Martin Amis, 1995
the forty-ninth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Vilhelm Sjoberg
Let’s kick off 2022 by firing up the ol’ Pattern-O-Matic™:
Pretty self-explanatory, but just for the sake of pumping up this article’s word count, I’ll spell things out a bit:
Pattern 1 says that I will forgive a lot in exchange for a memorable sentence, and on the sentence level, Martin Amis is extraordinarily talented. On the whole, I didn’t like this book, but there were many sentences and even entire passages that wowed me, to the point that even though I was on the verge of giving up about a third of the way through, I did continue on to the end just because I didn’t want to miss out on any good lines that might be lurking in those unread chapters.
Here’s a passage I bookmarked:
[L]iterature […] describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you […] social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age. […] Now what? Literature, for a while, can be about us […]: about writers.
That’s a very interesting observation, yet it also points out one of the book’s flaws. The Information is about a rivalry between two novelists that leads them into some very dark places. One of the novelists gripes that he has landed with a lesser literary agent, as evidenced by the fact that all her clients are “novelists who were well known for something else. Well known for newscasting, cliff-scaling, acting, cooking, dress-designing, javelin-throwing, and being related to the Queen”. But at least those other writers have something to write about other than being a writer! Pattern 43 says that “write what you know” is generally good advice, but that the big problem with this dictum is that it leads to way too many films about being a filmmaker, songs about being a songwriter, and novels about being a novelist. You can argue that, yeah, The Information may be annoyingly meta, but at least it reflects upon that fact… but Pattern 28 says that you don’t get any points for merely acknowledging rather than remedying your shortcomings.
The narrative of decline also points out that one stop on the road to annoyingly meta is to focus on “lowlife”, and this novel certainly does plenty of that. Not only are half the characters actual criminals—the kind of guys who ambush people in public bathrooms and lure children into vans—but the other half are grotesques of various sorts as well. Pattern 20 says that piñatas don’t make good characters, and The Information feels like a bad Coen Brothers movie in trotting out an array of contemptible wretches while the implied author points and sneers, “Dang, aren’t these wretches contemptible?”
Finally, The Information is very, very British, and while Pattern 23 says that this would make a novel rough sledding for me in any case, the fact that so much of it is about the British underworld makes it more like sledding while being pelted with bowling balls. There were significant chunks of this book that I couldn’t really make heads or tails of, and I kind of think that I may be better off for it.
Eric Cline, 2014
Another award-winning history book, and while I can understand why—apparently this book upended the consensus about an important turning point in ancient history—it’s another dud if you’re looking for something to keep you awake on a long drive. When I audited an ancient history survey course back in the ’00s, we were told that by 1200 BCE several major civilizations had arisen in the eastern Mediterranean—the Minoans, the Myceneans, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and of course the Egyptians—but that around that date, all but the last of these collapsed, and that the surviving records (chiefly from Egypt) suggested that an invasion of an array of “Sea Peoples” was to blame. Cline’s project is to present evidence for a range of alternatives: look, this city looks like it was destroyed in an earthquake, not a war! This one was destroyed in a war, but the invaders look like they came by land, not sea! Hey, here’s some evidence for climate change that may have led this city to be abandoned voluntarily! For a while it looks like Cline is trying to push the consensus, which in the 19th century went from “we don’t know” to “Sea Peoples”, back to “we don’t know”, but ultimately his take is not just that we don’t know the cause but that there was no primary cause. And since these Mediterranean civilizations had become interdependent, when one succumbed to the cumulative toll of multiple stressors, nearly all the rest fell in turn.
This is not an inherently dull topic, so I’m starting to feel as though writing a popular history book may be like translating a novel. That is, novels should be translated by people whose first language is the target language. If you have a 99% mastery of the source language and a 100% mastery of the target language, then the finished translation may lack perfect fidelity to the source, but it will read well. If you have a 100% mastery of the source language and a 99% mastery of the target language, then the finished translation will be stilted. Similarly, if your “first language” is academic history—dryly reporting back what you’ve found in an archive, etc.—then if you want to move beyond the scholarly journals, it seems like the move to make is to collaborate with someone whose first language is writing for the general public. Looking through my own archive, the common denominator I find among the history books I have loved is that they are by people who are writers first and historians second: people like Arthur Quinn, Martin Meredith, and, yes, Martin Amis.
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