His father Kingsley said, “I wish he would just once write a sentence like, ‘Then they finished their drinks and left.’” Martin Amis would rather eat bees than risk being so boring. At 62 he is still the most exciting living British writer for anyone concerned with vivid prose. Ian McEwan can be more formally exact, Iain Sinclair more jaggedly musical, Salman Rushdie more wildly imaginative. But you settle into an Amis novel, or essay, confident that he’ll cut to the heart of the subject with withering intelligence. “He has a style”, wrote John Carey, Britain’s leading literary critic, “as quick and efficient as a flick-knife.”
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