The “mini s**tstorms” of Martin Amis

Few writers attract as much flak and admiration as Martin Amis does, that too, effortlessly. In a career spanning more than four decades, he has produced 14 novels, two collections of short stories, four volumes of journalistic writing and criticism and several other works of non-fiction. He is loved and pilloried for reasons that stretch beyond his rich and varied oeuvre. Much of it – the pilloried bit – he says has to do with the “taint of heredity”. His father Kingsley Amis was a successful novelist and poet. As one of the most controversial literary figures of his generation, Amis Jr’s public pronouncements on a wide range of subjects, from Islamic terror to population demographics, have caused what The Guardian describes as “mini sh**tstorms”. 

Amis smoked on stage at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre as he was warming up for his turn to speak at the recently concluded Tata Literature Live! festival. And with every plume of sinister nicotine, he reminded people of his conscious choice of blowing political correctness away!  It’s a contradiction that befuddles you initially. But it helps you understand why it’s important to stand up for a choice – even if that means falling foul of Amis’ purpose of questioning a democratic decision of electing Trump or endorsing Brexit. A mandate, however flawed, must be respected. 

In a conversation with Pratik Ghosh, the 67-year-old Amis held forth on the emergence of the Far Right, why literature needs to keep revisiting the Holocaust and whether religion can trigger a third world war. Excerpts from the interview:

In a 2014 interview, you had said that racial strikes in the US left you disillusioned and that you might want to return to England where the racial culture is a triumph. Now with Donald Trump being elected President, what’s your take on the US?

It’s probably going to be a disaster. He’s manifestly unfit to be President. If it was just him as a phenomenon, it would just be a good, sick joke. But it ceased to be one because the Americans decided that he spoke for them. Instead of less of Trump, they want more of Trump, which is an immensely depressing commentary on America because he was democratically elected. I said to my wife, who is an American, ‘I know what it is going to be like to live under the Trump presidency because by the time the election was a week away, I was sick to my stomach seeing his face and hearing his voice, and (knowing) it is going to be like that, but only much worse.’

In many ways, Trump’s ascendancy to presidency and Brexit are bound by similar sentiments. Do you agree?

I know, and it’s depressing exactly in the same kind of way. Above all, it’s regressive. We were in Britain at the time of Brexit, and we were in America on election day, and the same feeling of nauseous unreality came upon us the following morning. It’s unreality that strikes you, not the horror that comes later. The trees are still there, the squares are still there, the streets look the same, but suddenly they look like a façade. They are not really the same things at all; something, like the soul, has gone out of them. That’s what it feels like. I am sure that feeling will modulate into something else, like disgust or hatred or rejection and I don’t expect that feeling to go away in another year or so.

Throughout the world we are seeing the rise of the Far Right. What explains the phenomenon?

What is the new phenomenon in the last 15 years? It’s the Internet and it has done something to our consciousness. If you look at a diagram of an illiterate brain and compare that with a literate brain, the latter is physiologically different. A literate brain has all sorts of extra things, ganglier, hanging of it. Then if you look at a computer-savvy brain, it’s different from the previous two, physically. Apart from changing the shape of your brain, the Internet is doing all sorts of other things to you as well. The fact that people tell lies now and it doesn’t seem to matter must be the result of the Internet. It has never been good on truth. When the Internet actually began, I read somewhere that what you read on the Internet is 60 per cent true. And, I felt that that’s no good, I want things to be 100 per cent true. It’s now something like 40 per cent true. False news, pretend news, are rotting our sense of what is real, and that will only increase.  

America and Britain have increasingly been intolerant towards their minorities, and the fear of the ‘Other’ has been a long-standing feature of both countries. Some say, Islamophobia has given credence to that feeling. Your views?

I am very uncomfortable with the word Islamophobia. Had there been no Islamic terrorism, there wouldn’t have been Islamophobia. It is regrettable that people hate other people, and it has nothing to do with religion; it has to do with the violence unleashed in the name of religion. Anti-Semitism is a neurosis. It has nothing to do with what Jews did. It’s something going wrong in other people’s minds. But, Islamophobia isn’t like Judeophobia, which is an imaginary resentment. Islamophobia has a real cause. Blowing up people strolling around Paris with machine guns; mowing down people in the city of Nice; chopping people’s heads off... Phobia is an irrational fear and there is nothing irrational about fearing something that says it wants to kill you. Islamismophobia is a better phrase or Jihadiphobia. No one has a quarrel with peace-loving Muslims, and 90 per cent of them are peace-loving and they hate terrorism as much as we do. I think they (peace-loving Muslims) should make that clear. The voice of the ordinary Muslim is rather silent.

Why do you think they are silent?

Fear. The fear of the violent minority. And, maybe, a tiny bit of sympathy for the violent minority. May be 10 per cent out of the vast majority of peace-loving Muslim population around the world has a bit of sympathy for what the jihadis are doing. They may have historical grievances. Islam reached its political, territorial peak about a thousand years ago. It was in retreat after that. And, no one likes to be dispossessed, or disappointed. The origin of the word “disappointment” is that your job, your appointment, has been taken away from you and that is humiliating. In the West, we don’t really understand that “humiliation”. We use the word quite casually. Humiliation is a very serious matter. When people feel humiliated, that takes everything away from them – it’s dispossession, loss of manhood, loss of personhood, and I think if there is lingering sympathy for the jihadis in a minority section of the huge majority of peace-loving Muslims, then it has to do with that historic humiliation.

European literature keeps going back to the Holocaust. You have written about Auschwitz in Time’s Arrow, The Zone of Interest and in your memoir, Experience. Why is that?

I am glad that it is and I hope that it goes on revisiting the Holocaust. It (the Holocaust) is the terminal point of human brutality. The basic justification for writing about it is that it makes it more certain that it can’t happen again. As soon as people start talking about the purity of blood, we identify that kind of talk... no, no, that it is the road to hell. I want people to be permanently alert to that and I think they are. Historian Tony Judt wrote a huge book called the Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. The conclusion in that book is that the central postwar event has been about dealing, emotionally and psychologically, with the Holocaust.

Do you think that we are heading towards another world war, this time on the issue of religion?

If that happens, I don’t think it will be about religion. I think it will be about geopolitics. The most likely source of concern is Russia, and Russia is not a religious state, though Russians are religious. The aim of Islamic terrorism is world domination and they haven’t got a chance of doing that. The next world war, if it happens, will be because of something going wrong at the highest levels of politics.

You are much admired and equally pilloried. Why do you think you evoke such extreme reactions?

I think it’s being the son of a writer; people say no, it’s is not to do with that. But I say it is to do with that. I do write on controversial subjects, but I think it’s the rarity of two generations of writers. It’s unbelievably rare — I looked into it recently — and there is no example in any language of father and son both being writers. There is something fishy about it. It has the taint of heredity. It has to do with anti-elitism.

What’s your next book about?

It is an autobiographical novel that I have been trying to write for 15 years and now I am making progress. I am very suspicious of writing about real life. It doesn’t seem to be doing enough; it doesn’t engage your subconscious. But writers do write about their lives. It all began with DH Lawrence, I think. Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is known to be autobiographical. 

I think the huge novels that England produced in the nineteenth century and beyond was when the country was the centre of the world. And, then the centrality moved to America, and suddenly, the Americans were writing these huge novels. The Russians in the nineteenth century were also producing them. And now it will probably go to China in fifty years’ time. Funny, that the novel seems to follow power.