George Orwell famously said that ‘ autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful (a man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying)’
By that measure, Martin Amis proclaims, what is disclosed in his latest book, INSIDE STORY, is gospel truth.
I am calling INSIDE STORY a book, even though emblazoned on its cover, it purports to be a novel. This contrariness is part of its charm.
The title, INSIDE STORY, tells its own story, an enticing double entendre. “Your identity sleeps inside you, unless or until it is aroused”, writes Amis, and this book is all about arousal.
For instance, there was an occasion whenGermaine Greer was Martin’s nurse. Does that arouse you?
If INSIDE STORY is, indeed, a novel, is it a smirk novel? A novel of self congratulation glorying in the author’s literary fame and stupendous success with women? Or is it a scowl novel? Scroll through and see.
Amis professes that writers are life’s eulogists, the woe specialists, the wound flaunters, and that it’s an elementary mistake thinking that writers are life’s elegists.
At a certain point, usually in late middle age, something congeals and solidifies and encysts itself. Encystant. Mirth metastasises, effervescence enervates and affability evaporates.
INSIDE STORY acknowledges that and then takes up arms against it, supported by his great friend, the late Christopher Hitchens. Together they find the humour in the tumour, the jocosity of cancer, the rancour of the canker that eventually claimed Christopher’s life.
INSIDE STORY is full of intellectual and emotional arousal, the intellectual probably gaining the upper hand with the author’s appreciation of fellow writers, Saul Bellow, Philip Larking, Kurt Vonnegut and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Intellectually, it is also a primer on how to write.
Audacious, ambitious, loquacious, INSIDE STORY is dense, diatmetric, dramatically and deliberately dubious.
Dip in.
INSIDE STORY by Martin Amis is published by Jonathan Cape
