Martin Amis's Blog, page 5

Iris Murdoch's fall could not have been more marked: perhaps the greatest novelist of her generation, she was reduced to a state of perpetual puzzlement by Alzheimer's. Martin Amis gets the first look at Richard Eyre's tender, raw portrait of her decline

'Like being chained to a corpse, isn't it?" This remark was offered to John Bayley by a fellow-sufferer in an Alzheimer marriage. He found himself "repelled" by the simile, and didn't care to give it the demolition it deserved. A corpse, we may reflect, has several modest virtues: it is silent, stationary, and, above all, utterly predictable. A corpse, so to speak, has done its worst. In addition, a corpse is not loved, and a corpse will not die.

Moreover, the corpse John Bayley was allegedly chained to was Iris Murdoch: the pre-eminent female English novelist of her generation, and some would say (Updike is one of them) the pre-eminent English novelist of her generation period. There can be no argument about the depth, the complexity, and indeed the beauty of Murdoch's mind: the novels attest to this. And so the terror and pity evoked by Alzheimer's are in her case much sharpened. Bayley gave us that tragedy in three leisurely acts, namely Iris, Iris and the Friends, and the more tangential and novelistic Widower's House. The recent movie, Iris, unfolds the story before our eyes in 100 minutes.

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The attack on the United States last Tuesday has brought home to the west two uncomfortable realities - the ferocious hatred felt for America; and that none of us will ever feel safe again. So, asks Martin Amis, where do we go from here?

Special report: terrorism in the US

I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by effect. That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.

Terrorism is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at her innocence. That innocence, it was here being claimed, was a luxurious and anachronistic delusion.

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Lucy Partington was 21 when she disappeared. For two decades, her family desperately hoped she was living elsewhere, under a new name. Then the world learned that she had been murdered by Frederick West. In the final exclusive extract from his memoir Experience, Martin Amis remembers his gentle, artistic cousin; and describes the agony of failed marriages - his father's and his own

Extract one: Kingsley and me
Extract two: The daughter I didn't meet for 19 years

On the night of December 27 1973, Lucy Partington, who was staying with her mother in Gloucestershire, was driven into Cheltenham to visit an old friend, Helen Render. Lucy and Helen spent the evening talking about their future; they put together a letter of application to the Courtauld Institute in London, where Lucy hoped to continue studying medieval art. They parted at 10.15. It was a three-minute walk to the bus stop. She never posted the letter and she never boarded the bus. She was 21. And it was another 21 years before the world found out what happened to her.

At certain times, for certain periods, David was able to persuade himself that Lucy was still alive - alive, but elsewhere. Naturally all the Partingtons attempted something of the kind. My mother, too, attempted it. I attempted it. Lucy was serious, resolute, artistic, musical and religious. Even when we were children, the message I always took away from Lucy was that she wasn't going to be deflected, she wasn't going to be deterred.

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The Actual by Saul Bellow
Viking £12.99, pp112

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. And novelists don't age as slowly as poets, some of whom (Yeats for instance) just keep on singing, and louder sing for every tatter in their mortal dress. Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at 30, they peak at 50 (the 'canon' is very predominantly the work of men and women in early middle age); at 70, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs. How many have managed to pace themselves through and beyond an eighth decade? Saul Bellow's The Actual has a phrase for this kind of speculation: 'cemetery arithmetic'. The new book also confirms the fact that Bellow, at 82, has bucked temporal law.

And bucked it twice over, it may be. Fifteen years ago, I believed that Late Bellow, as a phase, had begun with The Dean's December. The visionary explosiveness of Bellow's manly noon (Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift) seemed to have hunkered down into a more pinched and wintry artistry; the air was thinner but also clearer, colder, sharper. Then came the unfailing mordant and accurate Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. And then came More Die of Heartbreak, which now looks like yet another transitional work: a final visitation from the epic volubility of the past. The author has turned 70. But this wasn't Late Bellow. Late Bellow, or Even Later Bellow, was just about to crystallise.

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