The Information - Martin Amis

[Amanda]

Finished this one on audio recently for my randomiser list. I gave it 3 stars, but that is more accurately a roundup of about 2.6-2.75. I was going to rate it a 2 most of the way through, but I was impressed by a lot of the observations and dialogue at the end so I bumped it up.

Overall though, I'm kind of disappointed that the Martin Amis books I've read recently (this one and London fields) haven't lived up to my experience with Time's Arrow- which I read early on in starting the list and still consider it to be one of my favorite books on it. But anyway...

The Information broadly deals with themes of mid-life crisis surrounding growing knowledge of our own mortality (the "information" in question), and the complex resentment towards writing that comes from being a writer.

The story itself explores the relationship between 2 writers/novelists who were university friends, and now find themselves in their 40s. Richard Tull is bitter and substantially less successful than Gwyn Barry, a hack of immense popularity who has essentially schmoozed himself into an esteemed literary prize and movie deals. Richard dreams of revenge, contemplates what went wrong, works for a hack vanity publishing company, and is eventually hired to write a piece on Gwyn that he sees as a perfect in for revenge. Richard also assorts with some violent thugs and schemes ways to ruin Gwyn's life through them, and it gets carried away.

Similar to London Fields, all of the characters are varying degrees of despicable, particularly Richard and Gwyn both seem to be pretentious misogynists with inner dialogue of minimal merit. I don't require protagonists to be likable, I didn't find being inside their heads that interesting either. I find too many male authors trying to be edgy are too enthralled with their cynical sad-sack stand ins, but I don't find that archetype to be original or worth centering for any profound reason anymore. and I just I found this book to be really too navel gazey at times. Like a movie about the movies banking on being Oscar Bait- but the book version.

Also some of the writing was cringey for a book by an esteemed author about high caliber esteemed authors. One example that really stood out was "the horn sounded like a homosexual comedian...OoooOoohhHH". That is literally a Family Guy joke about French ambulances.

But.... I did genuinely love the last fraction of the book, which I otherwise hated. One line, conversely, that I loved and I think will stick with me forever was "astrology was really the ultimate embodiment of the geocentric universe: not only did it say 'the stars and everything else in the universe is about us" it said 'the stars and everything else in the universe is about ME'".

Also Gwyn's final meditation on being unbearably moved to sadness by both success and failure was worth reading, as well as his breakdown about what it actually meant to be loved as a successful person. Gave me parallels to Autumn of the Patriarch, which I really liked.

[Diane]

Rating: 2.5 stars


This is a story of literary envy and revenge. One middle-aged writer is jealous and resentful of a fellow middle-aged writer's success, which he considers unmerited. He feels that the other writers books are bland and unchallenging, while he has too much infomation to write a successful book. His plots and acts of revenge against this other writer start small, but eventually escalate.

I tend to despise books with main characters who are writers. I wonder how much of this was semi-autobiographical, given Amis' history. The writing also frequently made me uncomfortable in different ways. This book has been described as "inciteful" rather than "insightful", and I can see why. The book did have some occasional brilliance and depth, though, which made me give it a higher rating.

[Rosemary]

Richard Tull is an unsuccessful novelist whose latest work, called Untitled, seems to bring all readers out in hives or worse. He makes his living by writing book reviews and preparing books for publication at one of those 'vanity' publishers that used to charge people hundreds of pounds to publish their memoirs or whatever before print-on-demand was invented to make it free. But the main aim of his life is to bring down his old friend Gwyn Barry who has suddenly written a huge bestseller of (according to Richard) no literary merit.

This book has Amis's usual misogynistic characters plus some racial stereotypes, but some of Richard's calamities and the characters' observations do manage to be cruelly apt and/or funny.

I'm happy to say I've now finished the Martin Amis oeuvre from the list (still have one Kingsley to read). I noticed when I went to add my review in 'My Books' that I've rated Martin Amis's books right through the spectrum, and this one will neatly fill the gap in the middle:

Time's Arrow - 5 stars
London Fields, Money - 4 stars
The Information - 3 stars
Dead Babies - 2 stars
The Rachel Papers - 1 star (not a list book)