"The great poet of the postmodern metropolis" Colin McPherson/Corbis/Getty Images

English culture has produced a number of cliques and coteries in its day, from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Bloomsbury Group to Macspaunday (otherwise known as the Thirties poets Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis). The Angry Young Men of the Fifties werenāt exactly a clique since they scarcely knew each other, and apart from being young they shared almost nothing in common, least of all anger. Several of them ended up as curmudgeonly old buffers with dubious views about women and ethnicity. Among the latter was Kingsley Amis, father of the novelist Martin Amis, who died last week. Amis Senior moved from the high-spirited iconoclasm of Lucky Jim to a Right-wing clubmanās view of the world, and we shall see later that in one respect at least, Amis Junior followed suit.
Amisās own clique ā Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Clive James ā were a formidably talented bunch of wits and whiz kids, almost all of them products of Oxbridge in an era of intense cultural creativity, the Sixties and Seventies. Between them they have produced superlative fiction, caustic satire, and devastating humour. Hitchens, who wrote that the life of the āpoxed and suppuratingā John F. Kennedy was remarkable not for being cut short but for lasting so long, described Prince Charles (as he was then) as a āmorose, bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, with the most abysmal taste in royal consortsā. Ian Fleming was āa heavy sadist and narcissist and all-round pervertā with a particular penchant for the human bottom.
Hitchensās spiritual twin, Martin Amis, easily matched him for mordant wit. He was the great poet of the postmodern metropolis, his finger unerringly on the pulse of its hardboiled, streetwise, sexually libidinous inhabitants. His sensibility belonged as exactly to its time and place as that of Dickens or Faulkner. We are ushered into a depthless, deregulated world of appetite, self-interest, and purely vacuous freedom in which anything goes, held together only by the rigour of literary style. Style in Amis is what rises triumphantly above the squalor of his material. Its shapeliness, equipoise and finesse constitute an implicit critique of contemporary culture, which saved him from anything as uncool as having to pass explicit moral judgements on it. He once remarked that he would sell his grandmother for a finely turned phrase, and if I were his grandmother I would have taken this comment seriously enough to go into hiding. In a literary milieu in which style is sometimes considered āelitistā, few modern writers can handle a sentence so superbly.
Part of Amis knew this frenetically consumerist culture from the inside, while an alter ego submitted it to savagely entertaining satire in the name of a moral norm which is present only by its absence. His fiction thus refutes the old clichĆ© that satire requires a stable standard by which to judge. If anything goes, however, nothing has value ā not even shock-value, which is why calling a book Dead Babies smacked of clamouring for attention in an offence-proof world. The great modernist writers had the good fortune to confront a readership that was still eminently shockable. Indeed, the title Dead Babies would have been unthinkable in the Sixties, only a decade before the book appeared. In a postmodern world where the monstrous and psychopathic are routine, Amis didnāt have the modernistsā advantage. This was a civilisation in which nothing could be said, which was both the object of his satire and a source of his endless verbal fertility.
Thereās a disparity in Amisās writing between the sordid or macabre events it narrates and the tamely conventional views which silently underpin it. Itās a discrepancy which is true in different ways of Rushdie and McEwan. These writers portray a late-capitalist world which shows up the bankruptcy of liberal values, yet they have no real alternative to such values themselves. Like most liberals, they are nervous of convictions and commitments, which appear them as dogmatism and soulless system. (When Boris Johnson was asked in an interview whether he had any convictions, he replied warily that he had picked up one or two for speeding.) Amis dismissed socialism and Christianity as obsolete ideologies, but in his view all ideologies were obsolete. Except, of course, middle-class liberalism, which is no more than plain common sense. One of Clive Jamesās favourite slogans was āpas de zeleā, though one imagines that his aversion to ardour didnāt apply to opposing General Strikes.
The contemporary world is divided between those who believe too much (Islamists, for example) and those who believe too little (the metropolitan literati). It was logical, then, that when Islamism struck in New York on 9/11, having first invaded the London literary world in the shape of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Rushdie should wrap himself in the Stars and Stripes, apparently unconcerned by the fact that 30 years to the day before 9/11, the USA overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile and installed in its place an odious dictator who proceeded to murder far more people than died in the World Trade Centre.
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