Brilliant essayists, dark and fair
in restless imaginative attention, bypassing traditional approaches to find, behind the panoply of the world, a greater, synthetic and animating whole.
Spufford believes in God. Most of the time he leaves you to your own conclusions. Only where he insists, in ‘Sacred’ for instance, on a Christian reading, did I find him disappointingly reductive. I wanted to watch him not knowing; an intellectual Columbus, heading out for some hazy edge-land where disciplines blur and where there may be God or there may be dragons, and where, either way, Truth might finally offer up her soul.
Cut to the netherworld. Enter Milton’s Satan. Enter Death. The Rub of Time is written in the teeth of mortality. Here is Amis, often at his most brilliant, quick, passionate, very funny and up to his eyes in the mess of being human. The essays, covering a 20-year span, are organised under repeated themes with variation. ‘Twin Peaks’, which features Amis’s literary heroes Bellow and Nabokov, returns like a refrain between headings that cover politics, the British royal family, sport, literature and internet Q and A (one of the book’s rare lapses). Its concern is, what will remain? Its structure is strictly heirarchical. Who is number one? Clue: not God.
What can be made of a world, Amis wonders, where there is extreme violence, pornography, gambling, stupidity, a listless flatulence of body and mind and an obesity that is both mental and physical?
Not nothing, is his repeated answer: defiance and humour and literature. His triumphs here are the familiar fallen angels: Ballard in his suburb; Nabokov; Larkin struggling against his inner cold; Updike — all the ‘transgressive’ writers; and Chloe, the gonzo porn star, whose fragile, hard softness is both heartbreaking and unforgettable.
For all their cleverness, these essays are characterised by their emotional engagement. Amis gathers his personal canon around him, as you might pull a cloak tight against the cold and coming dark. He loves his heroes, all the more it seems for their mortality. Repeatedly, he measures their achievements, asserting first Nabokov’s and then Bellow’s pre-eminence. Behind his insistence is the anxiety of its opposite: what if literature isn‘t eternal? And, implicitly, what about me? Please tell me that something of this will last.
If Spufford writes in the certainty of belief, Amis has only the flickering of opinion to go by. Don’t dismiss it. Opinion isn’t fact, and it certainly isn’t Truth, but it has the warmth and changeability of life about it. It is a sort of intellectual heartbeat: evidence that we are alive and thinking and in the world. It is human and there is, underneath all the swagger, a modesty to that.It’s Life that Amis is interested in. His plea, addressed to Time, is: give us just a little more Life, damn you. By arrangement with
the Spectator