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The Information |  | Author: Martin Amis
Creator: David Threlfall
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy Used: £0.94
as of 29/7/2010 14:25 MDT details
You Save: £8.05 (90%)
Used (6) from £0.94
Seller: nancyscotson
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 720027
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Abridged edition (Reissue)
Number Of Items: 2
ISBN: 0001049364
EAN: 9780001049369
ASIN: 0001049364
Publication Date: June 17, 1996
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
brilliant but wordy July 26, 2010
P. Bird (England)
This brilliant book is very funny, a wonderful satire of the publishing world through two writers, one a failed novelist insanely jealous of his highly successful friend. We follow his dogged, hilarious attempts to bring down his friend. I laughed out loud at the calamities that befall each agent/publisher that attempts to read his own unreadable novel. And even louder when the Earl commands him to "get his trousers off!" Between poinant scenes with his sons and a hazy sketch of his marriage and mistress, he totters into the world of petty criminals. It was only here that I lost truck with the dazzling writing style, forever searching for the storyline in the tangle of words. As the book went on, I found myself skpping in opposite proportion to the number of pages left. It was too much of a good thing - like six dollops of icecream. Next stop, Money.
Information May 21, 2010
Dave Gilmour's cat (on Dave Gilmour's boat)
Information about The Information: it's a great book. Not Martin Amis's best (that's Money), but not too far off. This is essentially a darkly comic tragedy and a wry look at human vanity, jealousy and insecurity. Some of the writing is very, very funny indeed. Amis tackles the mid-life crisis full on, and the realization of mortality (and our place in the cosmic scheme of things) seems to underpin almost everything in the book. He also satirises the literary world to great effect, placing Richard Tull's demanding modernist fiction at one end of the scale, and Gwyn Barry's artless, clichéd 'trex' at the other. Then there are the running jokes about the effect of reading Richard's book on its (very few) readers, the endless biographies of minor literary figures that Tull is forced to review, and the humiliating ways authors are forced to promote and hype (thus cheapening) their wares.
Some people say this novel is too long. I like it this way, as the finely honed tragedy is allowed to unfold over a greater distance, this becoming even more pitiful and wretched. I would have been happy for a few more hundred pages. It's a wonderfully rich, sprawling work crammed with dazzlingly inventive sentences and ideas.
I have now read it twice and enjoyed it even more on the second go.
If you like Money and London Fields, you'll enjoy this.
The Unbearable Sameness of Amis... March 12, 2010
Justice Peace (Aberdeen)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Let me start by saying that Martin Amis is quite brilliant, intellectually that is. His work is multi-layered and you'll discover a word you've never seen before every few pages, although he overdoes it - you don't need to call a speaker an 'interlocutor' unless it's Latin translation.
However this brilliance can dazzle and blind. Abstraction and metaphor are all very well but at times you are left wondering, 'what the heck's going on?'
Private Eye has said that Amis's novels are about Amis being very clever, period; and that's spot on.
In saying that I enjoyed The Information and it is of course brilliantly constructed, written and narrated.
However.... the story is about a successful writer and an unsuccessful writer (who earns a crust reviewing erudite literary pieces) both living in London.
Now, this is just Amis and his alter-ego! Indeed Amis was a reviewer for The New Statesman and others before he became famous and successful.
(I'm also reading Amis's 'Against Cliches', a compendium of his reviews where he trashes Waugh's Brideshead and only seems to hold Nabokov in any regard (hero worship in fact)).
Also in The Information are two little sons, one of whom has behavioural issues - just like Marmaduke the violent baby boy in London Fields (where the protagonist is also a writer).
London Fields and The Information also heavily feature Amis's star gazing. He loves to quote astronomical facts and figures. Interesting, yes, but he does it again in both books even describing a female's attractiveness as akin to a black hole's infinite gravitational pull: 'no one can escape me'.
You get the picture I'm sure.
So, the questions are these: Is Amis a great storyteller? No. Is he the master of the English novel? Probably. Is he worth reading? Definitely, but only selectively.
Less is more with the great man.
JP :)
 Low Life March 28, 2009
Gargoyle (Scotland)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Amis has an interest in seedy minor criminals. Morrissey has the same affliction. The characters here though are completely unconvincing and drag the story down whenever they appear. Stick to what you know Martin - the lives of writers and 60s literary hippy types - and we'll all be happy.
 Laughter in the Dark November 1, 2006
Ethan Cooper (Big Apple)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I truly enjoyed this sad and funny book, which explores the interaction between two old Oxford friends -- Richard Tull, a failed and impotent cult writer, and Gwyn Barry, a best-selling author of mindless utopian trash. Further, Amis does a great job in the last section of the book, when the perspective shifts from Tull's futility to Barry's cruelty. This entire section was a surprise but also, on reflection, character-driven inevitability. It's super work.
Even so, does anyone else feel that Amis writes a tad long? In the middle of "The Information" I found myself pushing ahead, fearful that I might lose interest and not finish. Then, I found myself stopping to reread great bits from Amis that I had rushed over. Here's one: "Belladonna was a punk. That is to say, she had gone at herself as if to obliterate the natural gifts. Her mascara she wore like a burglar's eye-mask; her lipstick was approximate and sanguinary, her black hair spiked and looped and asymmetrical, like the pruned trees outside the window. Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let's all be ugly together."
Two good descriptive words for Amis are brilliant and exasperating. But do we really need so much of the character Scozzy?
Showing reviews 1-5 of 14
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