Reflections On Martin Amis

 Hearing the sad news of Martin Amis' death I stopped work and went to my favourite bar for lunch and a beer mourning our loss.

Not a week goes by without hearing of a celebrities death and while most don't affect me Amis' death did.  His death was the death of a comrade, of a fellow writer, and a great one at that.  It is also the death of an age.  

In my youth I dead five books of Amis.  'The Rachel Papers', 'Dead Babies', 'Einstein's Monsters', 'Time's Arrow' and 'Success'.  I found him to be an incredibly resourceful writer, an impeccable stylist, a contrarian, and enormously gifted at the craft of writing.  

His construction of his books is ingenious, playing games with the reader and indulging in dark humour wickedly.  As to his style he wouldn't be who he was without Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, both highly stylised writers.  He was truly modern who wrote about taxi cabs and junk food, the Americanisation of Britain and ASBOS.  

Some people attribute Amis' talent to his famous novelist father Kingsley Amis, writer of 'Lucky Jim', but I think it would be more accurate to his his work as of his own making, though takingly similar themes as Kingsley in a different way.

I've yet to read his most famous work 'Money', something which I am looking forward to as it was been quite a while since I have read anything by him.

So to Martin I raise a glass and say thanks for the enjoyment you gave me. 

'Thr Wordsmiths and the Warguild' by Hugh Cook

 

The second book in a series of ten, the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, by British writer Hugh Cook, 'The Wordsmiths and the Warguild' is about Togura Poulaan who is charged with a mission.   The mission being to find a thing called the Index so that the Wordsmiths, a powerful group in the city of Sung, can extract the mysteries within a type of vortex called the Odex.  A special incentive spurs Togura on as his one true love, Day Suet, has fallen into it.

So on a journey with walking rocks, pirates, sea-dragons, and wizards, begins to unfold itself with very few clues as to where this Index is.  There is also the side quest for Togura to finally lose his virginity.  He finds himself out of his depth very quickly.  In fact he spends a lot of his time in places he would rather not be.

I read the first book of the series, 'The Wizards and the Warrirors', two or three years ago as a random buy from my local fantasy/ sci-fi bookshop but I ended up loving it so much that I had bought the whole series to enjoy.  

What do I love about Hugh Cook?  His sheer inventiveness is mind blowing and his use of language is truly unique and very funny.  His characters tend to be larger than life and the impossible adventures they go on makes you gripped as to how they are going to get through such a journey.  

In 'The Wordsmiths and the Warguild' Togura is a very likeable character who is an ordinary man forced to turn adventurer for the love of his life.  The story twists and twists making you want to read more to see how it will all resolve itself.  The characters are rich and compelling driven by their own motivations either helping or hindering Togura.

The series was planned to be a huge sixty books but Cook had to stop at ten because they weren't selling well enough.  Still ten books is an impressive achievement and though he is not very well known they hold a special place in my heart as I enjoy how much fun it can be to read such books.  

'Evolution' by Stephen Baxter

 

Happy New Year!  Another one to add to the billions that have already occurred to life on this planet.  And I kick start the year with a book about how we came to be, 'Evolution' by Stephen Baxter, which is about the evolution of our species from the age of the dinosaurs to life five hundred million years into the future.

It is a novel and speculates on what it must have been like to live sixty-five million years ago as one of our shrew-like ancestors who survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.  This novel is fraught with near death experiences as much is about survival in a harsh world, full of danger and doing the best you can to see another day.

This book can be seen as a conceptual series of short stories that are linked by theme.  It is hard sci-fi so if you love your science then you will get a lot out of this book but it is no text book, it is a work of fiction despite it being so heavily influenced by current day science.  It does not pretend to be accurate.

As someone who found Darwin's 'Origin of Species' to be quite dry I am glad that there is an emotional piece of work about the theory of evolution.  This gives me a better understanding of how evolution works, how small changes in one ancestor can have an effect over the whole lineage of beings that come after it.

It's not just about the past but it goes far into the future seeing what a post-human age would look like and I found that to be utterly fascinating.  There will be more co-operation, more symbiotic relationships and the human civilisation would have disappeared completely.  There would be things created by NASA would make an appearance in this new world in their search for answers.

It's a stark look, and a bold sweep, over the whole arc of human evolution that gives us keener insights to our lives on this ever circling planet of ours.