Where to Start with Martin Amis: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Martin Amis — whether to begin with Money, London Fields, or The Information. A complete reading guide to the controversial British novelist.
Martin Amis (1949–2023) was the British novelist who became, through the controversy surrounding his fiction and his public persona, one of the most discussed and debated literary figures in Britain for forty years. His three major novels of the 1980s — Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995) — form the most sustained literary portrait of late twentieth-century British and American consumerism in the fiction of his era. His prose style — dense, allusive, formally ambitious, shot through with a dark comic energy — established him as one of the most distinctive stylists in the English-speaking world. He is the son of Kingsley Amis, and the argument about whether he surpassed his father is one of British literary culture’s ongoing debates.
Where to Start: Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
The essential Amis — and his most immediately compelling novel. John Self is an English director of beer commercials who is being flown between London and New York to make a film, whose cast is made up of difficult American stars, whose budget is being eroded, and who is being systematically exploited by people he is too drunk and too self-absorbed to identify. His narration — a sustained torrent of appetite, complaint, grotesque comedy, and inadvertent self-revelation — is one of the great achievements of the postwar British novel.
The novel is a portrait of the 1980s money culture in all its excess and its spiritual vacancy: Self’s appetites are not personal foibles but the period’s defining characteristics. The formal gambit — a character named Martin Amis appears in the novel as a writer Self befriends, who may be engineering the events of the plot — is pulled off with complete control. Amis’s funniest and most accessible novel.
London Fields (1989)
Amis’s most structurally complex and formally ambitious novel. Nicola Six, beautiful, brilliant, and psychically attuned to her own fate, knows she is going to be murdered. She chooses her killer and arranges the circumstances of her death with the same cold intelligence she brings to everything else. Sam Young, an American writer dying of an unspecified illness, narrates what he witnesses — or what he constructs from what he witnesses.
The novel operates simultaneously as postmodern noir, satire on gender and class in late Thatcher Britain, and meditation on the nuclear anxiety of the 1980s (set in 1999, it is full of the end-of-the-century dread that saturated the actual decade). Keith Talent — darts professional, petty criminal, magnificent grotesque — is among Amis’s greatest creations. Demanding and rewarding.
Reading Martin Amis
Amis’s fiction is distinguished by its prose style — a comic-satirical voice of extraordinary density and energy — and by its willingness to make its comedy serve serious cultural diagnosis. His novels are not comfortable: they are populated by unreliable narrators, self-deceiving grotesques, and characters whose appetites are presented without sentimentality or redemption. But the comedy is genuine, the formal invention is real, and the portrait of late twentieth-century Western consumerism is more comprehensive than any other British novelist of his generation achieved. Begin with Money for the most entertaining and the most immediately accessible; read London Fields for the most formally ambitious.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Martin Amis?
Money: A Suicide Note (1984) is the essential starting point — Amis's masterpiece, and the most comprehensive portrait of 1980s money culture in British fiction. John Self, an English director of beer commercials flying between London and New York to make a film, narrates his own degradation in a prose of sustained comic energy that is unlike anything else in British fiction. It is the funniest and the most immediately accessible of his novels, with a formal daring — a character named Martin Amis appears as a minor figure — that is carried off without vanity. London Fields is the best alternative for readers who want Amis's most structurally complex and most formally ambitious work.
What is Money: A Suicide Note about?
Money (1984) follows John Self, an English director of beer commercials who is being flown between London and New York to make a low-budget film. Self is a magnificently unreliable narrator — he drinks too much, eats too much, watches pornography, gets into fights, spends money he does not have, and is being systematically manipulated by forces he cannot identify or comprehend. The novel is a satire on 1980s consumerism and the transatlantic money culture: Self's appetites are the period's appetites, rendered in a prose of grotesque comic energy. Amis himself appears as a minor character — a novelist John Self befriends — in one of the boldest formal gambits in postwar British fiction.
What is London Fields about?
London Fields (1989) is Amis's most formally ambitious novel — a postmodern noir set in London in 1999, narrated by an American writer called Sam Young who observes a murder before it happens. Nicola Six, a beautiful and dangerously intelligent woman, knows she is going to be murdered and systematically arranges it — choosing her killer from among the men in her orbit: Keith Talent, a professional darts player and petty criminal, and Guy Clinch, a wealthy, naive innocent. The novel runs backward from the murder it announces in its opening pages, with the nuclear anxiety of the late 1980s running beneath the London scenes like a ground bass.
Is Martin Amis difficult to read?
Amis's style is demanding — his prose is dense, allusive, and technically ambitious — but Money is the most immediately accessible of his major novels because its narrator, John Self, is both funny and comprehensible: his appetites and his blindness are rendered in a voice that is immediately engaging even when Self himself is repellent. London Fields is more complex in structure and requires more patience. Both novels reward close reading: Amis is one of the most technically accomplished prose stylists in British fiction, and his sentences often do more than first appears. Readers who find his satirical mode too cold or his comedy too relentlessly dark may prefer to try The Rachel Papers, his debut, which is warmer.
