Martin Amis couldn’t plot to save his life the endings of his novels were often a mess.

And literature is (Amis again) “patterned artifice”: all shape, all form. Death is therefore literature’s opposite. Amis once called death “the information” – the basic bit of news that we all must hear – and went on to say that the information is really “nothing”. But they also fear it for an additional, and perhaps not wholly selfish, reason: death is the one thing in life that you can’t write about afterward – write about and therefore make sense of. Writers fear death for all the usual reasons. I want another Amisian dispatch from the front lines of experience. Because it turns out that I don’t want anyone else’s take on the death of Martin Amis.

The strangest thing about Martin Amis’s death, for those of us who love his books, is that Martin Amis isn’t around to write about it. It seemed as if that torrent of prose would continue forever that he would keep on speaking to us, in the accents of intimate friendship, for the rest of our reading lives. So that’s it: the full stop at the end of Inside Story, his novel from 2020, is the final full stop.

The green man by kingsley amis