Peer Review, Amis Style

I have read for pleasure for as long as I remember, some books haunting me for years after I finish them, others drawing me in only while they last. But two authors had a particularly formative influence on me in my late teens, in very different ways. Richard Dawkins caused me to reassess my position in the world. And Martin Amis showed me that so-called literary novels could also be pretty good fun. In the couple of decades since, my tastes have changed. Amis’s early novels, which made such an impression, were written while he was much younger than I am now. They are probably best left to sixth formers and twentysomethings. And as for Dawkins, well, I was convinced early on, argumentitatively so for a while; but the need to fight those fights left me as I drifted into the happy state of live and let live that Ben Goldacre wonderfully characterises as ‘apatheism’: "I'm an apatheist. It's not that i don't believe, it's more that I find all discussion of the issue shit-boring". Dawkins, of course, is still fighting; and Amis is still writing. Indeed, superficially the two seem to have followed similar trajectories from exclusive schools through Oxbridge and early brilliance and into… well, if satirist Craig Brown’s name hadn’t appeared at the bottom of this set of (supposed) Dawkins tweets would you have known they were in Private Eye? And his second volume of memoirs was greeted in Nature thus: “Brief Candle is about as edgy as Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones cranking out the 3,578th rendition of 'Brown Sugar' — a treat for fans, but reinscribing boundaries rather than crossing them”. Amis is also an easy target for ridicule, expressing with apparent seriousness not enormously sophisticated opinions on grown-up issues, like (according to the magnificent Chris Morris) 'a senile 12-year-old'. Nearly time (he's 66) for him to consider his own advice:

“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at thirty, they peak at fifty… at seventy, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs.”

As with so many things I got up to when I was young, then, reading Dawkins and Amis is probably best remembered fondly than attempting again now.

And yet.

I just read a Martin Amis book. True, it was not a novel, rather a book of his literary criticism and journalism (The War Against Cliche - just the kind of ‘bits and pieces’ book I enjoy). But it was good fun, and reminded me of Amis’s twin saving graces. First, he can really write. It’s partly the technical stuff - elsewhere, he writes that you should never start successive paragraphs with the same word, unless for effect, in which case do three in a row. Impossible to unread that command and I’ve obeyed it ever since. Whether or not it makes a difference stylistically, it makes you think about your writing in useful ways. More generally I just derive great pleasure from reading a sentence like:

“Excluding a few dry-outs, in hospitals and prisons, and the very occasional self-imposed prohibition, Malcolm Lowry was shitfaced for thirty-five years”

or:

“The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedies; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull… The question ‘What happens next’ has no meaning, because there is no next in Don Quixote’s world: there is only more.”

The second reason to re-try Amis is that he’s funny.

For instance, he decides to review Desmond Morris’s The Soccer Tribe by writing six pages of anecdote about the travails of being an intellectual football fan (note for younger readers: in the 1980s football fans were a trainspottery bunch, before Sky required us to profess to enjoy the lucrative game), not mentioning the book until the final sentence, whereupon:

“I have only time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill, etc., and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.”

For instance, on Norman Mailer:

“He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses.”

For instance, the new monster in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World

“…shows promise. It is a carnotaurus, a light-heavyweight with horns… ‘Diet: Meat’, as my dinosaur encyclopaedia bluntly assures us. This is good. In the Jurassic era, as in our own, vegetarians are a drag.”

So he can write, he can amuse, and he can, of course, be cruel. (On Crichton again: “Animals — especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors — are what his is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.”) But Amis’s reviews are also, in aggregate, much nicer than I had expected. He states as much himself: as a critic,

“[y]ou hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder… Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember… ”

This surprising (and admittedly somewhat self-interested - note the ‘how long they remember’…) sensitivity to the efforts of others - no matter how substandard - is echoed in his review of a volume of John Updike’s collected journalism:

“Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be available to all.”

Think on this, then, before you set upon the next unfortunate manuscript to land in your inbox. And try always to get kinder.

Pretentious, moi? Literary quotes in science

The most important thing to consider as a PhD student writing up is, of course – I’m sure we’d all agree – what quotes you plan to use in order to show of to your examiners just how cultured and well-read you are. A decade and more after submitting my thesis, I’m still proud of my selections, feeling they tick both boxes. (I will leave it to you to decide whether they also tick a third, ‘pretentious git’.) Having finally, reluctantly come around to the fact that the total number of people ever to have read my masterwork is unlikely to increase any time soon, I thought I’d share them with you here. First thing to note: I took this quote selection process very seriously (as is right and proper) and started noting down potential candidates fairly early in my PhD. I was determined to avoid anything commonplace, and in particular steered well clear of quotation dictionaries. Also – I only now realise – it never really occurred to me to quote a scientist, still less a scientific paper. I guess I thought that side of me would be well represented throughout the rest of my work, and I wanted these choice quotes to reflect instead my more arty, sophisticated, fancy-cocktail-and-complicated-music sensibilities.

I also need to give some context. I spent my PhD studying the phenomenon of rarity. Rarity is common: most species are extremely restricted both in terms of numbers of individuals and spatial distribution. What are the causes and consequences of this? In particular, I was interested in whether rare species are in any sense special – for instance, do their biological characteristics differ consistently from those of common species? So throughout my studies I was on red alert for any interesting use of the word ‘rare’, and especially anything that carried connotations of oddity arising as a function of being rare.

The perfect quote finally arrived in the cinema, as I was watching Terry Gilliam’s masterful interpretation of the great Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I had no notebook, no pen; however, I knew I had the novel at home so simply had to re-read it (always a pleasure) to find the quote, no? No. Turns out it’s not in the book; so I bought the VHS (OK, OK: I'm old) when it came out and watched it, finger poised over the pause button (and rewinding several times to make sure I’d interpreted Johnny Depp’s drawl perfectly) until I grabbed the quote:

There he goes, one of God’s own prototypes – a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die. Raoul Duke, Doctor of Journalism, of his Attorney

The rather odd attribution was because I was unsure if it was a Thompson original, or directly from Gilliam’s sceenplay, so I stuck with the character names. Only later did I find the original source, in The Great Shark Hunt, a collection of Thompson’s writing, where he uses it to describe his (HST, Doctor of Journalism, alter-ego: Raoul Duke) real-(if larger-than)-life attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta.

So that was all nice and relevant to the topic of my thesis, but how should I demonstrate the true depth of my intellectual facilities? Being a bit of a francophile, I thought I should have something in French; and who better to quote than Enlightenment poster-boy Voltaire? But I didn’t want anything run-of-the-mill – nothing from Candide, say. Fortunately, I’d read a collection of Voltaire’s work, and came across this from Memnon to start my introduction:

Memnon conçut un jour le projet insensé d’être parfaitement sage. Il n’y a guère d’hommes à qui cette folie n’ait quelquefois passé par la tête. Voltaire, Memnon (ou la sagesse humaine), 1747

My French is far rustier these days, but a (very) loose translation is something like, “One day Memnon came up with the ludicrous plan of becoming perfectly wise. There are few men to whom this mad idea has not occurred, from time to time.” Seemed somehow apt.

Finally, I needed something to start the general discussion. My thesis was rather a rambling affair (the first comment of my external examiner was, “Tell me, why did you decide to write two theses…?”), and I found a gem in Francis Wheen’s terrific biography of Karl Marx. I was not trying to make a political point – although it’s hard to disagree with the sentiment of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ – but through Wheen’s book I had become quite fond of Marx the fallible man, especially the contradictions between his socialist ideas and his own rather upwardly-mobile social pretensions. He was quite the procrastinator too, and as a writer nearing the end of this major project, my PhD thesis – and freshly out of funding and relying on benefits and the generosity of friends – I certainly empathised with the sentiment expressed here:

The material I am working on is so damnably involved… but for all that, for all that, the thing is rapidly approaching completion. There comes a time when one has forcibly to break off. Marx, letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1851

I have never really stopped struggling with this. (Neither did Marx: it took a further 16 years after he wrote the above for the first volume of Das Kapital actually to appear…) Knowing when to finish something, to submit and move on, is not my greatest strength. Perhaps this is the place.