2009/jul/04/my-fathers-tears-john-updike?mobile-redirect=false

"It's a recent phenomenon. Shakespeare died at 52, Dickens at 58, Jane Austen at 41. Saul Bellow published in his mid-80s a charming but slight novel, called Ravelstein, nothing like the mighty, longer novels. Norman Mailer made a dignified exit, too, again in his mid-80s. What happened with John Updike was that his ear went: this great stylist was reduced to sentences like this: 'the great make a mess on the floor when they fall; no-one cleans them up when they fall.' The clunking repetition of fall in two different applications, two different meanings - the idea of letting that go, of not spotting that, is a terrifying indictment of failing powers.
And then you have Philip Roth, who I think is having tremendous difficulty in breathing life into his characters - it's an amazing thing to be able to convince the reader that these characters really live, that this situation is alive, the ability to infuse life into your creations and that seems to me to be precarious in his case."
(Panel on literature and ageing with Clive James, University of Manchester, 2009) http://www.martinamisweb.com/events_files/ma_james_porter_litageing.mp3
(14 minutes in)

"It's a modern phenomenon - Dickens died at 59, Shakespeare 54, Jane Austen at 41. There was no question in the past of the talent dying before the body."
(interview with Mark Lawson, BBC4, 2010)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw0QwZpUiT8&feature=youtube_gdata_player (2:10)


"The development given to us by modern medicine is that writers now have to endure the loss of their powers.This is horribly evident when you read the late novels of writers who live beyond 70. Shakespeare died at 56, Jane Austen at 41. 'They never had to feel their powers deserting them. Now, writers die twice!"
(Hay-on Wye festival, 2010)
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1284532/Becoming-grandfather-uncool-says-Martin-Amis.html

“We’re going to die as everyone dies, but before that our talent is going to die. There are no exceptions to this. It’s an entirely 20th century phenomenon. Shakespeare died at 52, Dickens at 58, Jane Austen at 41 and DH Lawrence at 44. But now you have the octogenarian novelist, and on the whole they’re no bloody good. “You can’t keep it up and there are various ways you can see novelists disintegrating before your eyes as they move past 70. John Updike amazingly lost his ear. His last collection of short stories is full of ugly rhythms and some quite elementary mistakes, for instance two successive sentences ending with the same word. Now anyone interested in style will be told by their ear that you can’t do that. It gives a terrible kind of clunk on the page. And his last collection of short stories was full of schoolboy repetitions as if his ear was no longer telling him things. Another thing that happens to novelists is that they can’t breath life into their characters any more. The whole book is dead, inert, and you just have that terrible thing where you read the sentence, “He grew very angry” or “He went over to the window and opened it”, and you just find yourself thinking, “No, he didn’t. You’re not convincing me that he did that. Life has not been breathed into it.” That’s a sudden death of talent. But what invariably happens is a sort of dilution. Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer both wrote novels when they were 85, Ravelstein and The Castle in the Forest, and they’re not bad. But no one would seriously consider comparing them to Humboldt’s Gift or Harlot’s Ghost, these great 800-page bristling, sizzling novels. The flame, like on a cooker, just goes right down to the minimum, and that’s what lies before all of us."
(Hay Festival, Mexico, 2011)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/8825242/Martin-Amis-intoxicating-free-the-novelist-life.html

"And the writer in decline is a contribution of medical science—it didn’t used to come up, because they’re all dead. Dickens at 58, Shakespeare at 52, Jane Austen at 41. Didn’t used to come up. But now you have 80-year-old novelists. And it’s self-evident that the grasp and the gift erodes—you can see it in various ways. In Updike it was the ear that went. Those reliably melodious sentences just dried up—schoolboy inadvertencies crept into his later prose that just wouldn’t have been there earlier on. [the conversation turns to Amis's respect for Bellow's last novel] I respected Mailer’s last book, too. But no one would seriously compare either of those novels to Humboldt’s Gift or Harlot’s Ghost. I thought Ravelstein was a beautiful last gesture. But it had that mutedness. That incredible unstoppable energy had gone. That’s something new to worry about.
(interview for Vulture.com 2012)


On learning to love the reader:

But Nabokov wants to embrace his readers too. He comes across as this snorting wizard of hauteur, but he is the dream host, always giving us on our visits his best chair and his best wine. What would Joyce do? Let's think, he would call out vaguely from the kitchen, asking you to wait a couple of hours for the final fermentation of a home-brewed punch made out of grenadine, conger eels and sheep dip. [Hence] [t]hat 600-page crossword clue, Finnegans Wake."
(PEN American Centre, at a talk in honour of the 100th Anniversary of Nabokov's birth, 1999) http://www.martinamisweb.com/documents/ma_nabokov.doc

" 'Tell a dream, lose a reader', said Henry James. And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit. Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams. The result, Finnegans Wake, reads like a 600 page crossword clue."
(Experience, 2000)

"'Tell a dream, lose a reader,' said Henry James. Puns are cornily but rightly considered the lowest form of wit. [...] A writer should always be a good host. Nabokov would put you in his best armchair, serve you his best wine, and would be fussing about you. Joyce would come in, and be vaguely off in the kitchen somewhere, and looking among the old wine bottles saying 'I'll be out in a minute.' He didn't love the reader. [...] Finnegans Wake is a seven-hundred page crossword clue, and the answer is 'the' ".
(Clive James interview, 2001)
http://www.clivejames.com/video/library/1  (13:40)

"There can be a turning against the reader and that's the difference between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Joyce doesn't give a shit about the reader any more. And late Henry James is an awful slog. It's a disaffection that you must fight."
(Guardian interview, 2003) http://www.guardian.co.uk//books/2003/aug/29/fiction.martinamis?mobile-redirect=false

"It's a noble, democratizing book — alas, written by this man who was too inverted to take it further. Talk about a marriage with the reader: he's like Henry James in the growing estrangement from the reader in his corpus. Ulysses is a great, long honeymoon, but then he withdraws from the reader: separate beds and separate rooms. Finnegan's Wake is indifferent to the reader to a sadistic extent. Look at it: It's all dreams told in puns, the two most inimical things. With James, the estrangement of the marriage was even more fiendishly prolonged. All the hospitable stuff is over by the early-middle period, then more and more coldness and self-inspection. We all write for ourselves, but the whole idea of the marriage has broken down at that point."
(interview for Powells books, 2003) http://www.martinamisweb.com/interviews_files/powells_interview.pdf

"Love for the reader simply gives out: in the case of Joyce, you have that noble, all-inclusive book Ulysses, followed by that 700 page crossword clue, Finnegans Wake. We all agree there are a couple of things novels can't do. One is dreams, the other is sex. To write 700 pages about dreams in the form of multilingual puns is not the act of a lover. It's the act of an invert. In [Henry] James's Case, you see this generous intelligence, this thriving marriage with the reader devolve into separate beds and then separate rooms, and finally messy divorce."
(University of Manchester, debate on fiction in the 21st century,  2007
 http://media.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/humanities/mp3s/ahc/21st_century_writing/amis.mp3(about 18 minutes in)

"Nabokov invites you in, gives you the best chair by the fire and his best wine – then leaves you with a chess problem to solve. You arrive at James Joyce's house and he's forgotten you were coming. He leaves you in a drafty corridor for half an hour while he fixes a drink of peat and conger eel. He doesn't care about you."
(Hay Festival, London, 2009)
http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/lowri-257/martin-amis-talks-to-peter-florence-at-hay-festival-1647/

[...] "but also to love the reader, and that’s what I mean by the pleasure principle. The difference between a Nabokov, who in almost all his novels, nineteen novels, gives you his best chair and his best wine and his best conversation. Compare that to Joyce, who, when you arrive at his house, is nowhere to be found, and then you stumble upon him, making some disgusting drink of peat and dandelion in the kitchen. He doesn’t really care about you. Henry James ended up that way. They fall out of love with the reader. And the writing becomes a little distant."

"Being a writer is like having a guest: you give them your best chair, closest to the fire, your best wine and you try to amuse them. Not instruct them, amuse them."
("What I've Learned",  Esquire, 2012)   http://www.esquire.co.uk/2012/09/what-ive-learned-martin-amis/

"I have undiminished love for the reader. It’s like being a good host. You give your best chair and your best wine to your guests and you want them to have–not only instruction and delight in the old phrase—but since writing inevitably involves a bit of suffering for the writer—I mean a novel wouldn’t be any good if it didn’t—its quite an altruistic love in that you’re fully prepared to go through a bit of shit and uncertainty and doubt but that’s what you put in for the pleasure of your readers."

("Twenty Minutes with Martin Amis", Tottenham Review, 2012)http://www.tottenvillereview.com/twenty-minutes-with-martin-amis/

On the future of the planet

"We're coming to a stage where we see that the planet ages too - an idea that would not have occurred to a 19th-century farmer any more than it would have occurred to the dog at his feet."
 (New Yorker festival, 2005)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/cover-boys/2005/12/29/1135732674254.html?page=fullpage

"First, let me say that writers now, if I can put it this way, are inside history in a way they haven't been before. For instance, the idea that the planet was a finite commodity would have no resonance for a residence of 17th-century England any more than it would have done for the dog at his feet."
 (University of Manchester panel, 2007) http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/site_content.php?name=Previous_Podcasts (10:30)

On Philip Larkin and his girlfriend Monica Jones:

This eccentric old boot - I thought she was a bit strange - but coming back to the memory of this after the publication of [Larkin's letters and his biography], the memory became horrific to me.  The horror of Monica... I don't say this lightly or callously... looking back on this memory and seeing how parched his life was, how Monica was the main girl in his life, the love of his life. Re-examining the memory of this dinner, Monica looked like an urka. She didn't look like a female urka, either, she looked like a male urka. She sort of dominated the evening [...], and talked more than anyone else. She made a funny noise when she wasn't speaking: a little grunt of satisfaction. I remembered a friend who had a mad old relative..."
 (University of Manchester panel on Philip Larkin, 2008)
  (10:30)

"I spent an evening with Larkin and Monica and it’s described in my book Experience quite neutrally, as if they were both slightly eccentric. Years later, ten, fifteen years later when the Letters and the Life [the biography of Larkin by Andrew Motion] came out, I completely re-experienced that evening with horror. I didn’t realise that he was sexually so miserable, and I have to say she looked like an urka [a Russian criminal from the bottom of society]: like a male urka. Really butch. And she dominated the evening in a weird way. She was awful. A beast. And I thought, that is the love of his life."
(Prospect interview, 2010) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/martin-amis/

In 1982 I had dinner with Philip and Monica [...] at the time I found found the occasion only mildly bizarre, and wrote about it cheerfully enough in a memoir published in 2000 (although I see that I did describe Monica as 'virile'. That understates the case). Ten years on, I look back at that evening with something close to horror. In Monica's presence, Larkin behaved like the long-suffering nephew of an uncontrollably eccentric aunt. And she was the love of his life.
(Introduction to his selection of Larkin's poems, 2011)

On fictional response and 9/11

[novels are] messages from your subconscious history. They come from the back of your mind, not from its forefront."
 (Experience, 2000)

As Norman Mailer said, the temptation to rush in is immense, but you've got to let it simmer, back-boil it. This is true of every experience for writing; it has to have a chance to get into your unconscious and up your spinal column. You can't do it with the front of the brain.
(interview for powells.com, 2003) http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/old-martin-amis-is-in-your-face-again-by-dave/

"Norman Mailer said soon after September 11th that the writer's temptation [is] to wade straight in [...] you have to resist the initial temptation because - I found this is more or less universal - a writer needs two or three years to process an event, especially one of that size, because what needs to happen is the unconscious - sitting around thinking about it will buy you a certain distance but it's a sort of glandular process in the end, you have to let your body absorb it, you've got to think about it silently, not in words, but let it soak in to your body."
(interview with Bill Moyers, 2006)
 (1:43)

"As Norman Mailer said when 9/11 happened, the temptation to charge in should be resisted because what happens with writing is that you receive the stimuli and they go down into your subconscious, and what settles settles, and what doesn't doesn't. You find, after a couple of years, that you've got something to write about."
 (Interview for The Observer, 2006) http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/01/fiction.martinamis1?cat=books&type=article

"Norman Mailer said the temptation was to rush in on September 12th, but he said, and we all agree, that it takes several years for public events to filter down into the unconscious, and that's where novels come from. You can't do it from the top of your head, from the frontal brain, it has to go right through your system and come out the other side."
(Literature in the 21st century panel, University of Manchester 2007)
http://media.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/humanities/mp3s/ahc/21st_century_writing/amis.mp3
 (1:30)

"It goes from the front of the brain to the back of the brain and down the spine into the cortex, and enters your unconscious [...] as Norman Mailer said, the temptation to charge in with fiction is very great, but you must let it make that process: it must weave and trickle through you, and then perhaps you'll have something to say."
(57 minutes in)

"Norman Mailer - rest in peace - said that when September 11th happened he wanted to write a novel about it on September 12th - beginning on September the 12th. He said that the temptation to rush in is immense [...] These experiences have to make a three-year journey, roughly, down the cerebellum and spinal cord into wherever it is your fiction comes from - the unconscious, basically: they have to process that."
(Video interview for Prospect magazine, 2009.)
. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXcdCu7jpo&feature=youtube_gdata_player
 (opening remarks)


On the invigorating effect of tragedy

"I think that good stuff, good literature, is incapable of depressing anyone, otherwise there would be a bloodbath in the theatre at the end of King Lear."
(Desert Island Discs, 1996)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/castaway/198eb7d3  (8 minutes in)

"I don't think any interesting work of art can possibly be depressing--otherwise, King Lear would kill more people than cholera."
 (Washingtonpost.com webchat, 2003)

Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.
(introduction to his selection of Larkin's poems, 2011)

On book-reviewers' demands for fiction

"The current complaint, which I have already seen a number of times, goes something like this: can we please have a moratorium on novels about science! There will be, of course, no moratorium on novels about science. That is where the novel is heading, to fill a vacuum created, perhaps, by the failure of the sister discipline, philosophy of science, and by the indifference or contempt in which scientists hold it. Scientists don't care what the novelists say either."
(Experience, 2000 )

[...] the complaints of such a reviewer when they say things like "can we have a moratorium on...". They've been saying that recently about science - and it's true that, I think, in the coming decades, writers, novelists and poets will in some sense be philosophers of science [...] but no scientist today reads or has anything but contempt for philosophy of science. Science is out there on its own, and I think scientists will fill that void - there's nothing to be done about that."
(University of Manchester, literature in the 21st century, 2007)
 (12 minutes in)

On what cannot be known about the universe yet:

"I wouldn't call myself an atheist any more. I think that's it's a sort of crabbed word. And agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast that it would be premature. We're about eight Einsteins away from getting any kind of handle on the universe. So there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all. But why is the universe so incredibly complicated? Why is it so over our heads? That worries me and sort of makes me delay my vote on the existence of some intelligence. Not a being, but an intelligence. And I don't mean intelligent design. I just mean why is it so vast, as Updike said, why not this attractive spattering of stars in the background, [that would] be perfectly enough, you know? Why all these multiple universes, these parallel universes? These extraordinary quasars and black holes. What do we need all that for? So many questions remain, that I wouldn't call myself an atheist any more."
 (Bill Moyers interview, 2006)
(18:50)

"It is amazing - the total tonnage of what we don't know about the universe is truly humiliating. It turns out - it has recently turned out - that the macro-world - the world of the very large - is almost as Taoist and weird and convoluted and counterintuitive as the microworld - the sub-atomic world. For instance, in the real universe if you go outside and throw your keys in the air, they not only do not return to your hand, they accelerate up into infinity. We have discovered that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating, and no-one has any idea why. Something like - some humiliating figure like - 98 per cent of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy, which we are in the pathetic position of having to call "dark material" - that's all we know about it. So, standing as we do about 30 or 40 Albert Einsteins away from even the most rudimentary grasp of the universe..."
  (panel on literature and religion, Univeristy of Manchester, 2007) .

"It seems to me very significant that for the last two generations - thirty years perhaps - all science or cosmology has garnered is humiliation - they keep finding things out that destroy past knowledge - for instance that the universe is expanding but also accelerating in its expansion - a cosmologist said to me that's like coming up behind your house, throwing your keys in the air, and instead of coming back into your hands they go on going up. That's how radically it attacks previous knowledge. And I think in all thought about human destiny and the destiny of the universe, what we have to acknowledge - and it feels like a proof of something - that the universe is much cleverer than we are, and no-one knows what all this superfluous, unreadable intelligence is, and it sounds almost like a proof of the existence of God, but it's certainly proof of a higher intelligence, i.e. the universe, and why is it so much cleverer than we are? We're 10 Einsteins away from getting close to an understanding of the universe."
 (TimesTalks panel with AO Scott, El Doctorow and Margaret Atwood, 2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66mI4DImKv0&feature=youtube_gdata_player (1:14:30)

After such a farrago of recycling, it's hard not to think of the Penguin Classics edition of Saul Bellow's novel More Die of Heartbreak, which contains an introduction by Amis that appeared in an earlier book of essays, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, in 1993, and before that was the text of a paper he gave for a Saul Bellow conference in 1987, the year of the novel's publication. Even Amis's greatest hero - ("I was his ideal reader" -Experience) - must make do with regurgitated rather than fresh consideration.

Amis's virtues - or lack of them - as a novelist are a whole other debate, but as a cultural commentator - a course which, as a panel junkie, Professor of Creative Writing, the most interviewed novelist of his generation,  a political essayist and a commentator on everything from Islamic fundamentalism to Katie Price, he has inescapably and relentlessly chosen - his position is untenable until he starts to try out more new material on the road. Perhaps he'l let me have that last cliche.




Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels:

Friday, 15 June 2012

Ian McEwan Reconsidered







Ian McEwan is often mistaken for a major novelist. I've made this mistake in my time. After reading his early, taut yet graceful novel The Cement Garden in the Sixth Form, I sought out a later book, Enduring Love. It is a seductive book for a teenager with a love of reading and budding realisation of the potential of the modern novel to discover. Its opening chapter - among the greatest in all of fiction - describes a hot air balloon accident which the protagonist Joe and four other men - a doctor, a young man, a farmer and his labourer - attempt to prevent. Joe is enjoying a picnic in the Chilterns with his girlfriend. He turns and sees a stray hot-air balloon: its pilot has fallen out, but his child is still trapped in the basket. The five of them run towards and then cling to the balloon; they shout to the child to jump out, but he's paralysed with fear. As the balloon rises, the men let go, but after hitting the ground, the they look up and see one of the five was braver than the other four: the doctor held on. The balloon soars, and the doctor falls to his death. This is a brilliant piece of writing, generating imagery that works both as an exciting piece of action and as a metaphor for thematic concerns and philosophical questions. It is up there with Magwitch accosting Pip in the graveyard. Atonement - which I read that summer as a delayed post-A-level treat to myself - is also an exciting book to start one's acquaintance with contemporary fiction, with its marvellous evocation of summer heat, childhood innocence, sexual tension and the eerie images generated when the one misinterprets the others. It differs from Enduring Love in sustaining its high quality to the end of the book, and left this reader eager to read anything McEwan published the minute it hit bookshelves.


Things that were overrated tend to end up being underrated, and vice versa. It's not unfashionable to deride McEwan these days, but it tends to be for the wrong reasons. A piece in the New Statesman by Ziauddin Sardar lamented the rise of "Blitcon", by which he meant the supposedly conservative politics of the three leading British novelists, McEwan, Amis and Rushdie (which amounted to their opposition to the invasion of Iraq being accompanied by reservations). Like the (admittedly not unfounded) attacks on Amis by Ronan Bennett and Terry Eagleton following some revolting remarks he made about Muslims, and the attacks on McEwan for not boycotting Israel, they invite one's sympathy for the beseiged novelist to a tiny extent, if only because one can't help suspecting that they seem to demand a rigid, orthodox political and social outlook which is anathema to literature. Would Evelyn Waugh, had he lived in this age, be established as one of the greatest craftsmen of English prose, or would we pretend otherwise because as a person he said nasty things? The extraordinary writer and prose stylist James Ellroy is on record as saying he loves Bill O'Reilly, believes the Rodney King incident was blown out of proportion by the liberal media and that he shook Kenneth Starr by the hand to congratulate him on his role in exposing Clinton; while Ben Elton describes himself as a believer in the politics of Clement Attlee. Obviously Elton's politics are preferable, while Ellroy's comments make one's teeth grind, but whose novels have we truly benefited from? Do we really require nice, calm, sensible orthodox beliefs from novelists? The lack of political spark among our more feted contemporary writers is certainly depressing and worthy of a separate essay, (since I posted this, McEwan has made transphobic comments, defended the bigoted Ayaan Hirsi Ali, made lazy attacks on supposedly "no-platforming" students and joined Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Amis and Philip Pullman in taking an anti-Corbyn stance) but when it comes to assessing McEwan's novels, the reactionary nature of his politics (mirrored in many ways by the often downright repugnant politics of Amis,  and friends such as Dawkins, Rushdie, Steven Pinker, Howard Jacobson and Hitchens) requires a more literary riposte.


On the other hand, the literary world's objections to McEwan aren't much use either. John Banville's excoriating review of Saturday for The New York Review of Books failed to burst McEwan's bubble because it revealed a viewpoint far more impoverished than McEwan's. Banville genuinely finds it unconvincing that a neurosurgeon should know so little about Matthew Arnold. And there we'll leave him.


There's also often a laziness in the way supposedly refined prose is deprecated. John Crace described McEwan's prose as "forensic and cold" while Rick Gekosi dismissed Saturday as a book containing too much "studiedly fine writing". This is sloppy, unfinished criticism. If there's something wrong with a piece of writing, we should identify why it isn't actually fine even if it sometimes gives that impression, or why the forensic detail isn't enough. After all, Evelyn Waugh's prose is cold and Updike's is studiedly fine, but those writers could (and rightly are) just as easily be praised for those qualities. As anyone who reads the anonymous critics in Private Eye’s dreary “Literary Review” section knows, "It's all a bit too neat", "if only he'd stop showing off" and "the writing draws too much attention to itself" are the familiar cries of the critic who doesn't want to agree with the praise for the author, but can't be bothered to properly reassess the writing and offer grounds for disagreement.


What, then, is the real flaw with McEwan's work, which makes his books so unimpressive on rereading? I think the main problem is that unlike, say, Anita Brookner or John Banville, McEwan is often seen - and clearly sees himself - as a visceral writer, someone whose writing packs that extra punch and that extra illicit thrill that makes him appeal to more than just Frank Kermode. This leads, inevitably, to the "Ian Macabre" label that accompanied McEwan's more overtly horrific first four books (two collections of stories, First Love Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, and the novels The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers). Since The Child in Time, McEwan's fiction has tended to favour more redemptive characters and denounements, but the moment of visceral horror has remained his most prominent motif. In every one of his books, something frightening happens (the twist on this occurs in On Chesil Beach, when the thing that goes wrong is actually just marital premature ejaculation, but becomes violently horrible by being shown from a sexually uneducated bride's point of view). He possesses an admirable desire to thrill the reader, but is thwarted by the curse of his generation: in contrast to that of Graham Greene (whose novels McEwan admits to not greatly admiring in his Paris Review interview because "the prose is too flat for my taste") the plotting muscles have atrophied. Raymond Chandler used to say that when he got blocked he brought in a man with a gun. McEwan prefers a man with a knife. The latter tactic is used to heat things up in Saturday, while Enduring Love opts for both that and Chandler's option. The scene where two hitmen working for the antagonist make an attempt on Joe's life in a restaurant certainly jolts the reader, but it also renders the plot nonsensical (why do the hitmen shoot the wrong man when their employer can give a description of Joe? Why do it in a high-class crowded restaurant when he has Joe's address? Why does he attend himself but pay others to do the shooting? Is it just a dumb coincidence that the man they kill by accident is a more credible assassination victim?). By the time of McEwan's most recent novel Solar, the reader can see the thriller moment coming: when the protagonist is arguing with the eager young physicist next to the polar bear rug that's been present as a symbol of Man's feeble effort against global warming all along, who doesn't expect the latter to trip over it and break his neck? It's the feeblest moment in fiction since EM Forster tipped a bookcase upon Leonard Bast, and certainly a long way from Miss Havisham's wedding dress catching fire.


Unfortunately, adding dead bodies isn't the only way McEwan has tried to sugar the pill: in Solar he tries to be funny. The scene in which McEwan tries out the old "he kept taking my cigarettes/biscuits/crisps/KitKat then I lifted my newspaper/looked in my bag and there were my cigarettes/biscuits/crisps/KitKat"' routine without realising this had been made famous by Douglas Adams and widely circulated as both a gag and an urban legend is one of his most notorious mistakes (after being appraised of this during a reading  from the work-in-progress at a literary festival, he clumsily inserted it into the book itself, with someone telling Beard later on that crispgate is a common experience that Douglas Adams and others have written about. Yeah, that makes it a lot less embarrassing.) This and the inexplicable scene in which Beard attempts to make his wife jealous by turning up the radio to give the impression he has female company (a scene that violates the laws of logic and physics almost as much as it does the laws of comedy) see McEwan actually straying into the area of incompetence.


When one looks past these "and then a shot rang out" moments and the embarrassing (and hopefully one-off) attempt at humour, all one finds on the page is the voice of a polite, bookish, liberal writer, the voice of a man happy to discuss Darwin, religious fundamentalism, the war with Iraq and nuclear weapons over a nice dinner. and for whom literature and classical music are factors in his reactions to anything. The trouble is, many other people aren't like this, and McEwan's novels are about other people (in contrast, say, to Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels, where it doesn't matter that the protagonist sounds like a novelist because he is one). In The Child in Time, this is McEwan's idea of how a couple whose child has been abducted cope with the crisis:










She was reading mystical or sacred texts - St John of the Cross, Blake's longer poems, Lao-tzu. Her pencilled annotations crowded the margins. She worked hours each day at a Bach partita. The rasp of double-stopped notes, the spiralling frenzy of semiquavers warned him away. For his part he made the most approaches to a serious drinking habit and indulged the books of his adolescence, reading of unencumbered, solitary men whose troubles were the world's. Hemingway, Chandler, Kerouac.









Not only does he find it impossible to imagine characters who don’t rely on literature to help them get through tough times - even one as hideous as this - but he divides the reading preferences according to gender. Similarly, in Enduring Love Joe's girlfriend Clarissa, after witnessing the horrific sight of the man falling from the balloon, is instantly reminded of Milton's line "Hurl'd headlong flaming from th'Ethereal sky". One is reminded of Orwell’s criticism of Graham Greene, in his review of The Heart of the Matter, that too many of his characters were starting to write poetry.

McEwan relies on extensively researching the occupations of his characters. He shadowed a neurosurgeon for the writing of Saturday, while Joe's job as a science writer and his girlfriend's as a Keats scholar in Enduring Love clearly also led their creator to do his homework, but constant details of singed bone and bloodclots or digessions on evolution and Wordsworth's snubbing of Keats - both often occurring right in the thick of the action - do not create the illusion that these are different people to the author; only good writing can do that.

Other McEwan characters are blatant avatars. In The Child in Time, McEwan dares to let his imagination loose upon the most macabre nightmare of all: suppose Ian had ended up as a mere successful children's author? Sadly, this dystopia was explored further in McEwan's worst novel, The Daydreamer, a hideously twee children's book with a preface in which its author - no longer pretending to be a fictional character - argues that children's literature has no literary value ("when did you last curl up with The Swiss Family Robinson?"), but since it provides an opportunity to bond with one's children, here's his own contribution, which was certainly good enough for his own children ( to which he dutifully read each finished chapter). This insufferable, patronising tone - after a few sentences of which, the reader feels like they've been stuck in the interval of a school play hearing parents use the phrases "he plays at the fourth grade level" "already reading Harry Potter" and "hoping to get into Bennett Memorial: his sister's there already" - is rarely absent in a McEwan novel, and strips his work of a great deal of imaginative power. It renders it incapable of empathy. McEwan tries to compensate for this by adding winsomely self-deprecating vignettes on the hubris of the novelist. Henry Perowne, the protagonist of Saturday, is proudly displayed before us us an example of McEwan's magnanamosity: he can actually write about someone who doesn't like novels. "It seemed almost blasphemous to write about someone who doesn't think Anna Karenina is much cop," sighed McEwan in an interview. It should seem second-nature. Reasons for why somone doesn't like novels are no more interesting than an account of why I never took up gardening, but McEwan offers reasons for Henry's lack of interest which sound less like the opinions of someone who isn't McEwan than inverted claims for the novelist's supremacy, as do the comments on science's superiority to literature from Thelma Darke in The Child In Time and Joe in Enduring Love (it's interesting, too, that while Henry has no time for novels, he's able to devise a sickly pun about his daughter based on a Henry James title: "What Daisy knows!"). It builds up to a painfully cute moment where the plot details of books Henry disliked are listed, and one of them is unmistakably The Child in Time.

Even when the sentiments are reasonable, they often strike one as the words of a well-researched novelist at his computer screen rather than the thoughts of someone in the outside world. When Perowne drives past the anti-Iraq war rally, he notices a placard for The British Association of Muslims, and McEwan writes: "Henry remembers that outfit well. It explained in its newspaper recently that apostasy from Islam was an offence punishable by death." A perfectly good point, an important one in fact, but is it really feasible that someone on their way to a squash game would think this while glancing out of the car window and seeing one of their placards go by? Henry has extraordinary powers of lightning-fast visual recognition if so. Here Natasha Walter, in an otherwise favourable review of On Chesil Beach, was perceptive:










[The characters’] innocence is seen as political as well as sexual. They meet at a CND meeting in Oxford, and McEwan seems to suggest that anyone who was active in the peace movement then was naive - as he suggested about those who protest against war in our time in Saturday. "Florence knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes - clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design - was essentially a beneficial force in the world." This characterisation of peace activists as hopeless naifs stuck in my throat, but you cannot judge a novelist for his political views.





It would indeed stick in most intelligent readers' throats because it sounds more like a novelist's assumption than the passing thought of someone at the time: to use DH Lawrence's indispensable term, McEwan's thumb is in the scale. Nevertheless, McEwan was irked by this fine point and insisted in a subsequent letter to the Guardian that







Historically, such a position was perfectly possible; I knew of people who thought this even in the 1980s.



He unconsciously validated Natasha Walter's argument, however, with the following:






When she was still at her primary school I was campaigning, writing and speaking against nuclear weapons. I was a member of European Nuclear Disarmament and travelled to the Soviet Union with Mary Kaldor and Jonathan Steele of the Guardian to make contact and common cause with the unofficial and harassed peace movement there. With the composer Michael Berkeley I wrote an oratorio against the nuclear arms race. I am proud to have appeared in public with EP Thompson.






It's hard to see how anyone can deny a patronising attitude while using the phrase "when she was still at her primary school"; this airy, assumptive quality in McEwan's writing, in his novels as well as his letters, often has a whiff of "I tell you, these kids today..." about it. A key scene in Saturday dramatises arguments for and against invading Iraq in the form of a quarrel between Henry and his daughter Daisy. This doesn't for a second read like a conversation between two human beings. Although Daisy is wearisomely gifted (she's studied English at Oxford, won the Newdigate Prize and just published her first collection of poetry, with the revolting title My Saucy Bark and the quotes offered to the reader taken from the real-world source of Craig Raine), McEwan makes every argument of Daisy's fatuous. and every one of Henry's considered. Many people of Daisy's age would have rather more stimulating arguments against the invasion, including those without the prodigious literary talent. The result reads like one middle-aged person arguing with whatever he imagines the impetuous youngsters of today are saying.

In Solar the problem has exacerbated. The protagonist, a lauded scientist named Michael Beard, is at the ICA. A caricature of a pretentious left-wing academic speaks on the topic of science as a mere social construct, and is followed by a nervous female academic from Tel Aviv, who struggles with her contribution because the audience, according to McEwan, are resentful of her Israeli background and equate her with oppression of the Palestinians. Again, the problem is not the reactionary sentiments - the offensive equation of criticism of Israel's foreign policy with antisemitism, the portrayal of the next generation of leftists as hateful - that makes this bad writing, but the way they are panel-beaten into the shape of fiction.

When McEwan attempts to introduce characters with none of his viewpoints, the results are often embarrassing. There's a dreadful scene in The Child in Time in which the protagonist, Stephen, is involved in a car accident and rescues a chirpy comedy cockney lorry driver named Joe trapped in his vehicle. Addressing Stephen as "mate", he asks him to take down several messages for him in case he doesn't make it out of the wreck. The first one is a message of love to his girlfriend, insisting he would have come back to her and the kids eventually, another is to a friend apologising for not being able to make the Snooker tournament on Saturday or to pay back the 100 quid he owed him and another is a riposte addressed to a teacher who never thought he'd make anything of his life. Stephen helps him out of the lorry, the two share a drink and a round of "for he's a jolly good fellow", and both decide to live life to the full, in Joe's case means "I'm going back to Jane and the kids and bugger Wendy McGuire." It's a middle-class writer's twee, folksy idea of what working-class life is like. Instead of verisimilitude we get sentimentality.

Hari Kunzru, appearing on BBC4's documentary In Their Own Words, and to some extent Will Self, in a profile collected in his book Junk Mail, both noted that in Martin Amis's novels, there's a curious sense of class anxiety manifested in scenes in which a tougher working-class guy threatens the middle-class protagonist. This is also strongly present in McEwan's work, particularly in Saturday and Enduring Love. Baxter (he has no first name) in the former novel is first encountered by Perowne running from a Spearmint Rhino with his cronies (no doubt having indulged in distinctly unMcEwanesque behaviour) whereupon they attack our mild-mannered hero. It's oddly like the confrontations that Clark Kent, Bruce Banner and Peter Parker often endure, only without the superpowers (in much the same way that the squash game where Perowne and his friend clash resembles something a neutered Ian Fleming would have written). Having said that, Henry has a superpower of a kind: he can use his superior intelligence to talk the lower classes into laying down arms. He diagnoses Baxter's Huntingdon's disease there and then, and talks him out of violence with a promise of a diagnosis. And did I mention that the two cronies are called Nigel and Nark? McEwan really should have had the guts to call them Bebop and Rocksteady.

The novel climaxes with one of the iconically ghastly moments in modern fiction, in which Henry's daughter's recital of Matthew Arnold's ”Dover Beach” moves Baxter into holding off his attack, demonstrating that some superpowers are hereditary, as well as providing the most stirringly idiotic argument for the power of literature since Joseph Brodsky's declaration in his Nobel Prize speech that "for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens."

Jed Parry, the antagonist of Enduring Love, might seem to be exempt from this criticism due to hints of wealth, but it's striking that from his first appearance his accent is described as having a touch of cockney, and he speaks with the Australian question intonation, or as McEwan puts it:












his generation's habit of making a statement on the raising inflection of a question - in humble imitation of Americans, or Australians, or, as I heard one linguist explain, too mired in relative judgements, too hesitant and apologetic to say how things were in the world. Of course I didn't think any of this at the time. All I heard was a whine of powerlessness, and I relaxed.






The hasty insertion of the penultimate sentence and the clause about the linguist can't disguise the snobbery here (and given that Jed is a murderous stalker, and that the letters from him that form some of the chapters are full of psychotic delusion and nothing else, one can hardly play the unreliable narrator card and plead that McEwan is implying that there's more to Jed than his narrator Joe tells us).

Tom Aldous in Solar is a mixture of McEwan's prejudices. Like Parry, he has a pony-tail, and just as Parry retained a cockney accent despite a hint of a posh background, here we are asked to believe that, despite attending Imperial College, Cambridge and Caltech at Pasadena, he still retains a Norfolk accent "suggestive to Beard of hedgerows and hayricks" which "seemed to mock what he was trying to to say". McEwan ensures we don't forget this last point by nearly repeating the sentence two pages later with a reference to: "the Norfolk lad's bucolic tone, so at odds with what he was trying to say". As with the references to the Australian Question Intonation in Enduring Love, the idea that the youth of today - particuarly those without Received Pronounciation accents - can not truly articulate themselves is a given. His eagerness to save the planet makes him yet another of McEwan's "these kids today" caricatures.

Rodney Tarpin in the same book - Beard has to face off again each of them within pages of each other - is a more straightforward, Baxteresque bogeyman. With all four characters, there's a tangible sense of McEwan struggling to keep snobbery in check, as in this dubious passage:












Beard was disappointed not to see a tattoo, a snake or motorbike or hymn to his mum. But the physicist, as he fleetingly acknowledged, was an ageing bourgeois in the grip of stereotypical thinking




What's striking about the second sentence, rushing in to chide its predecessor just like the the ones in the passage from Enduring Love, is the sense of damage limitation: it hardly sounds like the thoughts of a man in the middle of an intimidating and potentially violent confrontation with his wife's lover (who would ever have time to rebuke themselves for bourgeois stereotyping when caught up in such a predicament?) , but it does sound like the afterthought of a novelist aware of the snobbery in his previous sentence.

The threats posed by Baxter, Parry, and Tarpin are both violent and sexual. Baxter holds a knife to Perownes's wife's throat and attempts to rape Daisy, Tarpin cuckolds Beard (as does Aldous) and beats both him and his wife, Parry (suffering an entirely fictional psychological condition) is convinced that Joe shares his love for him, and threatens his heterosexuality as well as his beautiful girlfriend (again with a knife). Near the climax of the book, Joe is reduced to visiting a bunch of drug dealers literarily too stoned to know what day it is to buy a gun. There's a real sense of entering the heart of darkness, at least for McEwan. Consider this passage:












It was impossible not to look at his moustache [...] It was dyed a fierce burnt orange, and ramrod-straight, waxed to prissy Prussian points. I brought a hand to my face to conceal a smile. I felt weightless and shivery. The shock of yesterday's shooting, this plan of reckless acquisition, the background fear - all combined to make me feel I wasn't really here, and I worried that I might do or say something stupid. [...] I could not stop the similes accumulating round Steve's moustache. Two rusty nails hammered outwards from his gums. The pointy masts of a schooner I built as a kid. Something to hang tea towels on.



Has any author been more frightened by a moustache? (and note again that those last sentences read like similes that a novelist would create but that no person in that situation would think) Like Perowne, Joe finds himself relying on language to counter brutality. When two of them have a hideous fight he tells the ringleader - a guy whose "mighty forearms"' are emphasised - "You're going to kill him. Is that what you want? [...] If he dies you'll be inside for the rest of your life." When one of them offers some vaguely hippyish advice on the cause of allergies, Joe tells us "When I said this was unfalsifiable, he looked pleased. I began to think he might not detest me after all." It's impossible not to think of Kunzru's take on Amis when reading these scenes: a sense of fear that the natives might get restless, and that the rungs on the ladders of literature, science or education may give way when one tries to make one's escape, seems to prevail.




It's not just his male characters that embarrass, though: McEwan is sporadically the worst writer of female characters since Dickens. The three offenders here are The Child In Time, Enduring Love and Saturday (Atonement, The Innocent and The Cement Garden are exempt). The Child In Time subscribes to a winsome kind of gender-essentialism: the vague, half-assed implication that women know things that men don't. While Stephen responds to the abduction of his daughter by drinking, reading Hemingway and Chandler and generally going to pieces, his wife Julie cuts her hair short, plays the piano, reads mystical texts, and spends some time at a monastery. It's Stephen's lot, as a man, to spend the novel on his own, trying and failing to find a way of dealing with his loss, while Julie has the mystical feminine wisdom that allows her to cope. The idea that when your child has been abducted leaving your husband on his own to go and find yourself in a monastery might be cruel or even dangerous (wouldn't he be a suicide risk?) is never raised. Her appearance at the end is like the appearance of a Guru at the culmination of a spiritual quest: after holding forth to an unquestioning Stephen about why she had to deal with this by herself, she performs the most feminine miracle of all and gives birth, which McEwan seems to think will heal them both. In McEwan's universe, men really are from Mars and women really are from Venus.

Enduring Love has the same flaw. The book is sold to us as an unreliable narrator novel: McEwan constantly implies that Joe is missing the point, responding to his crisis in the same misguided masculine way that Stephen did, while his girlfriend Clarissa deals with it in the wise feminine way; yet it's hard to see exactly what Joe did wrong. He tells Clarissa that Jed is stalking him, but in scenes oddly reminiscent of those unconvincing "there's someone outside with an axe/ Well, there's no-one there now" moments in horror movies, Clarissa is sceptical, even though the idea that she wouldn't be frightened by this is nonsensical, and her reasons for not believing the threat are hard to fathom. At one point, her only response when Joe shows her Jed's letters is to comment that that two men's handwriting is very similar, but this ludicrous implication of hers (who would say such a thing in those circumstances?) is forgotten about by the time it becomes clear that Joe is not suffering from a Fight Club syndrome. At the end of the book, a chapter consists of a letter from her to Joe. Although Joe tells us he dislikes its wounded, self-righteous tone, McEwan clearly wishes us to see the story from both angles. Unfortunately it's impossible to disagree with Joe. An earlier chapter tells the story from Clarissa's point-of-view to demonstrate why she doesn't believe Joe, but the details McEwan piles on - she's got a touch of glandular fever, her seminar was a failure because her students (these kids today!) didn't do the required reading - don't change the fact that any sane person whose partner tells them that a madman is stalking them in person, by phone and by letter would react with concern rather than scepticism.

In Saturday, McEwan continues his unattractive habit of idealising his female characters. Daisy Perowne is perhaps the worst character in his whole oeuvre: it's quite chilling to see how utterly unable McEwan is to evoke either genuine love or warmth between father and daughter, or a love of literature. The texts that Daisy loves, studies at university or recites feel like a standard reading list, and the opinions she offers hardly lend any more verisimilitude:









You ninny! [...] You Gradgrind! It's literature, not physics! [...] Look at your Mme Bovary again [...] he was warning the world against people just like you"






Does that really sound like a human being? Even Dead Poet’s Society wasn’t that cloying. We're also told that she can recite a page of The Golden Bowl, that she thinks "people can't live without stories" (a hideous sentiment in a world where so many people are deprived of the things they actually can’t live without, and McEwan's patronising acknowledgement that Henry is "living proof this isn't true” is scarcely better: he puts forth the proposal that people who don't like fiction aren't dead as if it were something that's only occurred to him lately), that she was upset that poor Gregor Samsa was treated so badly when she first read Metamorphoses, and that she has told Henry that a Jane Austen novel is a microcosm that gives you the whole world. McEwan is oddly conflicted towards her: he uses her as his poster girl for literature and as the antithesis of Baxter, and yet he mocks her as an emblem of the naivety of her generation (during her second year of Oxford, she comes under the sway of a charismatic teacher and announces that madness is a social construct to keep the rich in power, only to be deflated when Henry offers to show her a mental hospital. What kind of moron is she?). Towards the end, of course, she turns out to be pregnant, and as with Julie this has a mystical quality, almost as useful as “Dover Beach” for repelling rapists.

Henry's wife, like Stephen‘s, is blandly perfect to the point of non-existence (despite being a newspaper lawyer: the sharp moral judgement Henry displayed when seeing the British Association of Muslims from his car window doesn't seem to extend to his wife's job, and McEwan seems no more interested in it than he is. Oh for the days of Dickens when novelists set out to grab lawyers by the throat).

It’s not just McEwan’s characters that are impoverished due to his bookish liberalism: something sleazier is needed for satire, a genre he often attempts. The feeble anti-Thatcher satire which feels like an after-thought in The Child in Time and the attempt to write a poisonous black moral fable in the Evelyn Waugh/Muriel Spark mode that led to the lightweight Booker winner Amsterdam are topped only by McEwan's excruciatingly bad screenplay for The Ploughman's Lunch, a best-forgotten Richard Eyre film. It runs through the motions of an angry anti-Thatcher satire, and yet ends up just as prissy, sheltered and smug as any government. There's a deeply patronising scene in which the protagonist (played by Jonathan Pryce) returns home to his working-class parents, and some quite unbearable scenes of him and a friend (Tim Curry) sniggering their way through the Q and A at a mutual friend's poetry reading as numerous members of the public are foolish enough to hazard comments on the poem.. One of tbe most fatuous scenes in the film sees the same two playing squash (always a bad sign in McEwan's work), and then sitting down in the Court and smoking, and then giggling when the Squash Court Attendants rebuke them. By the end, the best McEwan can manage as a symbol for Thatcherite ruthlessness and corruption of the idealistic is the revelation that Curry was sleeping with Pryce's would-be girlfriend all along. McEwan has often said that working with Eyre on The Ploughman's Lunch was so enjoyable that it spoiled him for future screenwriting, as he didn't realise that it wasn't normally such a cozy experience. It's hard not to picture McEwan and Eyre smirking at their own wit, much like Pryce and Curry in the Squash Court and at the poetry reading, while they go to lunch, scout out locations, meet the cast, compare notes with literary friends, and bask in the warmth of knowing that they've helped bring down the Government, all thanks to a film that only their friends will see. McEwan, as we saw in his letter, is someone who fought the nuclear arms race by writing an oratorio about it.

Satire requires an acknowledgement that some horrors are irreducible. What's ultimately nauseating about The Child In Time is that McEwan creates a believable and horrifying situation (the abduction of a young child when a parent is distracted during a visit to a supermarket), but instead of honestly following through this terrible event and its implications, attempts to slap a happy ending and his own brand of cozy warm rationalism onto it. The book seems to confuse abduction with bereavement. At the book's denounement, Stephen finally says to Julie "she was a lovely daughter, a lovely girl", and the two cry, finally grieving: but McEwan seems to forget that no parent could talk of their child in the past tense until they knew she was dead. During the couple's affirmation of their love as Julie prepares to give birth, we encounter this odd passage:












while they could never redeem the loss of their daughter, they would live her through their new child, and never close their minds to the possibility of her return






So they will continue searching for her? One hopes so, but until she's found, dead or alive, the couple can't regenerate and focus on their new child in the way McEwan seems to envisage. It feels like an afterthought of the author's: does he mean they will attempt to get the investigation and public interest going - as any parent would have to - or does he just mean they won't forget?

By contrast, a great novel like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five triumphs due to its open acknowledgement that the traumatic event it describes - the Dresden fire-bombing - cannot be made more palatable by a novel, or reduced to something noble or majestic in its tragedy. Vonnegut and the reader cannot make sense of the horror of it at the start of the novel, and they still can't by the end. ("this book will be a failure", he warns us at the start). Paradoxically, Vonnegut's refusal to console and his acknowledgement of the inadequacy of fiction to do justice to such horror results in a far greater tribute to the victims of war and a far more affecting portrayal of trauma and suffering. One thinks also of Atom Egoyan's magnificent film The Sweet Hereafter, about a schoolbus crash that deprives a town of its children. It conveys the searing agony of a town that has been visited by a Pied Piper, and unlike The Child In Time, it has the courage to follow this through without flinching: there's no sense that this pain will pass once a new child is born.

Because McEwan's focus tends to be towards the "novel-of-ideas", his characters often suffer because they are at the mercy of whatever intellectual concept he wants them to enact. The short story "Psychopolis", the novels The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and On Chesil Beach and the previously mentioned Iraq war discussion in Saturday all focus on couples so that McEwan can explore dualistic ideas. The first three take whatever for-and-against debates McEwan is interested in at the time and once again hammer them into the shape of dialogue between two people. In Black Dogs, we are told that Bernard and June represent rationality and superstition respectively before we even meet them, whilst On Chesil Beach is marred on re-reading by the patronising way that Edward and Florence are set up to illustrate McEwan's assumption that sex began in 1963 (and while reviewers were quick to suggest those words of Larkin's as an epigraph for the novel, they missed the point that Larkin was simplifying for comic effect. It wasn't one of his more complex poems). The effect is too schematic for these characters to convince us as complicated human beings: McEwan seems too complacent in his assumptions regarding gender or social history to allow them to breath, and then develop in surprising ways.

An attempt to fuse his interest in couples and the state of the nation is naked in this line, again from that same passage (In fact, the same sentence) at the climax of The Child In Time:









In the wild expansiveness of their sorrow they undertook to heal everyone and everything, the Government, the county, the planet, but they would start with themselves.






Unlike in an oddly similar moment with Christopher Banks, the protagonist in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, whose bizarre fantasy of being a great detective extends to a belief he can stop the Second World War, (one is reminded also of McEwan's proud list of all the things he's done to stop nuclear proliferation while Natasha Walter was still at her primary school) there's little sense of madness, surrealism or delusion in this line. Instead, some attempt is made to wring some meaning out of the pointless scenes featuring Thatcher that have appeared throughout the book. It's tempting to see it as an emblem for McEwan and many other writers of his generation: earnestly vowing to heal the whole world, just as soon as they've sorted out their own problems. Could Stephen and Julie be planning an oratorio?

McEwan has produced good work: Atonement, The Cement Garden, The Innocent. The overpraise he has attracted, and his attempts to write both state-of-the-nation novels and those with plots gripping enough for a popular readership, have shown up the limits of his talent: his clumsy thriller plotting, his fruitless attempts to write convincingly about anyone other than himself, his fear of the working classes, his lack of patience with the younger generation, his inability to see through or subvert his more reactionary opinions and his tendency to take whatever ideas or research are interesting him at the moment and jam them into a fiction-shaped hole all rule him out from greatness, sometimes even from competence.
Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)