Back in the 1970s, when everybody still read the New Statesman, the magazine in one of its famous competitions called for suggestions for unlikely book titles. One of the entries, and perhaps the winner, was My Struggle by Martin Amis. Unfair, of course, although having Amis for a surname in the literary London of the time cannot have been a hindrance to young Martin's progress. In fact, as he readily admitted in his recent memoir, Experience, being Kingsley Amis's son was a great advantage, not so much for the doors that were thereby opened to him, but for the example of rigour, of humour, of unpretentiousness and the care for words that his father's work offered to him. For Martin Amis, clarity began at home.
Anyway, he would hardly have needed a parental leg-up: from the start, he was frighteningly gifted, as his first novel, The Rachel Papers, amply attested. Since that book he has produced 10 volumes of fiction, while The War Against ClichΘ is his fifth non-fiction collection. In the 1970s he worked at the Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement, and wrote extensively for both publications. One reads these early reviews now - in 1971 Martin Amis cannot long have been out of short trousers - and falls moodily silent. Could he not at least have given us a couple of pieces immature enough to laugh at?
In his foreword he admits to certain suppressions, which is some kind of comfort. Going through his early manuscripts, he tells us, he found a handful of essays loosely on the topic of "Literature and Society", complete with give-away capitals, which he considered "earnest, overweening, and contentedly dull". Yet there are things here from that time, a time that "now seems unrecognisably remote", that are as good as anything he has done over the subsequent decades. He writes with what sounds like total authority on senior practitioners of the art form in which he was a beginner - and all this, mark you, while he was still tricked out in "shoulder-length hair, a flower shirt, and knee-high tricoloured boots (well-concealed, it is true, by the twin teepees of my flared trousers)".
Not for young Amis the tyro's perfervid humility and care for a future in which one or other of the great ones might lean down from Olympus and smite him for the impudence of an unfavourable notice. So he takes deftly aimed flying kicks at the likes of J.G. Ballard, Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch. For the first and the last of these he seems to have worked up something of an obsession: there are reviews of four Murdochs and five Ballards, as well as a notice of David Cronenberg's "intelligent and unusual art movie" of Ballard's Crash. This last piece is surprisingly restrained; Cronenberg's dead-eyed celebration of stylised, lustrous violence might have been expected to elicit some of Amis's more incandescent images, for he does have a weakness for the fancier extremes of GBH on offer in this our Virtual Age.
Make no mistake, however: Amis, though never solemn, is always serious. Like any true artist, he is a moralist who does not moralise. Again in the foreword, he looks back with wry fondness to those early 1970s, when people still read books, and not only read but talked about what they were reading:
I took it seriously. We all did. We hung around the place talking about literary criticism. We sat in pubs and coffee bars talking about W.K. Wimsatt and G. Wilson Knight, about Richard Hoggart and Northrop Frye, about Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner and George Steiner. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilization. Everyone concurred.
This golden world, Amis contends, was destroyed, in 1973, by OPEC. "The oil hike, and inflation, and then stagflation, revealed literary criticism as one of the many leisure-class fripperies we would have to get along without." He goes on, however, to contend that lit. crit. was doomed anyway, although we bell-bottomed enthusiasts did not realise it until "the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push". By the turn of the millennium, "popular culture" had forced criticism into its last refuge in the universities, where it is rapidly expiring under the assault of cultural studies and all that entails, while "a brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, at the other end of the business, everyone has become a literary critic - or at least a book reviewer". Amis quotes the wise sceptic Gore Vidal to the effect that, nowadays, "nobody's feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else's".
Amis acknowledges that the enemies of good book reviewing are various, and the chief one is simple dullness. "The literary pages throng with people about whom one has no real feelings either way - except that one can't be bothered to read them." This is from a review of Picked-Up Pieces, a collection of literary journalism by John Updike, a writer for whom Amis has unbounded, if occasionally wary, admiration. Over the years the tireless and seemingly unsleeping Updike has generated enough non-fiction to fill three loaf-sized volumes, in which he includes many pieces that, as Amis has it, ought never to have been picked up, with the result that "inevitably, Updike will sometimes look like an Olympic swimmer in a bathtub".
This is a danger facing any reviewer who allows himself to be anthologised - Amis, in his acknowledgments for The War Against ClichΘ, thanks the shadowy, Nabokovian "Professor James Diedrick", who seems to have done all the dusty work. To Amis's great credit, though, he does not present The War Against ClichΘ as if it were a unified whole, with an overarching argument; it is no more than a collection of pieces that were written to commission. Although the tone is consistent whether he is writing for the TLS or Elle magazine, there is great diversity here - indeed, that very diversity is one of the chief attractions of the book.
Amis the reviewer seems to balk at nothing, so that an essay on Ulysses rubs shoulders with a review of Thomas Harris's Hannibal ("a novel of . . . profound and virtuoso vulgarity"), a cheerful debunking of Don Quixote (a beautiful idea "incarcerated in convention and garrulity") with an open-mouthed poring-over of the Guinness Book of Records, surely the literary equivalent of the telephone directory.
The centrepiece of this collection is the long New Yorker essay on Andrew Motion's prissily disapproving biography of Philip Larkin, along with the notorious edition of Larkin's letters which came out shortly after the Life. This is the most sensible and robust consideration of the Larkin controversy - Motion uncovered the hard underbelly of Larkin's sexuality, while the letters revealed his exuberantly misanthropic politics - and the most loving celebration of the work of one of the two or three truly great poets of the 20th century. The War Against ClichΘ is worth having for this piece if nothing else - and there is much, much else to be savoured in this rich and richly entertaining book.
Although his work is itself a testament to the fact that good writing can be done in a bad time, Amis is rightly contemptuous of what passes these days for literary reviewing. A passage at the close of his review of Hannibal encapsulates both his disdain and his disquiet. After incredulously quoting some of the encomiums of Harris's novel by other reviewers - "beautifully written . . . there is not a single ugly or dead sentence" - Amis points out that in fact Harris "has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose". Harris's ludicrous pretensions in this third Hannibal Lecter novel represent a shift from procedural thriller to gothic fantasy, with the result that "all internal coherence is lost".
That this loss has been widely indulged and even welcomed by the critics is perhaps not very surprising, because vanished coherence is also a feature of the world of the literary middleman. There is a levelling impulse at work. To put it simply, the book-chat mediocrities have had it with the hierarchy of the talents. In promoting the genre novelist (Tom Wolfe is another candidate, though a much worthier one), they demote his mainstream counterpart, and doing this has long been their pleasure and solace.
There are antidotes even to this malaise. For real solace, and real pleasure, Martin Amis is your man.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times.