Advantage Amis

Outspoken British author MARTIN AMIS opens up to SIDDHARTH DHANVANT SHANGHVI about his rivalry with Julian Barnes, his perceived misogyny and the “taint of heredity”.

- Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Even as I’m racing from Juhu to Colaba to meet Martin Amis, his memorable character John Self—from his classic 1984 novel Money— is whispering dark, flawless nothings in my ear. Funnily enough, Self sounds almost desi—a Rakhi Sawant handler out of Lokhandwala— rather than the gin-soaked New York film producer who is more an authorial spectra of postmodernism. The transcendent aspect of Money is that, although set in New York, its themes of greed, deceit and sexual excess are familiar to Mumbai, Rio or Naples; the disagreeable narrator, Self, is a personal anti-hero.

When I meet Amis I mute reserves of admiration, and exercise caution—after all, he’s the original bad boy of British fiction, noted for an acidic turn of phrase—but as it turns out, at breakfast, he’s studiously polite, civil to a fault, and engaging in his considered baritone and promiscuous scholarship. We speak of his books, from The Rachel Papers, a triumphant bellow of arrival (energetic enough to make his father, novelist Kingsley Amis, skittish around his son’s galloping prodigy), 1989’s London Fields— which didn’t make the Booker shortlist because the judges found its authorial tone misogynist—to The Information, which cost Amis a friendship with Julian Barnes, his then agent Pat Kavanagh’s husband. Amis traded Kavanagh for Andrew Wylie, who secured him a larger advance; this ought to have been written off as a business move but one that British literary society derided as a decision of avarice and betrayal.