Episodes
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British author, journalist and war correspondent David Patrikarakos was due to leave the UK for Athens in the summer of 2024. Before he left, he discovered My Martin Amis, and quickly got in touch to ask to tell his story about how he became, as he put it, "mildly obsessed" with the late novelist.
On this episode, David and Jack sit down together early one morning to revisit The Rachel Papers, Amis's first novel and one previously discussed on episode 4 with journalist and author Zoe Strimpel. David explains that he discovered the novel on his family bookshelf at the age of 14. The opening line from Charles Highway was a slam dunk: "simple and declarative and clever". From that point on, David was an Amis fan.
David also describes an antique copy of Hamlet he bought that once belonged to Amis as an undergraduate. The book contains Amis's marginalia. For more on that, you'll have to listen to the conversation. Needless to say, Amis was a precocious student who never stopped overachieving in later life, much to the chagrin of his global peers and critics.
David and Jack also discuss Amis's famous friendship with the late essayist Christopher Hitchens, with whom Amis shared much of his life, even the same cause of death. Were he to have the job of teaching a class of journalism students for a year, David says he would have no problem replacing Hitchens with Amis on the reading list. Amis's The War Against Cliche aside, being "alive to the possibilities of prose" is essential to any writer, he says. Yes, Amis can be over-prescriptive at times, but by letting him guide you for a period, you soon discover what it is writing does that no other art form can do.
The important thing, as ever, is to learn from Martin Amis, then go your own way.
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On this episode, British journalist, author and video game critic for The Observer Simon Parkin reaches into the more obscure corners of Amis's bibliography to dissect a dazzling collection of arcade game reviews published circa 1982. Entitled Invasion of the Space Invaders, this glossy publication starts with Amis's recollection of the moment these machines stole his heart, after a Space Invaders console makes its debut in a bar in the South of France.
It goes on to chart the best arcade games of the era, offering Amis's review of everything from Pac-Man to Donkey Kong, to Frogger, to Missile Command. We also get his firsthand observations from the scuffed floors of New York's seediest video parlours of who this new medium is attracting, why it is so captivating to its devotees, and what it is costing both them and society at large.
Simon explains how Amis first fuelled his aspirations to write as a freelance journalist, and why his work remains both aspirational and relatable to this day.
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John Niven is a Scottish author and screenwriter whose books include Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, The Second Coming. The F*ck-it List, and O Brother.
John discusses his favourite of Amis's novel, The Information, published in 1995. The Information follows two star-crossed writers, Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull. The pair have been friends since university, but now as their approach their mid years, Tull's once promising career is withering on the vine while Barry receives plaudits and more opportunities than he can manage.
John explains how the novel has aged like fine wine for him, both as a reader and writer whose career has mirrored both Tull and Barry's circumstances, though he is pleased to say it has settled somewhere comfortably in the middle of the two.
As John says, Amis occupied a rarefied place: a serious literary novelist who was at the same time incredibly funny. His hunch is that Amis will be read for decades to come. Time is, after all, the only true test of a writer's work.
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Reporter for The Sunday Times Will Lloyd sits down with Jack Aldane on this ninth episode to discuss The Second Plane, a collection of twelve pieces of nonfiction and two short stories by Amis published in 2008, covering 9/11, the age of terrorism, Islamism and the follies of the Blair-Bush coalition.
Will says Amis should be remembered as one of the greatest comic novelists ever to write in English. However, he adds that had the author remembered this himself when it counted, The Second Plane would probably never have been written.
The Second Plane shows what can happen to a writer when seismic events combine with the weight of expectation to explain them in real time. When the World Trade Center is attacked on 11 September 2001, Amis does not report from the ground, nor speak to those who witness the event firsthand. Instead, he along with other members of the literary elite are conscripted to tell the Anglophone world what it all means.
Some confess in their columns to being poleaxed by what they’ve seen. Amis instead uses his adrenaline to tame and name the collective moment with signature bombast. But this is not John Self’s New York, and Amis is unusually way off the mark.
Will explains why The Second Plane is arguably a literary parallel of the Iraq War. For one thing, the same errors of conjecture and righteous zeal are noticeable throughout.
Like so many cultural and political thought leaders of his time, Amis went over the top only to discover that he was woefully out of his depth.
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Journalist and memoirist Graham Caveney speaks to Jack Aldane on this eighth episode of the series about Martin Amis's iconoclastic fifth novel Money: A Suicide Note.
He and the host discuss the novel's true subject, which runs counter to popular interpretation. Though Money is often celebrated as the quintessential novel of the 80s, Caveney argues it is as much if not predominantly a story about the 60s, of which the 80s was arguably the last, lurid hurrah.
And of course, they discuss the novel’s protagonist John Self, who shows what happens when yobbish machismo meets a culture of convenience and excess, and whose farcical downfall makes Money an early diagnosis of the human condition under neoliberalism.
Caveney explains the novel's impact on his generation. By the closing decades of the 20th century, he says, aspirant writers in the UK were resigned to thinking about the English novel as a relic of the pre-war era. With the American canon at the helm, Britain was losing its voice in contemporary fiction. By writing Money Amis single-handed tore up the rulebook, proving that it was once more possible for English writers to take on the zeitgeist with originality and authority. For Caveney, Money was a cultural watershed on par with the greatest seminal moments in modern music.
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Leo Robson is a freelance writer whose work has featured in The New Yorker, Harpers and New Statesman, among others.
In this episode, he and the series' host and producer Jack Aldane sit down to discuss Martin Amis's fourth novel Other People, a Mystery Story, published in 1981.
Robson explains that Amis had many literary debts his fans can take pleasure in exploring, and that the novelist, much like his father Kingsley, wrote in order to manage his fears and anxieties about the turbulence of the 20th century.
The taxonomies Amis used to organise the world, from the largest elemental forms (Time, Death, Sex, Money), to the minutiae of existence, were arguably his coping strategy, Robson says, and one he wielded brilliantly.
Though his "centurion confidence" as a writer could grate, he adds, Amis gifted his readers a way to see the world afresh, to take it in slowly and carefully, and to use some of that same confidence to marvel and laugh at its darkest features.
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Editor of Cap X Alys Denby discovered Martin Amis through a boy at university would she would later go on to marry. The first book of Amis's he leant her was Success, published in 1978.
Success juxtaposes two lives set in the same era of social and economic transformation in Britain: that of well-bred Gregory Riding and his lowly foster brother Terence Service. The story is told through a two-way mirror of Riding and Services's ego-fuelled ambition. Their contrasting projections foreshadow Amis's long-term interest in male rivalries and women who enter them, often with hilarious and horrific consequences.
Alys tells Jack the story of what Success taught her about men's idea of success, how many of Amis's male readers seriously underestimate how funny women find his prose, and how times have changed such that a book like Success would likely never receive the same plaudits today as it did from papers like The Observer.
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Columnist, podcast and book reviewer for The London Times James Marriott joins Jack Aldane on Episode 5 to discuss The War Against Cliché , an anthology of Martin Amis's reviews and essays from 1971 to 2000. It was the book that changed James's approach to life, and especially writing.
James tells Jack why, despite his never having been a devotee to Amis the novelist, Amis's journalism contains by far some of the cleverest, funniest and most galvanising opinions on literature you’ll ever encounter.
The War Against Cliché remains, he says, the book which makes him want to write more than any other, and without which producing book reviews would be a whole lot less fun.
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Gender scholar, author and columnist Zoe Strimpel tells Jack Aldane about the "sexual sentimental education" she gleaned from Martin Amis’s novels as a young woman battling teenage angst.
In particular, they discuss Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, which introduced Zoe to the dark corners of male heterosexuality through Amis's burgeoning comic prose style, and how the book's portrayal of sex compares with the rules of attraction today.
Is the novel's insatiably horny hero Charles Highway now an extinct breed, or is his academic approach to sex a precursor to the modern male propensity to overthink?
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Columnist for The Financial Times Janan Ganesh, speaks to Jack Aldane about the London he grew up in during the early 90s, and which is captured in one of Martin Amis's most celebrated novels, London Fields. Janan explains why, for years, he has consistently revisited the book (of which he owns multiple copies), and how he once found himself compulsively picking it up every day to consume 50-pages in each sitting.
They discuss the characters in the 1989 novel, including those Janan believes the story could have done without, and the one he believes is the greatest literary creation to roam London since the age of Dickens.
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Author, journalist and literary editor for The Spectator, Sam Leith, tells Jack Aldane his story of meeting Martin Amis, his reflections on Amis's lifelong role as "media whipping boy", and why he chose to talk about 'Dead Babies', Amis's second novel published in 1975.
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Author, award-winning columnist and Editor at Large for The New European, Matt d'Ancona, tells the show's host Jack Aldane his story of discovering Martin Amis in the heady 1980s as one of a generation of what he calls "Fukuyama's Babies".
Matt choses passages to read from Amis's memoir 'Experience', published in 2000.
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In My Martin Amis, British journalist and host of The Booking Club podcast Jack Aldane talks to writers, critics and publicists who have something personal to say about the life and legacy of the last English novelist Martin Amis (1949-2023).
Join him as they tell the story of how they discovered Amis's prose, the book that made them a fan, and what the author taught them about life and literature
Subscribe now and listen to a new episode of My Martin Amis each month, wherever you get your podcasts. Stay up to date on Twitter with @mymartinamis and find out who will be Jack's first guest.
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