Martin Amis is dead. Of oesophageal cancer. He was 73.
As a novelist, he had the worst of all possible starts: he was the son of a novelist. And not some unread dilettante, but the famous, distinctive and funny Kingsley. So when Martin wrote his first novel, it was like Dan Carter Junior turning up at rugby training and offering to play first five. Comparisons would be made.
Some have suggested that being Kingsley’s son gave him a head-start, got him published, made him noticed, and there may have been some truth in that at the outset. Everyone wanted to see how Kingsley’s son wrote. At the same time, they were queuing up to chop him down, to dismiss him as an Edson Ford, a later Kennedy, even a Don Junior or Eric, both of whom try hard to emulate their dad but neither of whom can quite manage the full pathological, narcissistic malice.
But Martin emerged instantly from his father’s shadow. He might have adopted the same profession but he could not have done it more differently. No one could mistake one line of Martin’s for one line of his father’s.
He did well, and sold lots of books. In the ‘80s and ‘90s he earned huge advances, and those advances earned him huge resentment. Inadvertently, he became a celebrity of sorts, a tall poppy whom the tabloids sought to scythe. He had terrible teeth, teeth that rotted, ached and fell out; he spent thousands on getting them fixed. The tabloids accused him of cosmetic dentistry.