Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny

Guardian

As clever and convincing as ever

Sunday Telegraph

[There] are moments of magical vigilance and great emotional delicacy, intimations of a quite different kind of writer that Amis could be, or would be, perhaps, were it not for the demands of his devastating comic gift

Guardian

Se alle

Mind tinglingly good... He seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could... Here is a novel to silence the doubters...Amis has found a subject to match the tessellated polish of his style

Observer

'Lucid... Daring... A blissful antidote to the arrhythmic stylelessness of so much contemporary fiction

Time Out

His humour is a welcome change from the prevailing literary pietism

New Statesman

His prose sparkles

Scotsman

A consummate stylist...constantly and intensely aware of the language he is using, the medium of his art

Daily Mail

Raucously funny, relentlessly fast-paced, delightfully intricate... A marvelous novel, a powerful book, a work of pain and madness and love...a work of seriousness. A work of beauty

Baltimore Sun

Amis is a force unto himself... There is, quite simply, no one else like him

Washington Post Book World

'Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny’ Guardian


When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages.

We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King.

'As funny as Dead Babies, as blackly portentous as London Fields and as satirically on-the-nail as Money' Mail on Sunday

Les mer
Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. This work serves as an example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation.
Les mer
'As funny as Dead Babies, as blackly portentous as London Fields and as satirically on-the-nail as Money' Mail on Sunday

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780099267591
Publisert
2004-05-27
Utgiver
Vintage Publishing
Vekt
249 gr
Høyde
198 mm
Bredde
130 mm
Dybde
20 mm
Aldersnivå
01, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
352

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.