In Praise of ... Martin Amis

A frequent complaint against contemporary writers is that they are not engaged. Where is the great novel to take on turbo-capitalism, climate change or house prices? What are all the great talents doing in their studies with their £150,000 advances, other than reimagining favorite bits of history, such as Dunkirk or the Empire Windrush? Don't they realise there is a big, often bad, world out there that needs vivid description and intelligent illumination? The Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski laid out the charge 20 years ago. Witnessing the travails of Africa, he wondered why he never met other writers out there. On returning to Europe he found them "writing their little domestic stories; the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce - in short the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years." Kapuscinski held that most avant garde literature was so because of its style ("as if assembled in a workshop"), not its subject ("it is never caught actually looking out at the world"). His charge is now harder to sustain - who could read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and desist from long-life lightbulbs? It reaches the point of abolition in the case of Martin Amis. A stylist with the trick of defamiliarising the familiar, he is also a keen student of the public realm. His writing on Islamist terrorism has made him enemies; his opinions are sometimes cruder and shallower than the language that dresses them. Still, we should prize him - for his engagement as well as his gifts.