Martin Amis: The Biography [Hardcover]

Martin Amis: The Biography (2011) is the first biography of one of Britain's pre-eminent novelists of the late-twentieth century. Famous as much for his lifestyle as for his literary achievements, Martin Amis is a hugely provocative and controversial writer, and bridges the gap between popular culture and literary writing in a way that few, if any, authors have done in the past. Following on from his well received biography of Kingsley Amis, Richard Bradford was tasked with tackling the fascinating life of Amis Jnr. Indeed, if anything, Bradford's intimate knowledge of Amis snr. is a hindrance, seeping, redundantly, into the work too often. Overall though, Bradford aims to deliver a biography firmly based on an exploration of Martin's fiction, carefully correlating Amis's experience with the characters and tone of his novels.

Having written his own autobiography, Experience, in 2000 there is very little new information about Martin's personal life in Bradford's biography; its true strength lying in the interviews the biographer conducts with Amis himself, and select members of his circle, perhaps most notably Christopher Hitchens. However, there are parts of Amis's life which are not given proper space; the death of his alcoholic sister at the age of 40, his friendship with the rough-and-ready Rob Henderson, a relationship that, arguably, was as influential to Amis's fiction as the one with Hitchens, which is given far more space. Beyond eulogising about Amis's writing, Bradford presents Martin as a man of almost flawless character; a superb father, sensitive, handsome, gregarious, and magnificently witty. There is more than a hint of doe-eyed hero-worship here and one finds it impossible to accept, given what one already knows of his life, that Amis is as straight-forward and all round pleasant a character as that. In keeping with his patronizing polemic, Bradford, as an interviewer, shies away from the difficult questions; he never gets to the bottom of Amis's relationship with women - was he a sophisticated seducer, or did he just fall into a string of relationships?, he doesn't push for a fuller answer about Martin's molestation as a child, or his father's supposed alcoholism - events which must have had a significant impact on Amis's development. On top of this, in his evaluation of Amis's literary credentials, Bradford chooses to ignore Amis's biggest critics, providing a frightfully one-sided view of the man. Tellingly, every book listed in the bibliography is penned by Amis, Martin.

The writing is unforgivably sloppy with contradictions aplenty, frequent grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and sentences whose meanings are unintentionally ambiguous. Too often Bradford sprays literary superlatives around without offering deeper evaluation and criticism of the work in question, and one soon becomes immune to the incessant hyperbole. Indeed, each novel is introduced with such grand acclamations from Bradford that it is difficult to gauge exactly where each sits in Amis's canon, or how each was received by the wider circle of critics on publication. When relaying biographical events, Bradford commits the cardinal sin of slipping into the realm of invention; supplementing factual accounts with unrecorded dialogue to emphasise a point.

Some of Bradford's critical assertions seem a little off the mark and are rarely supported by evidence, or clear arguments, and one gets the impression that once he catches hold of an idea the biographer pushes forward with it obstinately regardless of the facts. However, Bradford draws neat parallels between Martin's characters and the people he spent time with, perhaps placing a little too much emphasis on this as an explanation for the development of his prose, but still providing interesting observations. He also manages to recreate the atmosphere of Martin's social circle, which he flourished under during the 1970s and 80s, very well. It is rumoured that Bradford and Amis fell out during the writing of the book, certainly this is not a fully-authorised biography, and it is suspected that the delay in publication was due to legal wrangling on Amis's side. Sadly, whether through authorial reticence, or legal pressure, the result is a biography without a cutting edge, which in no way illuminates Amis's life or work beyond currently available information. Amis is a complex character, and it will take a tenacious biographer to truly unravel the mythology that surrounds him, Bradford is not that man, and one suspects that the necessary degree of freedom and detachment to undertake such a proceeding may not be afforded a prospective chronicler of Amis's work while Martin is still writing.

I have a litany of small complaints to make against this book. For a start, there's way too much Kingsley Amis in it. The fact that Martin Amis had a dad who was also a novelist is not even the fourteenth most interesting thing about him, but Richard Bradford seems almost obsessed with it, a position that is explained by his previously having written the biography of, yes, you guessed it, Amis Snr. And when you DO want to know about MA's dad - for example, when he takes care of him in later life - you don't. So I found that annoying.

In addition, the Martin Amis you will meet in this book's pages is a sort of modern saint; there are loads too many emphatically-delivered details of what time he got home in order to cook his children's dinner (I don't think I would find that interesting in anyone's biography) and loving sections on how poor Mart didn't mean to leave any of his girlfriends or write really sexist books and anyway he behaved no worse than anyone else would have done who had practically all of London's female population throwing themselves at him because he was so deliciously funny and just as good-looking as Mick Jagger actually.

However from the very beginning, it is clear that our biographer is going to be rather idiosyncratic - from the start, Richard Bradford's in the story rather obtrusively, à la Charles Kinbote - by the end of about chapter 1 (for example) we know that he thinks global warming is a huge conspiracy, nuclear weapons are excellent and that the nanny state should stop preventing children canoeing around the Welsh coast should they wish to do so.

He then seems to think we should be spending quite a lot of the book judging MA's behaviour towards girls, prospective parents-in-law, interviewees, stepmothers, siblings, friends and agents, which seems one of the most fruitless activities to indulge in, in a literary biography, because how on earth can we really know what happened? And he indulges frequently in a habit he actually tells reviewers off for: "seeking shelter behind such makeshift adjectival substitutions for evaluation as 'powerful' 'dazzling' 'enthralling'". In fact Bradford often uses terms like these, 'outstanding' 'electrifying' 'hilarious', which rarely add anything to our understanding of the writer under discussion.

But actually NONE of these things stop the book being really enjoyable. If you like Martin Amis and you have read his books, it illuminates the circumstances of writing, the personal stuff swooshing around in the background to the novels, and it elucidates some of the mythical "million pound dentistry" things as well. I didn't know much about Amis's life and it was really interesting to read about his weird education, his sexy bachelor years, his odd and disciplined working practices, his love of darts, his fear of the apocalypse, etc etc. And even though I disagreed with many of Bradford's critical statements about Amis's writing (in the final chapter on MA's reputation, he says Money is as important a novel as Ulysses. Hmm) he HAS spurred me to go back to the novels and re-read, thinking now about how these books represent a time we lived through. Especially the last few novels Amis has written, which I have completely neglected.

So a number of caveats, and yet I still do recommend it!

Good grief. I thought this might be a little soft, given that the author had Amis' permission to write it, and got a great deal of access, but I never thought it would be this bad. If only there was a way to get your money back on a Kindle book. I can't even flog it second hand. The book consists of basically only two things; the author getting far too excited about his subject's sexual conquests, which quickly degenerate into a sort of shopping list of upper class totty, and the author making fawning, lazy attempts to make Amis' novels out to be masterpieces on a par with "The Greats". Dreadful sycophantic drivel, which goes on and on, repeating the same nonsense. One day somebody will have to write a serious account of Martin Amis' life and work -presumably without his permission, or when he's dead. But this isn't it.