Over the next few days I will be posting three poems on Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan respectively. They happen to be my exact peers, and occupy the summit of the British literary establishment. For what it is worth, I regard all three as highly over-rated, particularly Amis and Rushdie. All three, I would submit, have severe limitations as novelists. I could write a book on their failings, though I prefer to set out my critiques in the form of verse. To give only two examples of crucial failures, none of these three writers has developed a single, rounded, three-dimensional human character, and none of them has expressed a single genuinely original thought. Perhaps this is not unrelated to the fact that not one of the three has ever lived any kind of life outside the purely literary, with the possible exception of Rushdie, who worked as an advertising copyrighter.
Instead, it would appear that each has chosen a literary career out of ambition, rather than (as most true writers do) discovering the need to write by adventitious accident. Each is a careerist, in other words. It could be argued that at least two of these three writers, Amis and Rushdie, have suffered the moral fate of the literary careerist. Broadly speaking, their writing has become increasingly insipid and self-parodic in direct proportion as their fame has grown. The case of McEwan is a little more complex. His commitment to the technical aspects of writing is formidable and sincere, but (as I shall argue later) this is not enough to engender first-rate fiction.
In the course of the literary criticisms which follow on this site, I shall pursue several thoughts with perhaps annoying persistence. One of these is that the classical tradition of English language literature is distinguished not so much by its "literary" aspect as its moral and philosophical content. All the classical writers -- playwrights, poets and novelists -- had first-class philosophical minds and used fully-formed and largely sympathetic characters to explore moral or philosophical themes which interested or obsessed them. Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, George Orwell and William Golding all fall into this category. The relation between Amis, Rushdie and McEwan and their characters is, I would argue, qualitatively different. Their characters are almost without exception two-dimensional ciphers whose primary function is to jump through the hoops set by the omniscient author.
Richard Ford, a genuine writer who continues the classical tradition and is arguably one of its best modern exemplars, has written that we come to fiction "for, amongst other things, a view of morality in action". Amongst modern American writers, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, Cormac MacCarthy and Jane Smiley, all, to a significant extent, explore "morality in action". Amongst British writers Justin Cartwright, Howard Jacobson and Philip Pullman continue this central, classic tradition with subtlety and distinction.
The dark heart at the centre of British publishing is Cape, who publish and tirelessly support Amis, Rushdie, and McEwan -- our supposed "golden generation" of British writers. To some extent the three writers, who know each other well, and broadly support one another, constitute a "movement". For example, Amis has argued that the notion of the powerful fully-developed character is a largely nineteenth-century construction and has been obliterated by the incidence of totalitarian systems such as fascism and communism. According to Amis' arguments, these systems have demonstrated that the individual character is essentially frail and weak compared with the political forces which surround him or her. Amis proposes this proves that the notion of predominant individual character has been rendered insubstantial as the basis of the modern novel. For our own specific purposes at least, this non-sequitur may be regarded as typical of Amis' post facto self-justification. As logical reasoning it breaks down at the first glance. The incidence (and fall) of fascism and communism could equally be construed as exemplifying the monstrous rise of certain types of dominant individual character (in the form of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao, amongst others) as much as the extinction of the idea of individual character.
The manifest literary failings and various self-justifications of the Cape school and its apologists form the subject of the three poems which will follow. Before proceeding to the poems themselves, I should like to make one final point. In broad philosophical matters I consider myself to be a Popperian, not least in believing that it is our duty to criticise every aspect of society, including its central assumptions. Popper constantly stressed that there is no theory or assumption which is too sacred to be questioned. As things stand, Amis, Rushdie and McEwan occupy positions of extraordinary distinction and prestige in our national literary pantheon, and their champion Cape is widely considered to be at the summit of British literary publishers. These are arguably the strongest points of assault on a British literary establishment which, apart from a few magnificently maverick and independent writers, I consider to be perhaps the most mediocre and complacent in our history.
In pursuit of these critical aims, I intend to use whatever weapons come to hand, from analysis to ridicule. Accordingly, if there is no mercy in the following poems, perhaps I could add cheerfully that I do not expect any in return.
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