Martin Amis has died.

One of the Best Young British Novelists of that first 1983 edition, a stellar list which well lived up to the accolade.

Somehow or other, though, I have never got around to reading any of his books. Reviews of them failed to enthuse me.

I also swerved the TV adaptation of Money, its trailers did not entice me.

By all acounts the loss is mine.

Time’s Arrow, however, has been on my tbr list for years. I suppose I should get round to it.

Martin Louis Amis: 25/8/1949 – 19/5/2023. So it goes.

I usually read all the stuff about fiction in the Guardian’s Saturday Review as well as some of the non-fiction reviews.

Last week’s contained three items of particular interest to me.

The cover piece, Steven Pinker’s An Anti-stickler’s Manifesto was about ten “grammar rules” he thinks it’s okay to break sometimes. He says that some of them aren’t actually rules at all and others aren’t rules in English. You may be surprised to read that by and large I agree with him. But I do believe it is important to know what the rules are. This is in order that when you break them it is for a purpose.

Then there was an article about Martin Amis. In this Amis was quoted as saying, “Prose is foremost, and ‘if the prose isn’t there, then you’re reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation, psychological insight and form.'” Secondary interests? Psychological insight is a secondary interest? Story is a secondary interest? Characterisation is a secondary interest? Is this last not what certain purveyors of genre (no names, no pack drill) are pilloried for not providing?

The final piece was an interview with George R R Martin, in London for the Science Fiction Worldcon after first appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival.