Martin Amis's Other People: A Mystery Story.

It’s not that the bookfields on which I normally graze don’t provide pleasure, stimulation and the alleviation of boredom. It’s just that sometimes you’re made to realise that they’re full of crap. And you’d stopped noticing.

Such has been my experience over the last few days as I’ve read Martin Amis’s 1981  novel Other People. It’s subtitled ‘A Mystery Story’, which drew my eye to it, in the British Heart Foundation charity shop described below. But the mystery, or mysteries it delves into are a great deal more metaphysical than in the run-of-the-word-processor thrillers I’ve been used to of late. Other People is a long way from pulp fiction.

Using a very formal circular, or elliptical, or double-helix structure, Amis tells the story of  an amnesiac woman called (by herself) Mary Lamb, whose descent into a hell of ‘other people’ is recounted in prose of such breathtaking brilliance you smell, see, hear and feel her every newly-discovered sensation.

Part Kafka, part Amis’s beloved Nabokov - there’s a quote from Lolita towards the end - this is a transitional book, the bridge from early work like The Rachel Papers and Success to the great London trilogy - Money, London Fields, The Information. The immersion in London’s underworld, the grotesque characters, the physicality and griminess of the later books are all here. But this is essentially a book of ideas. Identity, gender, time, perception, good and evil. It’s also very funny, and may be the best ever novel about drunkenness.

It’s tricksy, but not in the way a generic detective novel is. Amis’s literary skills and intellectual firepower are, as usual, fully on display. In no way is he slumming it, as many downmarketing academics playing with crime fiction are . He’s not ‘using the form’. It’s a complex, difficult book.

I found it enormously rewarding. And disturbing. Because it made me appreciate the self-imposed banality of much of the stuff I’ve been reading. The thick-ear, masturbatory stupidity churned out by highly-educated writers who should know better. Who’re after cheap thrills, cash and public impact, with maybe one dumb moral point sticking out like a hammered thumb: Newspapers are dodgy; greed is bad; people do bad things; gosh, even good people sometimes do bad things. Duh.

These are the kind of people who hate Amis because he makes them feel inadequate. He makes their prose look turgid and their ambitions small.

This book was written 32 years ago. It is as visceral, shocking, formally brilliant and verbally pyrotechnical as it was on publication. It's a short book. It makes a lot of thicker tomes seem shrivelled.