Martin Amis - Author HARDtalk

England and South Wales this morning. To the Midlands, and

northern England and North Wales, showers could return to eastern

counties as well. Hit and miss, though. In northern Britain, dry

and bright. Further south, low to mid-twenties. It is warming up.

Wednesday will see the peak in the temperatures and humidity. The heat

will build more widely in England and Wales, we could see the the

mid-20s. We could get some thunder on Wednesday and Thursday. It is

warming up in England and Wales, but it could turn thundery for

Scotland and Northern Ireland. That's all for now. More details on

the thunderstorms heading our way Hello. This is BBC News. The

headlines: The Syrian conflict dominates at the G8 summit. After

tense talks, Presidents Obama and Putin admit they have different

perspectives on the way forward but say they both want to stop the

violence. However there is some progress as the US and European

leaders officially launch negotiations on a vast

transatlantic free trade pact, which David Cameron says will add

billions to the global economy. Veteran broadcaster Stuart Hall is

sentenced to 15 months in jail for sexually abusing girls. Solicitors

representing some of the victims say proceedings are under way to

sue Hall and the BBC for damages. Moors Murderer Ian Brady is seen by

the public for the first time in decades via a video link from a

high security hospital at a mental health hearing. Brady wants to move

to a prison where he won't be force-fed.

The art collector Charles Saatchi says pictures of him holding his

wife Nigella Lawson by the throat are horrific but were just a

playful tiff. Tonight Scotland Yard said a 70-year-old man voluntarily

attended a central London police station and accepted a caution for

assault. Now on BBC News - writer Martin

Amis joins Stephen Sackur on Welcome to HARDtalk. Early in his

writing career, my guest was pigeon-holed as the enfant terrible

of the British literary world. Four decades on, Martin Amis remains one

of the most successful and closely scrutinised novelists of his

generation. Much of his fiction fizzes with dark energy. In his

world, greed, lust, addiction and ignorance loom large. And yet, he

says that he writes in a celebratory spirit. What exactly

Welcome to HARDtalk. Your latest novel is a satire on a state of

England novel, but nobody can read it and conclude that you believe

that England today is a healthy society. One would not write a

satirical novel claiming that. I do not think that anyone believes that

everything is going fine. I think there are some fascinating

contradictions in British society and it is historically explicable,

but this huge interest in the trivial, celebrity, shallow

culture... Surfaces, appearances. I can only think that this is what

happens to a one-time great power does no longer reverberates around

the world as it once did. I think we got through that demotion

because the ideology was saying that we do not like empire, if

anything, we are ashamed of even having had one. So we make the

switch, but subconsciously, it is in people's subliminal minds.

you care about the state of England? Yes, very much. I have

three children on this side of the Atlantic. We should make it plain

that for the last couple of years or so, you have been living in New

York. Some saw the book, Lionel Asbo, as a kind of middle finger

salute as you left England. We knew that would happen. My wife and I.

That was just unfortunate timing. So there was not any element of

that? None. I had almost finished the book when I had left. The first

draft was done before we even mentioned moving to America. As I

was on my way out, every chance I got, every public appearance, I

said, it is nothing to do with disaffection with England. It still

came out that way. A vicious V-sign from the airport. It never was that.

I take that point. But nonetheless, you had talked about characterising

shallowness, the sort of selfish nature of current English society

and culture, but doesn't it go beyond that? There is something

truly depressing about the dominance of casual violence, of

greed, of pornography, a sort of aggressiveness that invades every

corner of the London that you portray. Yes, but it is written

with affection. Affection for what? For England, for the English. What

I miss most in America, the Americans are just as tolerant and

generous as most English people are, British people. Anyone who has

chosen to enter in the spirit of life beyond our shores. But they do

not have the wit. Americans are not witty. It is that kind of society.

If it is an immigrant society, you are very sensitive about giving

offence, and a joke is always an assertion of superiority. If I may

pursue that line, a joke is an assertion of superiority, isn't

there a sense in which you are asserting a sense of superiority

over your characters. So many of your characters are drawn from the

working class or even the underclass, and they are

predominantly men, who, coming back to this point about banality, greed,

lust, violence, they are unpleasant characters in so many different

ways. As a man from a comfortable background, looking at the working

class, are you not condescending to them? That is my right to address.

It is about the underclass. It was questioned for the first time in my

life in this book and I have been doing it for 40 years, writing

about that class. The absentees in my novels are the middle class. I

take the extremes at the top and the bottom. The middle class are

well served by any number of novelists but they do not interest

me. But is the working class well served by you? Yes, I should think

so. Don't you laugh at them?Yes. But I also exult them. Do not

forget that the other main character is angelic, superior to

me morally, in decency and all the rest, thirst for education. Writing

a novel is a very crude business. If Lionel has to be that bad, then

Desmond has to be that good and that is how novels are put together.

Do you care how your novels are received any more? You have bust

your guts to get these books out. Does it matter to you how they are

received? That's all you have. Authors have letters from readers,

but reviews are all you have. have not been good, have they? They

have not been good for Lionel Asbo, and they have not been that great

for a number of your later novels. That is not the case. The Pregnant

Widow got reviews, House Of Meetings before that got even

better reviews. I occupy a perculiar position in England.

People think that there is no limit to how offensive they can be when

they write about me. I know what you mean because obviously I have

looked at some reviews, and maybe the worst were for Yellow Dog, and

some of those was so brutal, I was sitting there thinking, if Martin

Amis read these, what must have he thought? Particularly from a fellow

novelist. It is so downright damming of you and the book.

think it is partly to do with my father. When I started out, it was

not a great disadvantage to be the son of a young writer, if anything,

it was an advantage. But then the whole question of heredity

swivelled. I lack legitimacy for this reason, it seems. That the

lingering notion is that I inherited a full set of writer's

genes and it has not been difficult for me, or I do not have the usual

pains that all writers have had. But there is no upper limit to how

offensive people are. With Yellow Dog, it was not just reviews,

anyone who could hold a pen was queuing up. Paul Johnson wrote and

said it was one of those little episodes of militant anti-

intellectualism. How thick-skinned are you? Being the son of a writer

helps. I would see my father get a battering every now and again. It

makes you a bit more detached from the whole business. What strikes me,

sometimes in this chair I sound like a pop psychiatrist, but you

have always had a complicated relationship with the media.

have been a journalist. You spend a lot of your spare time actually

writing journalism and travelling the world for newspapers. You have

also lead a pretty public life, and at times you have appeared to quite

enjoy the limelight and being in the press and on TV, and at the

same time, you seem to deeply resent a lot of the journalistic

coverage of you. I sometimes satirise the press in Yellow Dog

and again in Lionel Asbo. That is absolutely forbidden. They think

they made you. So you are being an ingrate if you complain about the

press. The literary novel was quite an obscure activity until about

1980. Then the media have got so fat that it had to start including

literary writers. Because they had run out of rapists and boxers and

ne'er-do-wells and depressed comedians. They were reduced to

writing about us. But it is sort of a Faustian bargain. I wonder

whether you reflect and look at the decisions taken by other top

writers, I'm thinking like Don DeLillo and others who have very

much kept their distance from the media and living any of their life

in public, and they have said, judge me on the novels and nothing

else. And you have never done that. No, I have not. I enjoy the

interaction. Writing is tremendously solitary. You have to

have a huge appetite for solitude and you have to be most alive then.

But you get bored. I do not get bored, but it is just a change. A

dramatic change from your average about freedom. You have written

quite a lot about how important writing as an expression of freedom

is to you. Writing is freedom, you said. That is why it is such an

agony to contemplate the efforts of writers who are trying to write in

unfree societies. How have you responded in the last few days to

the mountain of new evidence that seems to be gathering that your

homeland in the United Kingdom, there are places where unbeknownst

to us, a lot of our Communications, our telephone calls, internet and

digital communications, are in one way or another, being marked,

monitored and stored. Does that worry you? Yes, it does. You cannot

help but be passionately pro-Obama when you see who he was up against

in the last election, but he has perpetrated quite a few things on

the sly that I much resented. This is certainly one of them. It will

be interesting to see if he has to Looking from an international

Looking from an international perspective again, Ai Weiwei who is

controversial in his own country was shocked. He said that the US

was acting like China. With these thoughts about freedom and what

America symbolises and represents to those not living there, I wonder

if this is changing? I do not see how it can not. How it can do

otherwise. One almost feels it as a violation. It is a clear abuse of

power. Another area linked to this because it is no doubt one of the

motivations for the new reach of the intelligence services. The

post-9/11 concern about the threat of Islamic militants. Something

that you have written and thought about and responded to. Not so very

long ago, about seven years ago, you responded in a very passionate

way to revelations about a particular plot to blow up

airliners, you remember, over the skies of the Atlantic. At that

point, you said and you were thinking aloud, that this prompts

an urge to see that the Muslim community should suffer until it

gets its own house in order. Yes, the journalists who came to see me

and had flown across the Atlantic without a book like everyone else

on that flight. This incensed me. It seemed like a victory for

ignorance and incuriosity. Wasn't it also an over-reaction from the

security people on the ground? This idea about getting the balance

right about security and basic freedoms? Once you fall into a

fearful mindset then you get the balance wrong. And you say things

as for the shires I -- as foolish as I said. I did not recommend the

course of action but I floated it. It is a pernicious thing to say

because collective punishment is always a bad idea. I ceased to

believe that later on that afternoon. I had a chat with a

friend and he said, "If you do that then you would turn them all

against us." I realised that. It was the first time when I thought

that maybe they were stronger than us. What you have said since is

that you are not Islamophobic but you concede that you could be

Islamist-a-phobic. There is an Islamic heresy or sophistry whereby

you justify killing not only others but also your fellows, your co-

religionists, by the following means: If they are good Muslims,

they will go to heaven. If they are bad Muslims, they go to hell. That

is what Islam calls people like Osama Bin Laden. A takfir, a

takfiri. I'm certainly against that. Where does that leave you? You do

get events in the Middle East and you write about them. You wrote a

book about the second plane about five years ago which looked at the

post-9/11 world. Given your concerns, when you look at a

country like Tunisia which is now governed by a party that is

Islamist or indeed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or indeed

maybe even Turkey with Recep Tayyip Erdogan - do you conclude that

these governments are a long-term danger to your values in the West?

No, I don't think the governments are. The Arab Spring is already

looking like the Arab Winter. It is not at all surprising that

democracy has not taken hold in the way we all hoped that it would. It

is a foreign idea and it would take decades if not centuries to become

the norm in the Arab world. I do not fear the governments, even if

they are the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the individual. Recent outrages

we have had, the Boston bombing for instance and Woolwich, the stabbing,

seemed to me to come under the heading of what was called home-

grown terrorism, where it is alienation that makes you act. You

tart it up with a few slogans which you find online to make it look as

though you are protesting against the invasion of Iraq. Before we end,

I want to come back to your creative writing and your fiction.

I know that you are working on a new novel about Auschwitz. That is

a subject you have visited before. Does the creative process get

harder? It does and it does not. What falls off is the flowing

inspiration you have when you are younger. I know you have discussed

this with one author and he said that most good books are written by

people under 40. Presumably, he thinks that that is not an accident

and maybe you agree with him. do lose that flow. But you gain in

technique. You know more firmly what goes where and modulation and

how to tell a story. Not as good a novelist but a better storyteller.

Do you struggle to find new subjects? I know that - it is

facile to say but when you have done a Holocaust book, you could

say that if it has raised issues that you have looked at in other

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 61 seconds

state of England novels - are you Dickens died early as well as

Shakespeare and Jane Austen, at 43, and the younger Bronte sister died

at 30. Now Herrmann Walter is 97. You seem to be sure that in your

lifetime, you cannot expect to be judged fairly about the quality of

your work. You say that what really matters is whether you are being

read in 50 years' time. Do you thank you will be in 50 years'

time? That is why my eyes light up when I see young readers come to

signings and readings and see 25 year-olds who have my book. I think

that that is 50 years right there. You realise that all of the

reviewing and even lit crit is mostly just rhetoric. There is no

way of separating the excellent from the less excellent. The only

thing which does that is time. You will not be around for that, as my

father used to complain. It was no use to him, posterity. I think that

that was just bravado. We all want to live on. That is partly why we

have children. The desire for some kind of immortality is a very deep

drive. In your case, it is the children and the books. Yes. As a

way of continuing. Martin Amis, we have to end there. Thank you.

You would be well-advised to keep an eye on the forecast. Some big

changes coming up, especially in England and Wales. We will have hot,

humid, thundery air. It is coming from France. Already overnight we

could see some showery bursts developing in southern counties.

Hit and miss, but some sharp ones possible. Most places will be dry

with broken cloud the further north. single figures. A mild night,

turning muggy in southern areas. Humidity developing. Some seem

missed in the south-west. Through Tuesday, one band of showers Chris

Froome England and Wales. Many places will avoid the rain, though.

-- ships through England and Wales. We could see some downpours through

south-east England. That threat increases towards the evening. 21

his conservative. Mid-20s possible in some places. -- is Conservative.

We will have a nice day. Not desperately warm. Mid-to-high teams.

With light winds it could feel quite nice. -- mid-to-high teens.

For Wales, we could have some showers drifting south to north.

Plenty of dry weather in between. As there will be in the south-west.

The threat of showers easing off. If you're heading to the beach it

could be misty and murky. Into the evening, we have the increasing

threat of showers in the south-east of England. That threat expands to

other parts of England and Wales as this weather front continues to

move further north. Don't take the detail to literally through the

middle of the week. But in general terms it looks like England and

Wales will see the highest temperatures, but also the highest

humidity. That means heavy thundery downpours. In Scotland and Northern

Ireland, not as hot and humid but drier and brighter. Don't take the

detail too literally. We will have some bursts of rain, but hazy

sunshine as well. The mid-to-high 20s in parts of the south-east.

Cooler in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Looking further ahead, it

doesn't look like the heat will last long. It looks like we could

see some wet weather in England and Wales on Thursday. More persistent

heavy thundery downpours. To her again, it will not be long before