Sam Leith Sam Leith

Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

Sam Leith is disappointed that our most famous living novelist remains an enigma

Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders? That’s what I want to know. Only by consulting Richard Bradford’s bibliography would you know that in 1982 Martin Amis published a book — subtitled ‘An Addict’s Guide’ — on how to win at Space Invaders, and that he (presumably) hasn’t let it come back into print.

An entire book! That seems to me worthy at least of a paragraph in the body of a 400-odd-page writer’s biography. It tells you something, doesn’t it? I mean, apart from the fact that Martin Amis once liked Space Invaders, which is amusing if not crucial. Anything a writer disowns is of interest: particularly if it’s a frivolous thing and particularly if, like Amis, you take seriousness seriously.

That absence — whether it’s down to a misfired attempt at high-mindedness, or was (less likely) a condition of Amis’s agreement to be interviewed — shakes one’s confidence in this work. Amis thrives on modernity, and Richard Bradford reports on it like a particularly stuffy and bewildered cousin of Craig Raine’s Martian:

Martin and friends would divert themselves with the so-called quiz machine, a cross between pinball — given that the subject of the question would be randomly selected —and the multiple choice formula of University Challenge.

That said, among the virtues of Bradford’s treatment is a by and large steady focus on the work (albeit with too much original-spotting for my taste), and a sympathetic attention to Amis the man. He gives us the Martin Amis that common sense tells us must be there, the Amis that, conditioned by years of yellow-press raillery, many were surprised to find in Experience: conscientious, thoughtful, pained, decent. Bradford writes suggestively about the relationship, both literary and personal, between Martin and his father, and quotes well from Amis himself, and also from Amis’s best friend, Christopher Hitchens.

The outline of the story will be familiar to most of us.

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