A book I found in a charity shop in Munich. I’d only previously read one of Amis’ novels, Money (enjoyable), his memoir Experience (very good) and his essays (superb). He is probably a better essayist than novelist, but that’s not exactly an insult to his novels – like Gore Vidal, his essays are so brilliant (and brilliantly wrong at times) that his novels can slip a degree or two down the ladder of excellence, while heaving their skirts well above the stain of mediocrity.
The plot of The Information isn’t important, it is merely a frame on which Amis weaves his various observations and set-pieces. But in brief, there are two ghastly novelists called Richard and Gwyn, the former a loser who writes unreadable drivel, the latter an equally conniving but, by chance, successful Author who writes blandly readable works about Politically Correct utopias. Both men are total shits.
Amis a great observer. I would love to read an Amis novel about multicultural London, where whites are a minority and terrorist attacks are to be expected “as part and parcel of living in a big city”. Here he is on a pool hall in, presumably, the early 90s:
Gwyn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Centre, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker. In the ferrety light of poolhalls everyhwere. Gwyn himself had had several beers, and Richard, naturally, was completely smashed. Eighteen tables, all in use, eighteen lucent pyramids over the green troughs and the bright bone balls; and then the multicoloured competitors, Spanish, West Indian, South American, Pacific Rim – and the no-colour Brits, indistinguishable, it seemed, from the great genies of cigarette smoke that moved between the tables like the ghosts of referees…England was changing. Twenty years ago Richard and Gwyn or their equivalents could never have gone to a snooker hall – Gwyn in his chinos and cashmere turtleneck, Richard in his (accidentally appropriate) waistcoat and lopsided bowtie. They would have stood outside, blowing into cupped hands, smelling the bacon grease, and scanned the stubbornly just-literate lettering on the basement placard, and moved aside for the donkey-jacketed and zoot-suited cueists weaving through the dead and wounded on their way down the crackling stone steps. Gwyn and Richard might have got in. But they wouldn’t have got out. In those days the Englishmen all had names like Cooper and Baker and Weaver, and they beat you up. Now they all had names like Shop and Shirt and Car, and you could go anywhere you liked.
It is all very British, even in its galling modernity. Nothing much really happens – just a sequence of scenes where Richard tries & fails to fuck Gwyn up, out of pointless rivalry, but it is a highly enjoyable book all the same. After I finished, I wondered at the title: The Information. Not “Information”. No, this is “The Information.” I was reminded of TS Eliot’s:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Amis is very modern in this sense: he inhabits a world of minimal significance. The closest I’ve seen him come to spiritual reality is in Experience, where he writes of his cousin’s rape and murder at the hands of Fred West; but even here, he is merely horrified – he does not understand that evil is a real, material effect and power, a spiritual force.
Amis is a great writer because he works within, and reflects upon, his framework; so The Information is in some ways a superficial novel, but also a novel about this very superficiality. It reminds me of Camus’ The Fall, except that the penumbra of the spiritual constantly presses upon Camus’ protagonist and his limited, narcissistic world, to the point where he himself is dimly aware of that which he denies. Amis’ characters are splendidly, horribly oblivious.
Amis delineates an utterly materialist world. There is no morality beyond that momentarily chosen, for self-aggrandizement or virtue signalling, by talking apes. Thus, a concomitant spike in empty, exhausting materialistic pleasures, for example sex or smoking; the chainsmoking protagonist:
Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met.
A nicotine nymphomaniac – physical pleasure, without an embracing spiritual armature, is a toxic gratification. Without any spiritual substratum, the entire physical world is an absurd world of colliding objects:
Christ, the dumb insolence of inanimate objects! He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?
It is a world of purely internally-generated meaning; a world of competition without appeal to higher, unworldly authority. As with Communism, any system that denies the immaterial must focus obsessively upon minor gradations of rank and privilege, on money and status:
Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let’s all be ugly together. This notion held a lot of automatic appeal for Richard – for Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind being old if no one was young.
Most likely, this is central to Amis’ peculiar genius: he observes so closely, so enviously, because there cannot be a god or extra-material value in his world – there is only the material, only status, age, sex, cigarettes. There is no knowledge, only information. And so, it is granted the definite article; it is The Information.
Remainders 