Amis's second short story collection is diverse in subject, style and antiquity - including  a science fiction story that reveals that Earth is unimportant and doomed, a fantasy where poets make big money film deals and screenwriters starve, and a commentary on the way that society has left the old rules of status and masculinity behind, featuring Big Mal Bale who reappears in Yellow Dog.  There are short funny stories too.

Mentioned in this episode:



Extract from 
Experience (2000)

Another review of the book 
Another review

Contemporary reviews 


Mason’s Life by Kingsley Amis

Carol Morley's 2018 film adaptation of Night Train places the action in New Orleans.  The podcast discusses how the book's mystery has been altered to make it more of a conventional noir, why it was filmed in 'Covid style' with empty rooms and few people, and why the viewer may find the ending unsatisfying.   Worth watching if you like the book; there is a spolier section at the end of the episode in case you plan to do so.

We jump across the Atlantic to a modern noir, with a disillusioned alcoholic cop investigating the death of her beautiful and successful friend.  A comic novel light on jokes, with an emphasis on the meaninglessness of existence and the impossibility of happiness.  The podcast ponders whether a work that shows the police as bigoted, lawless and incompetent counts as "copaganda", where the phrase "the sense of an ending" comes from and what it means, and whether the ending is as bleak as it seems.

Content note: discussion of suicide and child sexual abuse.

We reach the halfway point of Amis's fiction, a long meditation on the realities of the writer's life and the futility of revenge.  Some poetic allusions to Philip Larkin's The Trees and Wendy Cope's Tumps (typically useless male poets), and the mystery of what a planesaw is, enliven Amis writing at the top of his game on the sad and depressing life of Richard Tull, a novelist whose early promise has evaporated into hackwork.

Amis follows a Nazi doctor from his death as a respectable suburban physician in America back through New York to Portugal, Rome, and wartime Germany.  On the way we discover the strangeness of eating and relationships told backwards, the significance of 1960, and whether those guilty of monstrous crimes are monsters or ordinary people.

Diane LeBlond 2013 Etudes britanniques contemporaines “Martin Amis and ‘the
Nature of the Offence’: from Expressions of Outrage to the Experience of Scandal”

Content note: the novel raises issues of sexual violence, domestic violence, child abuse, child sexual exploitation and disordered eating.

Looking at Amis' London novel, or his darts novel, or his millenial novel (in the end-of-the-world sense not the avocado-toast-and-can't-buy-a-house sense).  And the 2018 film based on it.  On the way I discuss the strange parochialism of the metropolitan writer, how many levels of unreliable narration are present, and whether Amis hates the working class or just happens to write about its worst examples.
I also mention:

• Roger Lewis    The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,

• Susie Thomas on class and gender   

• The Martin Chronicles podcast

This episode discusses Amis's first short story collection, loosely themed on nuclear war and its aftermath, and concludes that the stories are unsatisfying. On the way I discuss what Amis might learn from Scooby Doo about narrative, the art of the literary backhanded compliment, and whether the Nuclear Age presents different challenges to the Age of Anxiety.

There is a brief mention of schizophrenia and suicide.

A detailed discussion of one of Amis's best books, exploring the strange appeal of John Self, what it is that the character Martin Amis takes from him as reward for winning a game of chess, and why Self's limited reading includes the obscure Shakespeare play Timon of Athens.  

The podcast covers the novel's treatment of themes including suicide and physical and sexual violence.

BBC interview 1984 with dramatisation featuring Mel Smith as Self  

The Guardian 100 best novels: Money

Facebook page for the podcast

A look at the science fiction Garden of Eden/ Frankenstein/ mad robot film Saturn 3 for which Amis wrote a screenplay, although nothing in the finished script bears much evidence of his style. It's chief interest is as raw material for the novel Money.

Something is wrong on Saturn 3 website

Industry Podcast episode on John Barry

We Hate Movies podcast episode 127: Blame It On Rio

A look at some of the film versions of Amis's books as a prelude to Saturn 3: Rachel papers (1989) and Dead Babies (Mood Swingers) (2000) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJqCZQ2Yrs ,