The Cult of Martin Amis and the Anxieties of Nat Cons

In the persistence of Endism, from history to politics, the Death of the Novel was inevitable. Even Naipaul, a bit frustrated by the limits of the art he perfected and greatly impressed by the form of cinema, once saw the intimations of stagna­tion in fiction after its flourish in the earlier centuries—and he went on to write novels. In England, it was those savants still missing the Dickensian bleak houses and a return trip to the Midlands realism of Middlemarch who worried about the future of the novel. I remember the cry from an anguished critic: Where’s the plot? It was not some latter-day Joycean genius that provoked him; anyway, nothing of that sort was happening in English fiction. Naipaul’s pessimism was momentary in retrospect; the neo-Victorians’ wail continued. No wonder they were so thrilled by the arrival of what one reviewer then called the “Taj Mahal of a novel.” It took a Vikram Seth to give them the perfect Victorian big book, the kind of storytelling that was a glori­ous piece of time travel. Otherwise, the countryside was hardly sunny.

Something else had already hap­pened in English fiction, most notably a slow genetic makeover in which Englishness with the Queen’s E was slowly disintegrating. Writers like Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan de-islandised the English novel. The Englishness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Re­mains of the Day was a smart affectation; it had the serenity, however deceptive, of a Japanese garden. Amis, with the two novels that defined him as a bad-boy connoisseur of wordplay, Money and London Fields, shattered the idyllic assurance of the English novel, and, along with his comrades, redeemed it from the limits of Englishness. Facing urban morbidity with unmatched co­medic exuberance, Amis realised, like his idols Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, that the ennui as well as the excitement of the moment you’re condemned to endure are built on lan­guage—language alone. Amis’ words, after the verbal firework in the glow of which writers like Will Self found their inner Amis, stayed on the page as embers of subversion.

He didn’t fit in. The Booker Prize’s consistent rejection of Amis amplified an irony. When the sun was allegedly setting on the English novel, it was the Booker’s discovery of originals who de­fied the loftiness as well as the laziness of the island that opened the windows to a new world narrated in English with multiple cultural accents, from Rushdie to Ishiguro to Ben Okri to JM Coetzee… Amis remained an out­sider. He was iconised and ostracised at the same time. The Amis mystique grew in cult-worthy admiration and rejection.

While going through some Amis obituaries in the London press, I couldn’t escape the refrain that he was a “zeitgeist novelist”, which I think is as generic as the “state-of-the-nation novel”. Money’s John Self may have per­sonified, in Amis’ sulphuric phrases, the pathology of pursuit. Still, zeitgeist is a double-edged qualification to a novelist; deviate and you fall into a criti­cal inferno. Amis deviated in his later works, and suddenly, the zeitgeist nov­elist became a novelist overtaken by Zeit. He travelled back to the twilight zones of Nazism and the antechambers of Stalinism, to the temptations of evil. He added history as an adjective to the world with which he never stopped arguing—as novelist and essayist. That didn’t make him a novelist of un-zeitgeist, as Victory City didn’t make his friend Rushdie one. No good novelist lives in the bubble of the present. His­tory provides more than metaphors; its impulses make the present intimate. Amis was not a novelist of yesterday. He erected eternity on kinetic prose.

Conservatism is on trial. I reached London when the pundits were still deconstructing the anxieties of an ideology that is essentially English. In a recently concluded conclave, national conservatism was the subject that concentrated the minds from home and abroad. It was interesting to see the nation, after its history-shifting perfor­mance during the Brexit referendum seven summers ago, reclaiming its place in the conversation. The debate assumed greater importance at a time when the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is staring at a dismal 2024. The Nat Cons believe that taking back control of the nation from the Left, which is in the vanguard of culture wars featuring race and gender, is the only way forward. The nation won in 2016, though liberal London said it was the island with imperial notions that voted ‘Leave’. And in 2024, only the na­tion can win, or so believe the Nat Cons.

No other issue tests the national interest of national conservatives as immigration, both legal and illegal. The numbers are alarming, though no Nat Con has yet raised Powellian metaphors of Horror Britannica, a sense of national emergency is palpable in the right-wing op-ed pages. Even liberal con­servatives—or civic conserva­tives—can’t afford to romanticise hyper-immigration. Bringing down the immigration number has consistently been a conserva­tive promise—and successive Conservative governments have failed. Apologists may argue that the sudden spike is because of Ukraine and Hong Kong. Then legal migration itself is a subject that animates the romantics— civilisations are built on the free movement of people and ideas—and sceptics—civilisations are frayed by unchecked immigration that strains national resources—alike. The most ardent Nat Cons are not sure about Sunak taking a brutal anti-immigra­tion position, even though stop-the-boats has been one of his election promises.

The new Iron Lady, without the popular endorsement the original had enjoyed, is Suella Braverman, the home secretary, who once suggested that the unwanted cargo should be airlifted to Rwanda. Braverman, with her own immigration backstory, is the prima donna of national conservatism. The righteous left campaigned for her ouster in the silliest of scandals—a speeding offence she committed a year ago when she was attorney general. She asked her staff to check whether she could take a private driving aware­ness course. Finally she didn’t take it; she got points on her licence. Political scandal could not have been more English than this one, rivalled perhaps by Boris Johnson’s Covid Partygate that cost him the top job. The official ethics police spared the home secre­tary. The Nat Con on the fast track is in no mood to spare the immigrant standing in her way.

booksBritish politicsdeathliteratureMartin AmisRishi SunakSuella Braverman