A LIFE LIVED ON PAPER

Chris Hallam turns the pages on the story of literary superstar Martin Amis

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All writers, it can be assumed, secretly fantasise about achieving what perhaps might be seen as a form of literary immortality: the dream of seeing their work continuing to be read long after their death.

Not so Kingsley Amis. Like his son, Martin, Kingsley was a celebrated and successful author, but always denied having any interest in what happened to his own books in the future. According to Martin: “My father used to say he didn’t care at all about posterity as he wouldn’t be around to enjoy its good opinion. ‘It’s no bloody use is it to me!’ he’d say.” But Martin, for one, didn’t believe him. “All that matters [to writers] is whether you’re read after you’re dead,” he said in 1996. “And it keeps writers honest, because it’s this big important question and they know they’ll never get a glimpse of it.”

We do not know whether Martin Amis, who died in May at the age of 73, will still be read long into the future. All that can be said for certain is that books such as The Rachel Papers (1973), Success (1978), Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and Time’s Arrow (1991) ensured he became one of the best known and successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He became a literary superstar, “the Mick Jagger of literature” according to his friend Ian McEwan, and the coolest of a bunch of new, young writers who emerged in the 1970s, a gang who included Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and McEwan himself.