An autobiography which seeks to set the record straight "without artifice"

‘THE TRUTH is in the fiction. That is where the spiritual thermometer gives its reading." So Martin Amis says in Experience. What, then, is the status of the truth in his autobiography, which is also a memorial of Kingsley Amis, his father? You can be sure, at the very least, that the truth is well-mimicked. Amis is a gifted mimic even on paper, and at second hand - he mimics, brilliantly, his brother Philip mimicking Kingsley in a towering rage. There is enough scorching dialogue and anecdote here to script an entire "Kingsley Amis" one-man show. Not that the book is a one-man or even a two-man show: Amis’s mother, Hilly, his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and his sister, Sally, are all class acts in these pages.

Amis intends, he says, to set the record straight and to speak, for once, "without artifice". This is impossible. He is a self-conscious character in his own story, infinitely vulnerable to the reflection in his bathroom mirror. You cannot craft a narrative without artifice, and this one is as crafty and as artificial as it gets - by which I mean it is a work of art.

The autobiography - which is funny, sad, moving and absolutely riveting - is a complex piece of layering, and incorporates a substantial overview (or underview) of his father’s life and work. It begins with two parallel conversations: one with Martin talking with his own young sons, the other from Kingsley’s I Like it Here, based on a conversation he had with Martin and Philip as children. Form, Martin writes, comes from a novelist’s addiction to seeing such parallels and making connections.

That is how this book works, and indeed it is how memory works. One thing leads to another, generally to fear and death, otherwise to tooth trouble and sex. Thus the middle-aged Martin’s embarrassment at buying Steradent in a chemist’s is linked, by a circuitous route, with Kingsley’s buying his teenage sons a celebratory gross of condoms, having learned that they would put them to good use.

Amis approvingly quotes Julian Barnes as saying that novelists do not write "about" their themes and subjects but "around" them. His first section - a long and winding road from innocence to experience - proceeds like a movie, in flashbacks and fast-forwards, the main themes dropped in with the casual menace of rattling chains, and the backstories gradually revealed, all exactly the kind of "compulsive self-circlings" that Amis identifies in the "higher autobiography" which he thinks literary fiction has become.

The narrative is punctuated by his letters home from school and Oxford (flowered shirts and crushed-velvet flares). Amis, by the way, has kept almost no letters, and none at all from his father - the only clue here for anyone seeking evidence of oedipal destructiveness.

The narrative is served red-hot and dans son coulis of footnotes, Nabokov-style. Some footnotes take up more space on the page than the main matter. They create an extra-textual text of glosses, amplifications, personal messages, appeals to the reader, supplementary anecdotes, digressions and literary criticism. The following account of the main themes is, therefore, an unlovely act of deconstruction.

Amis’s student cousin Lucy Partington went missing in December 1973, a few weeks after the publication of his first novel. The Amises lived in the city, the Partingtons in the country. They provided simple affection and arcadian holidays for Martin and his brother and sister. Lucy was "serious, resolute, artistic, musical and religious". And innocent. Twenty-one years later they learn that she was one of the victims of Frederick West. He had decapitated and dismembered her body. What did he do before he killed her? No one can know.

This horror runs through Amis’s narrative, connecting with other evils and violations and with "significant suicides" - among them that of the mother of his out-of-wedlock daughter, Delilah Seale, a stranger to him until she was a young adult. Amis was amazed when Maureen Freely in a review noted "the stream of lost and wandering daughters and putative or fugitive fathers" in his fiction. He had not realised. Writing, he says, grows out of "silent anxiety", and the unconscious does all the work.

Many narrative paths lead towards and away from the partings and discontinuities of his annus horribilis, 1994-5. The knowledge of Lucy’s fate was still new. Amis’s marriage was falling apart. The teeth that secured the wonky bridgework in his upper jaw were falling out. No one has described with more agonising humour the pain and shame, the gory wrenchings, drillings, tearings and clampings, of dental catastrophe - except Nabokov in Pnin, whom he quotes. Amis’s New York dentist also scooped a benign tumour out of his lower jaw, and inserted a chunk of cowbone, into which he screwed implants. Meanwhile the English press wrote nasty stories about his abandoning his wife and sons "to go and live with an heiress [his second wife, Isabel Fonseca] in New York, the better to squander my advances on a Liberace smile".

The USA has always invigorated Amis. Holocaust-haunted, he has been fascinated by Israel. His deep and filial friendship with Saul Bellow spans both countries. England is problematic - largely because of the injustice, futility and unreason of the press, which he gives an Appendix all to itself.

In negotiating that much-publicised advance for The Information (1995), Amis broke with his long-time agent, Pat Kavanagh, and, as a result, lost the close friendship of her husband, Julian Barnes. "I won’t be the one to turn away," writes Amis in that context, and in the same spirit stresses that Kingsley did not leave either of his wives; they left him. This is disingenuous. People do not turn away from those they love without reason. Kingsley himself turned away at the very end, "to do his dying". "I hate it when they turn away," writes Martin.

The second section charts in detail Kingsley’s drink-driven decline, "the great engine of his comedy" winding down as he descended into dementia. This tragicomic chronicling often seems to be necessary to writers, after the death of someone close who loomed huge. Death often elicits too, as here, a weird exhilaration. Amis had yet another motive in writing about Kingsley’s end: to correct the inaccuracies written in a newspaper, "assailing us in our grief", by Kingsley’s official biographer, Eric Jacobs. Now, re-reading his father’s books, Amis thinks: "All this is you and the best of you, and it is still here and I still have it."

Soon after Kingsley’s death, Martin and Isabel had a daughter, and then another. "Life is mainly death and babies," and babies are "the white magic". He loves his children. But do not ask whether Amis is "nice", or whether Amis is "happy". "A writer’s life is all anxiety and ambition." He is a writer, and a seriously good writer, and never on better form than now. Experience, the book of his life, may be the book of his life.