The Information Paperback – March 19, 1996

Okay, this book is adult themed. Complex, let it all hang out, totally uncensored at times streams of consciousness. I enjoyed his penchant for organizing subjects from Small to large subjects.How to characterize this book? I think he poured his self, angst, insecurities, human observations, failings, regrets and guiltily non-regrets into this book, and most likely mirrored real life masquerading as fiction. It IS long.Yes, he can be offensive, this book pushes thought boundaries, in this case he really let it rip. It's not for everyone, but this applies to a lot of books. For me, anytime a book makes me think, it is worth my while.

Martin Amis’s The Information is not, as some reviewers claim, a fictionalized tell-all about the publishing industry. Instead, it is about human nature, e.g. jealousy, egomania, and revenge, and how authors, often held up as gurus or immortals, are just as petty and biologically driven as supposedly lower forms. The story involves two writers, Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull, both mid-life, both long-time friends, until a wedge is driven into their relationship when Gwyn pens a vacuous book (Amelior) the public finds deep and Richard…, well, Richard struggles, scraping by with book reviews and vanity publishing and hoping someone will read his unreadable novel (Untitled – that’s the title) while he lives off his wife’s earnings and spends much of his time drinking, smoking, and scheming against his much more successful one-time pal. During The Information, Amis often draws parallels between characters and events and various aspects of and theories in cosmology, perhaps to emphasize the pettiness or futility of human actions. These scientific forays and poetic analogies are themselves paralleled or countered by the rough talk of a group of East End goons that Richard calls on for some help. Amis’s prose in The Information is exquisite, nearly every sentence a crackling work of art. The novel is more subdued than Money or London fields, more mature, more consistent, more professional. The craftsmanship is just beautiful. The story, however,…. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The prose is that exceptional, but I expected more to happen and agree with an old review from The Independent that in some ways the novel doesn’t really add up. Still, it’s hard to believe some consider this book bad. Amis is probably the finest writer in the English language since Shakespeare and this is one finely written novel. Maybe I would have liked to see more happen in the story, but The Information did what all Amis novels do: it made me want to read more Martin Amis.Troy Parfitt is the author of War Torn: Adventures in the Brave New Canada

Let me explain why I award “The Information” only three stars. Certainly when it comes to zingers, Amis delivers. Plot and characters? Not so much. Only a few of them are interesting, and the author himself seems at times somewhat bored with his plot. Imagine – a crime story with zero suspense. Most readers will be checking and rechecking the final page long before reaching it, and doing the mental arithmetic – only 154 pages to go! To say nothing of the passages one is reading and – even before finishing them – wishing one wasn't. For example the rather savage delight he takes in describing various circus-animal afflictions. (pg. 255)What about language? Amis has a weakness for showing off his exalted vocabulary and making obscure, inside jokes. Striving to avoid the commonplace, he ends up wearying the reader. If you spend much time trying to figure out how, for instance, “suspension” can be “pluralistic,” this will turn into a long read indeed. (pg. 277) And what about his tic of repeating a sentence, changing just one word without altering the meaning in any non-trivial way? The habit is annoying, as the reader wastes time looking for some special significance that is just not there (tip of the hat to reviewer R. Russell Bittner for pointing this out first). “The Information” should win a prize in the category “best over-written novel.”Then there are the missed opportunities. Amis knows full well it would have been better to work his list of malapropisms into the character's speech (as his father did, for example, in “The Russian Girl”), but he decides not to, claiming it “contorts the narrative.” (pg. 188) Meaning that he was unable to do it without contorting HIS narrative. And maybe the description of a man eating a grape (just one) would contribute somewhat to the tension if we knew beforehand – not just retrospectively – that the man doing the eating is a burglar in the midst of a job. It's as if, when given the chance to create a bit of drama, Amis deliberately chooses not to, fearing someone might accuse him of being tawdry, of writing like – gasp! – Gwyn Barry.Many times I seriously considered returning “The Information” to the used book store where I bought it and trading it in for something that did not baffle or annoy me quite so often. And yet I plowed ahead, hoping the next page might bring another of the highly polished gems scattered through the text. Such as “the dumb insolence of inanimate objects,” or “the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.” “These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him.” “His obscurity was the only celebrated thing about him... He never even made it into Neglect.” And he has an undeniable talent for coming up with faintly ridiculous book titles (“The Wouldbegood: A Life of Edith Nesbit”). In the end, reading Martin Amis is like eating popcorn – never filling, never satisfying, but once you've started, it can be oddly difficult to stop. One keeps going in a permanent mood of wry amusement until one's lips get a bit tired of all that curling.

Great author