The world turns on Martin Amis

I've been writing about Martin Amis (again) for the current issue of Prospect—a review only available online to subscribers, I'm afraid—and have once again started to feel faintly sullied and bemused by the circus of activities that surrounds his every move. What he must feel about it all I can only imagine.

He is, of course, both a brilliant talent and a big fish in the little pond of "public" British authors. For many people—myself included—writing about Amis has for around two decades been a useful way of writing about what it might mean to describe the modern world through a British lens. Recently, however, both he and we seem to have taken an unwelcome lurch into parochialism. It's a kind of parochialism masquerading as universality, but it's parochial nonetheless, in that it's being conducted at a bizarre remove—in terms both of experience and expertise—from the political and social realities under discussion: the middle east, US power-politics, religious extremism, terrorism. The weightier the words in question, the larger the divide between our author and these subject seems; and the larger questions of personality and publicity loom in commentators' chatter.

Take the recent interview between Amis and Johann Hari that was splashed all over the cover of the Independent's "Extra." According to Matthew D'Ancona, it's a gem of political and literary discourse—a definitive sparring session on demography, religion, race and terrorism. Yet when I read it, I found myself digesting four sides of conversation that had almost nothing either fresh or profound to say on any of these topics, and certainly nothing Amis and Hari haven't already commented on more eloquently elsewhere. The piece rakes carefully through the debris of Amis's alleged "racism" (he isn't), ponders whether generalisations about race and religion are dangerous (they are, but they may also be useful), informs us that Amis's "hand is shaking" at points with inarticulate emotion, and that he smokes a lot, and then concludes with the insight that Hari has been watching "a boxing match in Amis's brain"—presumably between the good Mart who agrees with Johann Hari and the bad Mart who reads Mark Steyn.

It may well be the most definitive piece yet published on the "Martin Amis controversies." But, as these controversies are a media-storm in a teacup that have precisely no light to shed on any of the great issues wracking the world at present, this means very little.