Engagement

A Guardian leader today is, in the words of Norman Geras, a short blast in praise of Martin Amis. I agree with the good professor that the remarks by 'Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski' seem philistine, but the whole piece seems wrong-headed.

Witnessing the travails of Africa, he wondered why he never met other writers out there.

Perhaps that's because - ahem - newspapers don't bother sending writers to faraway places of which we know little. It seems a little odd for a newspaper editorial to complain about the practices of newspaper editors.

A frequent complaint against contemporary writers is that they are not engaged. Where is the great novel to take on turbo-capitalism, climate change or house prices? What are all the great talents doing in their studies with their £150,000 advances, other than reimagining favourite bits of history, such as Dunkirk or the Empire Windrush? Don't they realise there is a big, often bad, world out there that needs vivid description and intelligent illumination?

I don't know about you, but I've been waiting for years for a novel about house prices. Most novelists are lucky to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage; very few get six-figure advances. Wasn't the point of 'Money' that John Self's cheque at the end was 'half way to six figures'? 'It was three figures'. From memory, because I'm too lazy to find the book.

It could also be the case that, if you wanted to know about what was happening in the world economically and politically and scientifically, reading a made-up story may not be the best way to go about this. You could try reading a newspaper (one that employs journalists rather than columnists, so not the Guardian then) or watching TV.

A stylist with the trick of defamiliarising the familiar, [Martin Amis] is also a keen student of the public realm. His writing on Islamist terrorism has made him enemies; his opinions are sometimes cruder and shallower than the language that dresses them. Still, we should prize him - for his engagement as well as his gifts.

The thing about Amis is that he's not the most well-informed writer on Islam. If you want to understand al Qaeda, you're better off looking for its roots in Chechnya and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rather than a couple of books by Sayyid Qutb.

As for Amis' language, I stand with David Sexton in the Evening Standard (quoted here):

The writing is so preening, so self-important about its own vocabulary and phrase-making that it always draws attention to its own display, not to the matter in hand. None of the formulae - 'worldflash of a coming future'; 'horrorism'; 'hemispherical abjection' - rings quite true.

Martin Amis used to have gifts, but it's because he tries to be engaged that he's become so tedious. Doesn't it say something when we're told to prize a writer because we should rather than because he's a pleasure to read? Sartre, who pretty much invented all this silly nonsense about engagement once said that he'd rather read Raymond Chandler than Wittgenstein. Quite.