Adieu Amis

Martin Amis is emigrating to America, according to a wide-ranging interview in the Times (£) at the weekend. The reasons are primarily personal (being near his mother-in-law primarily among them, as well as best-bud Christopher Hitchens). But the interview reads more like a farewell piece. The forty-year battle of Amis vs the British establishment is all but over. As Ginny Dougary describes it:
 
‘It’s scarcely surprising that Amis, for all his courtesy…seems depressed. In print his answers are full of his usual brio and thoughtfulness but his delivery was uncharacteristically subdued. He talked into his chest and his body seemed etiolated with psychic fatigue. When I ask him about Hitchens, at one point he lets out a deep, strangled sigh, as though the question has mugged him.’
 
Amis has come back once before. A fanfare met his return from exile in Uruguay with House of Meetings a few years ago. The hope then was that he could do a Philip Roth (an explosion of late brilliance) or become a John Updike (Britain’s own benevolent Great Man of Letters). Neither prophecy quite panned out.
 
The recent fortunes of Ian McEwan can’t have helped either. As Tina Brown put it rather succinctly in an interview with McEwan last year: ‘I think most people would agree that you have…won the reputation race’. With the success of Solar (comic, satirical and contemporary – a distinct scuffing of Amis’s turf), McEwan has let his fiction do the talking.
 
However, Ginny Dougary touches on what might be Amis’s main problem:
 
‘…the way Amis is unafraid to be provocative and make waves about current issues is…reminiscent of Norman Mailer. What Amis seems to crave most is a big stage peopled by epic characters.’
 
Recently, Amis’ views have kicked up more dust than his work, especially when it comes to his criticism of Islam. Perhaps the British stage is no longer big enough.