BOOKS

His war against cliché: the essays reveal the real genius of Martin Amis

The late novelist was at his funny, scathing and erudite best when he turned his hand to literary journalism, writes James Marriott

The author in his Notting Hill flat in 1986
The author in his Notting Hill flat in 1986
ALAMY
The Times

I bought my copy of Martin Amis’s collected essays and reviews, The War Against Cliché, in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road shortly after I moved to London. It was 2014 and I was 22. I started reading it the same day. After about five minutes I realised I hadn’t understood how funny journalism could be. After about ten minutes I began jettisoning most of my most deeply-held literary beliefs in deference to Amis’s superior judgments (my then-hero Iris Murdoch comes in for a series of fairly unanswerable drubbings). By the time I had spent half an hour with the book I realised that my life had changed for ever. Why had nobody told me writing could be this good: so funny, so