The Literati

The Information 

by Martin Amis

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”   ― Martin Amis, The Information

By the time I read The Information, the novel was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication, I had already enjoyed London Fields. The Information, while also set in London had a more contemporaneous plot and with its focus on the literati held my attention in spite of Amis's sometimes anarchic prose style. The enormous advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he abandoned his long-serving agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis and his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's autobiography Experience (2000), he and Barnes had not resolved their differences.
The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair of British writers of fiction. One, a spectacularly successful purveyor of "airport novels," is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful writer of philosophical and generally abstruse prose. The novel is written in the author's classic style: characters appearing as stereotyped caricatures, grotesque elaborations on the wickedness of middle age, and a general air of post-apocalyptic malaise.
Amis's novels are somewhat an acquired taste and his claim to be influenced by Jane Austen seems to have dissipated by the appearance of this and later novels. On the other hand perhaps not, with a fascination for words and contemporary relationships Amis's style may mirror our current world in a way not that different from Austen in her world.


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French Culture and Literature

Something to Declare: Essays on France 

and French Culture 

by Julian Barnes

“I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television.”  ― Julian Barnes

This is France through the senses and sensibility of Julian Barnes. From the Tour de France to French cooking you get a British perspective of the country. In these essays Barnes is a student of the language and literature and he "spent the academic year of 1966-7 working as a lecteur d'anglais " (the slightly posher term for assistant) in Rennes; he has remained the leading exponent of what might be called assistantialism. He is a novelist of ideas, in other words, who relies on "simplicities that are merely camouflaged as fiendish complexities".  The book includes this and more with several essays on Flaubert - well-written and fun to read.



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Dual Lives

Arthur and George

by Julian Barnes

“If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.”  ― Julian Barnes, Arthur and George
Julian Barnes uses an elegant and readable writing style to create the dual fictional lives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji in this his tenth novel. The result is a compelling narrative that at once is both interesting as fictional biography and as a detective story. Personally, I found the mystery and Doyle's investigation into its' source was more interesting, but the rest of the novel was well enough told to almost keep up with the suspense created by the mystery. The combination was one of the best novels I have read all year and would certainly make any ten-best list I might create, if I were so inclined. The author uses an interesting narrative technique switching back and forth between the two protagonists as they grow up completely unaware of each other until the moment when their lives become inextricably intertwined, in no small part due to the fame of Doyle's most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. What happens subsequently as their lives continue to their unique personal conclusions is summed up in the final sections of the novel. Certainly this is a more than satisfying read for several winter nights.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2006.