Some journalists, it seems, like to see in Martin Amis the public bumptiousness they find in his father, as though they can hardly bear to believe in his filial attack of major literary talent. When I met him, he was sighing with disbelief at the shamelessly silly profile that appeared in a recent issue of Time Out.

He lives with his girlfriend Antonia, but runs a working pad – a flat in a solid and gabled Victorian edifice – in Westbourne Park, that outland of North Kensington, a crow’s mid-course between Wormwood Scrubs and Paddington. Outside the front door a small but thriving fig-tree obtrudes Martian-green tongues; upstairs, the flat has the appearance of having been burgled (‘I paid my cleaning lady £70, and she’s gone off on holiday’). An ‘Eye of the Tiger’ pinball machine rears in a corner of the kitchen; the curtainless sitting-room houses a wall of hardback novels, TV set, video, a scroll-armed sofa, the heavily and nearly revised typescript of a new story entitled ‘The Thin Sickness’, and here and in the study a transport of working books and papers (others bulk in the bidet). Local kids scream in a playground next door: ‘Riot lessons,’ my host jokes, and fetches me coffee and a generous drop of the hard stuff. He is kitted out for tennis, and after all too short a time, virtually in mid-sentence, rushes out to his car – a small, black, beaten-looking model – to meet the match suggested by his gear; so the interview takes two afternoons, not one.

His novels, with their witty treatment of a sick society, arouse as much hot critical debate as the personality fostered by the media. The Rachel Papers (1973; winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Dead Babies (1975; reissued in paperback with the less satisfactory title Dark Secrets), Success (1978), Other People: A Mystery Story (1981): inimitably Martin Amis – as is his ambivalent dissection of video game addiction, Invasion of the Space Invaders (Hutchinson, 1982) – the novels depict brutally unreasoning energy and compulsion with all the outrageous funniness to be wrung from cultural absence. Addicts will not be disappointed by the big new novel, Money, published by Jonathan Cape (£7.95).

‘Early acclaim won’t harm a writer if he has the strength, or the cynicism, not to believe in that acclaim’: that’s what you wrote about Norman Mailer, and you must have been speaking from experience. What was it in your case?

My belief is that everything that’s written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn’t take any notice of it. Partly because it is likely to be wrong, but mainly because you have to have conviction/in what you’re doing. The whole body of response that you get as a writer has nothing to do with the actual writing. One of the most obvious and well set up enemies of promise is the aggregate of what is written about you.

Because it makes a feature of your personality or social conduct?

That’s right. It’s amazing how naively people think you respond to criticism: they think that you read the critics and start doing things differently, whereas in fact you are often a year into the next novel by the time its predecessor comes out.

Money is set in 1981: was it begun then?

I started it in 1980. It could have been set any time, but the conjunction of the Royal Wedding and the riots in 1981 seemed a natural timetable for the book. I also thought it amusing to write an historical novel about something which actually happened only the other day.

Most of the profiles written about you describe you as having enormous self-consciousness and self-conceit. Does that trouble you?

I don’t know if I’ve always felt like this – I’ve articulated it to myself just recently – but actually I don’t care what anyone says about me. I can’t remember being upset by any review or profile, and this attitude communicates itself to people who interview me: some take more violent exception to it than others. The embarrassing truth is that what you want is a readership, and you have to achieve it by this clumsy, accidental method of becoming well-known, which has nothing to be said for it apart from getting a readership. I am constantly aware that the only life I have in the common imagination – which is a working definition of fame – is always likely to prick up unpleasant things. Basically, it seems, no one wants to think well of anyone; all the impulses are working the other way, and I fall into that trap again and again. I am accused of manipulating the media, of being an adroit self-publicist, but I can only say that if that’s what I’m doing I am doing a very bad job of it.

Would you confess to the cliché of being fascinated in your writing by what you deplore?

In my writing, yes, I am fascinated by what I deplore, or I deplore what fascinates me: it’s hard to get it the right way around. But another equally reliable cliché is that you feel completely distinct as a writer and as a person. The writing takes place in this odd capsule where I work, which is the only place it happens. Certainly one has had a taste of the John Self life in Money, a taste of all kinds of possible lives, but it isn’t what you are thinking all the time: it is just what happens when you go to your study.

In one or two places – particularly in a profile of Gloria Steinem you wrote – you’ve disputed the notion that the style is the man, but in an article on Angus Wilson, (Atlantic, May 1984) you wrote, ‘the relationship between a writer’s life and work, while not direct or unwavering, is there on the page, detectable in imagery as much as in content . . .’

Joan Didion wrote, ‘Style is character’, and I said that style is not character; if it were, everyone would write as revealingly as Didion does, and not everyone does. Style is everything and nothing. It is not, as is commonly supposed, that you get your content and soup it up with style: style is absolutely embedded in the way you perceive. On the other hand, it is something you are given anyway, and I think writers are only aware of having a talent when it does a lot of the work for them, when they encounter a huge difficulty and find that their talent solves it after a couple of days: it takes on some of the work-load, that’s what style feels like. It’s a sort of amoral, god-given way of writing, the bit you don’t have to work at, although you are terrifically careful of working at it once it’s there on the page. No matter how many times you go through a book, you always find rhymes and chimes and bad rhythms that make you start. As Northrop Frye has said, you are the midwife rather than the mother: you want to get the book into life in as undamaged a state as possible. You have done all the things which professionally you should do to it, and if it is alive it wants to be rid of you too – of all the feeding-tubes of the ego, as Frye said – because otherwise the ego will pop in and start tidying up if you are not careful.

I wonder how much the business of plotting a novel matters to you, particularly when you often seem so possessed by the central characters of your books? Money might well have worked simply as a scything chronicle of John Self’s descent into degeneration through drink and sex and power, whereas you introduce the twist of having him undone by the manipulator, the phoney Fielding Goodney. It might strike one as a trick ending when the bulk of the novel has given us perhaps too few suggestions that Goodney is the antagonist.

It has been said already that the plot is almost a distraction in this book, but I think it’s important that Fielding Goodney is like an artist. I don’t understand it fully yet, but I’m sure it all has to do with that idea.

Everyone in the book is a kind of artist – sack-artists, piss-artists, con-artists, bullshit-artists – and perhaps this leads on to something I will understand and write about later. There is a type of person who is a handsome liar, a golden mythomaniac, who lies for no reason, without motivation. It’s a great affront to the novel, because A C Bradley and that whole school of humanistic criticism tell us that people behave for reasons, whereas – if you read The Sun every day, you keep your wits about you in the street – you see that motivation has actually been exaggerated in the novel: you have something much woollier than motivation.

The Martin Amis character in Money suggests that motivation must now be seen as something more inward and neurotic.

Yes, motivation is a sort of shagged-out force in modern life.

In Money, however, the reader has seen too little of the character or thoughts of Fielding Goodney even to feel concerned about whether or not he has motivation. We may be amused or disturbed by the trick or gimmick of the plot, but he is presented more or less as a suave ideal in John Self’s eyes.

Yes, ‘ideal’ is right. He embodies confidence, which is, at least in my novels, identified as a psychopathic state. The last chapter says that confidence is a wildly inappropriate response to present-day life. Fielding Goodney is meant to embody and show the weakness of such a state of mind. In Other People, which has a sort of menacing narrator-figure, I say that some people have fear and some people have confidence, whereas actually no one has confidence – the most confident people you know have no confidence. But that wasn’t quite right: there are all sorts of executive confidence and performing confidence. But I’m talking about deep confidence. Panic is actually the appropriate response to life. I remember telling my father three years ago that Money would all be based on a totally unexplained confidence trick which I meant to be as brutal as possible – absolutely unexplained – and I think that’s quite a good analogy for money.

To what extent do you think of your novels as presenting metaphors for a whole society? You have written that William Burroughs’ drugged world is meant to suggest ‘the image of the whole world as a structure of addiction and controls’, which you called ‘the radical falsification line’, but the world of your novels is ridden with sex and alcohol and exploitation too.

Burroughs is surely extreme. All writers must falsify. I remember coming across the phrase ‘radical falsification’ when writing about Keats as an undergraduate: I said about ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ that the world isn’t just hungry generations treading you down. I suppose what fascinates me about drink and sex is that they are the magical area of ordinary life: the area where people behave very strangely.

You are on record as having said that you’re ‘obsessed by down and outs and the griefs of ordinary people’, and yet you mostly go for extremism rather than ordinariness. In a way that some readers might find cynical you heighten everything to the point where it is burlesqued… 

Burlesqued and therefore domesticated. Horrible things aren’t horrible in novels, because you have this intermediary which is writing, style, and everything which gives pleasure in a novel. It really is a haggard old paradox. Why do you feel good at the end of King Lear? Because some sort of purgation has happened … although the idea of purgation has never interested me as a directive.

Does display or exposure interest you more than purgation?

There’s a beautiful paragraph in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature which appeals to me:

The turning of the villain into a buffoon is not a set purpose with your authentic writer. Crime is a sorry farce whether the stressing of this may help the community or not. The twinkle in the author’s eye as he notes the imbecile drooping of a murderer’s underlip or watches the stocky forefinger of a professional tyrant exploring a profitable nostril in the solitude of his sumptuous bedroom, this twinkle is what punishes your man more surely than the pistol or the tiptoeing conspirator.

So it isn’t a set purpose to make this life look frightful. It is frightful, but on the other hand I feel very sympathetic to all my characters.

With respect to your own novels, it can, I think, raise an uncomfortable paradox in the reader’s mind that you can write with a Nabokovian writerly relish and at the same time keep up the indignation usually expected of the satirist.

I’m never sure that what I’ve been writing is satire. Money is a sort of dramatic monologue, but Self never actually says anything intelligent in the whole book. At one point he asks Martina Twain why she likes him:

‘Why?’ Because I’m so twentieth century.
‘You’ve got to tell me.’

It’s important that he doesn’t actually say ‘Because I’m so twentieth century’, since all his quoted remarks are fumbling.

He sees himself as a representative figure?

He suspects that he is, yes. Another example is when he reads about that girl who is allergic to the twentieth century – all modern fabrics make her roar with rejection – and he says, ‘I’m addicted to the twentieth century’. I do mean him to be a consumer, and he is consumed by consumerism, as all consumers are. I also mean him to be stupefied by having watched too much television – his life is without sustenance of any kind – and that is why he is so fooled by everyone; he never knows what is going on. He has this stupid, non-effort view which is given to you by television and by reading a shitty newspaper. On four or five occasions his mind stretches to thinking about Poland, and he always sees it as a sort of soap opera: he wonders about Danuta Walesa, for example, and hopes she has her kid OK.

One central feature of your novels is your enormous involvement with the nature of language – particularly perhaps in Other People – which I don’t think critics have sufficiently observed. You seem to suggest that the world is not only defined and decoded by language but also that language does actually reify the world: we can’t perceive or conceive anything except for the way we think in language.

The thing I feel best about in Other People is the question of cliché. Every time someone uses a cliché it becomes sinister, because the girl takes it literally. When an old lady sees that Mary is barefoot in the street, she says ‘You’ll catch your death’, and Mary says ‘Will I?’ She is not inured to cliché as we all are. The things that get said in clichés are really poetic, menacing, mystical, and it was a set purpose for me to try to get that across. I don’t know if I settled down to put over anything about language in Money, although I was dealing with the question of whether or not it is a difficulty to have a stupid narrator while not being interested in writing a novel that is realistically stupid. I would never – not even in a short story – want to impersonate a stupid person, because I would always want to write at full stretch. Realism is a footling consideration. And yet I think that what I write in my characters is realistic. V S Pritchett is a great poet of the creed that ordinary people have beautifully tangled, expressive, mystical thoughts, and there can be no more interesting quest for a writer than to examine that.

The only novel you’ve written where irony wasn’t required, it seems, was The Rachel Papers, where Charles Highway is in a way a self-ironist. He has a literary self-consciousness which in other novels you might reserve for the authorial voice. He says about Rachel, for example, that her ‘character was about as high-powered as her syntax’ – and of course he is shamingly right: she is a sorry girl who tells lies – and he refers the reader to Angus Wilson’s idea that he himself might be suffering from ‘adolescent egotism’.

Yes, the only twist I was conscious of giving to the adolescent novel – the genre to which The Rachel Papers belongs – is that Charles Highway is a budding literary critic, whereas the narrators of such novels are usually budding writers. During one particularly painful and messy episode with Rachel, for example, he says ‘But these are matters for the psychologist, not for the literary critic’. He is a nascent literary critic, with all the worst faults of the literary critic – that sort of distance from life. The only come-uppance he gets is from the university tutor who interviews him towards the end. Reading the book again after five years I was still pleased with the idea of the tutor being an author-figure. All of my books have an author-figure. Charles is a crude case of someone who tries to turn literature to his own advantage – using Blake, for example, to seduce girls.

The tutor says ‘Literature has a life of its own, you know’. Would you go along with the idea that whereas the novel traditionally adjudicates right and wrong and punishes bad characters, literature actually offers false models for life, which is in reality more messy and less exact?

That’s certainly true. In a comic novel the rejected heroine would usually be given some good lines – lingering to set the record straight – but in The Rachel Papers Charles Highway says on the last page, ‘She left without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of come-uppance at all.’ You can see the whole process of meting out apt punishments or improbable conversions becoming rather strained even in the nineteenth century, and indeed in Shakespeare when the comic festivities need to be hurriedly assembled at the end of Much Ado – where frightful shits are allowed to marry quite nice girls, just because it’s a comedy and everyone is getting married. Among the many mysterious processes under way in this century is a breakdown of genre, so that comic novels can take on quite rugged stuff. It seems clear to me – now that I can look back on my work – that what I am is a comic writer, and that comedy is a much looser form than it once was. It no longer follows the Shakespearian model where comedy means a rejection of the older society – the older generation with its hidebound laws and prohibitions, as in As You Like It – and happy endings after complication: a comic shape which is still there in Jane Austen and Dickens. Lucky Jim shows the maturing comic form on its last page, where Dixon has got the girl and the Welch family appear: ‘Dixon drew in breath to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of laughter.’ He’s noticed that the Welches have one another’s hats on, and his laughter – not his denunciation – is the deliverance of comedy. You don’t punish, you laugh.

Yes, you’ve written elsewhere that comedy gives us ‘a world where the greatest sins are folly and pretension’; but in your novels you are often dealing with corruption and crime – which might require a moralistic impetus.

It is all a lot more ragged now. Look at my father’s last two novels: they’re still in the shape of comedy, but they take on very sensitive, painful matters. You are bound to come up with something odd when as a comic writer you write about things which are only in comedy to be defeated. But they aren’t defeated, as life constantly shows us. I think the novel is moving more and more closely to what life is like, and that is why it’s so autobiographical at the moment. I am not a particularly autobiographical writer, but I notice that the only thing you trust is something you have been through. It doesn’t means that you set things down as they happened, but the idea of the imagination romping free doesn’t quite make it any more.

In Money you anticipated that problem, I think, by including a me-persona, ‘Martin Amis’, so that nobody might identify you with your hero, John Self, indulging a wet, drunk fantasy.

I was wondering whether I did put ‘me’ in there because I was so terrified of people thinking that I was John Self. But actually I’ve been hanging around the wings of my novels so awkwardly sometimes, like the guest at the banquet, that I thought I might jolly well be in there at last. Also, every character in this book dupes the narrator, and yet I am the one who has actually done it all to him: I’ve always been very conscious of that, and it is perhaps an index of how alive my characters are to me. I learned this lesson from writing Dead Babies, since I kept on coming across people, usually women, who were so tender-hearted and so full of a generous belief in characters that they couldn’t bear to finish the novel – because they knew that terrible things were going to happen to the character Keith Whitehead. At the time I used to think, ‘It’s only Keith! Who cares what happens to Keith?’ This guy is carefully divested of every possible reason for being liked, and yet people really do care about his character. I wrote about Keith with a sort of horrible Dickensian glee, and it never occurred to me that his unloveableness could awaken love.

You do admit to schadenfreude, or a sort of gleeful superciliousness, when you are dealing with such a character?

Absolutely, yes, and in Money I say that the author is not free of sadistic impulses. But it isn’t real sadism, because I don’t believe in John as strongly as some readers do. It’s double-edged: I do believe in him in some ways, but not in the same way as some people.

Some readers might carry away the notion – if I can put it crudely – that the logic of what you write points to the idea that the ugly are unsatisfactory people…

Unacceptable, inadmissible? No. It is funny that what assails me most strongly when I walk the street is the thought, ‘Pity the plain’, which I say to myself again and again, when in actual fact I have a huge amount of sympathy for them: I think the plain are the real livers of life, with great vividness. My feelings are always the opposite of dismissal of those people.

And yet you can treat them on the page with novelistic ruthlessness.

It’s perhaps because of the intoxication caused by the sense of freedom you have as a novelist: there is no limit to what you can do. The antecedent for me appearing in this book, by the way, is a novella I started writing – between Dead Babies and Success – in which I was to be the central character: I was going to summon Charles Highway from The Rachel Papers, Andy Adorno from Dead Babies, and Gregory from Success, and put things right with them; but the novella didn’t work out.

You do tend to polarise your characters into misfits on the one side and the deliberate degenerates – such as Quentin in Dead Babies and Gregory in Success – on the other.

Yes, I know. Other People was praised for showing my escape from all these obsessions, but I’ve emphatically returned to them in Money! When I started writing this book I knew there was no getting away from the fact that I was returning to those old things, and perhaps I’ve finished with them now. I found myself in the first chapter writing about a tennis match between someone who was strolling around and hitting top-spin forehands and a sort of wheezing, farting, vomiting, flailing misfit: I could see that I was at it again! I suppose it does all stem from social shames and adolescent horrors…

Do you think there’s a connection between the self-abuse of your pathetic, misbegotten characters and the self-delight of the writer?

Again it’s something one is loath or helpless to explain. Perhaps I can’t go on like this much longer, but on the other hand I don’t think writers need more than two or three subjects. I’ve recently been reading a lot of Graham Greene – who is perhaps too paradigmatic in this connection – and he says the same things again and again. It’s a Renaissance Man who has three things to say about life; usually it’s one or two things.

Self-abuse in your novels – whether it’s sexual or alcoholic self-abuse – is often connected with a low intelligence quotient.

Well, the character of Jamie in Other People is intelligent, and he does it. I think drink – and all that it includes as an idea in a novel – is more of a painkiller than a quest for a good time, since it so obviously doesn’t result in a good time. Drinking is fleeing from real sensations, insulating yourself; it’s a reality-softener for people for whom the world is too sharp.

Do you recognise in yourself a puritanical streak? After all, you do believe in innocence – simple innocence and criminal innocence – and in corruption.

I have strong moral views, and they are very much directed at things like money and acquisition. I think money is the central deformity in life: as Saul Bellow says, it’s one of the evils that has cheerfully survived identification as such. Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy that we have all agreed to go along with. My hatred for it does look as though I’m underwriting a certain asceticism, but it isn’t really that way: I don’t offer alternatives to what I deplore.

I am clear about the moral transgressions and even the occasional strengths and steadfastnesses of characters, but I don’t ever feel the need to point them out. I may be just a victim of what I take to be the nature of moral thinking in our time, which is actually lazy. At one point in Money John Self says, ‘What is this state I’m in of knowing I’m wrong but not changing it?’, and he decides – though I don’t know if I spelt this out in the final draft – that it’s a state of corruption, a certain sort of laxity about oneself, low moral energy. I think people do and always will have moral awareness, but the executive branch is weak at the moment; and perhaps I reflect or connive at that in not sorting out reward and punishment.

There is a moral reckoning in Success, I think: as Terry gains confidence and power, so his moral stock bottoms out.

Yes, it is definite in that book: Terry kicks tramps. Among all the comments made about my work my favourite is what a girl remarked to me after reading Success: ‘I liked the bit where you kicked that tramp.’ There are a lot of tramps in my books. John Self in Money ends up as a tramp, and yet I feel that it’s my first happy ending. I would hate to be a tramp, but it felt right for him, and there is a possibility that he will be all right. I don’t know if you noticed, but the only semi-colon in the book appears in the last sentence, which is meant to be a mighty clue to the idea that he is slowing down … because at one point he had said that he wants some semi-colons in his life.

What I’m really saying is that every writer thinks he’s in the forefront of breakdown and collapse. Money is the strongest manifestation of all sorts of modern crap; you can’t start thinking clearly until you’ve got over money, and the only way John Self is going to get over money as an idea – since he has no culture and has never read anything – is to be divested of it. That’s probably why it felt like a happy ending to me.

You’ve written that the novelist’s fatal disease is ideas, and yet you do use ideas in your novels – ideas about the spurious nature of money, about obsessionalism, and even perhaps about ontology in Other People…

I really mean Ideas with a capital I; but I’m not sure that it’s true anyway, since Saul Bellow, for instance, incorporates ideas very vitally in his novels. There are no rules for the novel, and I keep on being reminded of what a wonderfully lax and capacious form the novel is. I do think it’s a slight humiliation for an imaginative writer to serve ideas; it is much better just to be alive to how ideas filter through into daily life, rather than to have controlling ideas.

Do you feel at all obliged to be a psychologist in writing novels, or are you much more concerned with behaviourism?

It’s an ex post facto business deciding that question, if it is a real distinction. I think my novels are behaviourist rather than psychological. Writing novels is a kind of high anthropology. It is terribly difficult for a writer to know what he is up to, since so many decisions are already made before he sits down to write – like the selection of material, which I believe is not a conscious choice on the writer’s part. It’s as unconscious as the deeply mysterious business of a novel arriving when you suddenly feel a little twitch. The only thing that appeals to you about that twitch or idea is that you can write a novel about it; it has no other appeal, and you might even deplore it, but there it is. All that part of it is completely amoral, unconscious, and god-given. I think Leavis said that the selection of material is a moral decision, but it’s not a decision; it’s a recognition.

What you are also very conscious of, I think, is the business of foregrounding style. Everything you write bears the strong stylistic presence of the author, with the very deliberate rhythms and cadences, even when in Money you describe New York police cars as ‘pigs’ cocked traps ready for the first incautious paw’ – a phrase which begins with the jangling dissonance of that cluster of consonants and then shades into an iambic rhythm with internal rhyme.

Style is serving something else, which is I suppose a voice. When you’re writing you run it through your mind until your tuning-fork is still, as it were. I think I might well be a frustrated poet in some ways; I can’t write poetry.

Yes, I suppose my question is really about the authorial poetry or lyricism of what you write, whatever the material.

I might be a better novelist if I could write poems too, in order to separate the two. My father’s last remaining taunt to me is, ‘I don’t seem to see a new book of poems by you … when are you going to produce a new book of poems?’ He says it in a sort of puzzled, teasing voice, because he is both. I think what he dislikes about my prose is overkill, as he would see it, because he has got the other channel to follow and I haven’t. I have tried like mad to write poetry, and I have written two published poems – but they were really chopped-up prose, not a different vein. On the other hand, I think prose is a beautiful medium, and can take anything you care to put into it.

But are you ever conscious of surrendering human insight for the sake of stylistic sheen?

I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, for a paragraph that has a spin on it: that sounds whorish, but I think it’s the higher consideration. Mere psychological truth in a novel doesn’t seem to me all that valuable a commodity. I would rather let the words prompt me, rather than what I am actually representing.

Although even well-informed readers might properly expect the style to serve the subject – not the ‘message’, I mean, but the content?

I’m not conscious of any great tension there; I don’t feel that I’m short-changing the truth by writing at my highest level of energy, although I think it sometimes exhausts the reader. My wife-to-be felt completely exhausted and had to go to bed after reading the first twenty pages of Money – partly because of the behaviour of the chap – but I think it’s rather good to exhaust the reader, I don’t mind.

In your critical essays you have insisted on disinterestedness or distance in novel-writing – the idea that real life and concerns must be refashioned to make a work of art – but I wonder if sometimes your own novels don’t come near to betraying that standard by dint of your passionate, lyrical infusion as author?

I don’t think so. The reason why you can’t put real people into novels is because they don’t fit: the fiction itself would be making all sorts of demands on those characters, and people aren’t like that – they don’t fit into novels. Similarly, the style is a radical reworking of impressions; if there’s enough style it does have a radical effect on perception. Writing a novel always feels to me like starting off in a very wide tunnel – in fact it doesn’t look like a tunnel at all, since it’s marvellously airy and free at the beginning, when you are assigning life to various propositions – but finishing off by crawling down a really cramped tunnel, because the novel itself has set up so many demands on you. There is so little room for manoeuvre by the end that you are actually a complete prisoner of the book, and it is formal demands that cause all these constrictions: the shape gets very tight by the end, and there are no choices any more.

Did you feel that your feelings about women and about yourself developed in writing Other People?

I think I was probably less of a male chauvinist when I finished it. Whenever you go into anything, all the automatic responses gradually slip away. It was educative for me, I think.

Do you feel any need to justify what some readers may consider to be pornographic scenes in your novels? In a profile of Gloria Steinem you recorded her view that pornography is part of the conspiracy of ‘anti-woman welfare’, and you went on to suggest that it might be better to see it as ‘mere weakness and chaotic venality’. This question may relate to certain heavy passages in Money: do you feel yourself to be something of a male apologist in respect of pornography?

I think the feminists have got a very strong argument against pornography, but I don’t think it’s a civil rights issue. Women take pornography as an organised thing, but it isn’t that: it’s just a nasty way of making money for all the people who are in it. It is certainly insulting, but there’s nothing crusading about it. I think there is a sub-text for women’s objections to pornography – I asked Germaine Greer about this, and she denied it hotly – which is that it excludes women, and women don’t like what excludes them. It excludes them because men go off with it and masturbate, and I think that’s a strong subliminal reason for women’s objections to it. The best argument against pornography is that it’s obviously bad.

There are certainly one or two pornographic scenes in Money, and they’re there for the effect they have on the narrator: he has no resistance to pornography. It’s very easy for me to decide that I don’t write pornography, because I’m sure that one of the definitions of pornography would have to be that the creator of pornography is excited by it, and I’m not excited by anything except by how I’m going to arrange the words.

You somehow managed to make John Self in Money both obnoxious and endearing, but could it not be said that in creating the excitement of his vulgar and meretricious career you are inviting readers to indulge their bottom-line impulses and erotic drives?

If his erotic drives were stronger, then presumably pornography wouldn’t have such easy access to him. Pornography isn’t really erotic, it’s carnal; it’s a frippery for the jaded, and jadedness is again an enemy of eroticism. John Self likes everything that’s bad – that’s the trouble with him – he has no resistance, because he has no sustenance, no structure. Pornography is one of his many symptoms, if you like. The crucial pornographic scene is when he is seduced, as it were, by his then stepmother, Vron. That’s his nadir in the book: everything has collapsed, so why not do the worst thing? Then he is beaten up, and told that his father isn’t his real father; so it had to be the worst possible sex. The artistic objection is the only objection. But it seems to me that it’s John’s worst moment, and the idea of pleasure isn’t in that scene at all: isn’t he in fact getting the lesson of pornography? It never occurs to me that the reader could find such a scene titillating, because that’s just not what I’m thinking about. Perhaps I should be thinking more about whether the reader will be finding it offensive and therefore, in a sense, good.

You could say that it’s good as a form of comic excess, but then someone else might judge that it all goes to demonstrate your sense of frailty about anything you might have to say about more complex responses… 

Because I have to pile on all this vulgar stuff? Well, obviously, vulgarity is something that interests me a lot, and people may not want to give me the benefit of the doubt, but one risks that. I never reproach myself for it, and I think that those are the sorts of criticism you have a duty to ignore.

You don’t plant moral signposts in your novels, but there remains the danger that you might appear to connive at the sicknesses of contemporary society.

All evil-doing is neurotic and mad, and the connections with what it is about the world that makes people transgress are, I think, getting woollier all the time. I think television is the great source of crime now. Gratuitous crime, for example, is more or less a modern phenomenon; crimes are less obviously crimes of need or desperation. So it’s harder work trying to fathom what has gone so wrong to make people transgress in increasingly extraordinary and horribly energetic ways. A novelist has to take a reading of the world, and that is what happens in all the novels that interest me. Just what is going on? It sounds banal, but it’s an absolutely vital question for the novelist. It’s the highest investigation. It’s always best to trust the artistic impulse; I don’t have a strong contrary impulse to go around assigning moral statutes to characters. The point is that you have to make it as vivid and intense as you can.

You include two strings of literary allusion in Money: to Othello and to Orwell’s Animal Farm and (perhaps slightly less) 1984. How important were those allusions in your planning of the novel, and do they in fact amount to a mythic structure in your mind? Or are they just curlicues?

I asked Saul Bellow if Augie March had a mythic structure, and he said that it just had a patina. There is a strong Shakespearian theme in Money, and it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare as a sort of writer-god. John Self’s interpretation of Othello is that Desdemona is being unfaithful, because fifty pages earlier he’s seen a pornographic film which uses the same plot-structure. Shakespeare is the model or taunting presence of what he’s excluded from, and Fielding Goodney’s relation to John Self is really that of Iago. When Goodney fights with him, he appears to say ‘Oh damn dear go … Oh and you man dog’; later on the Martin Amis character tells Self that the words might have been ‘Oh damned Iago…’, at which point John Self thinks he’s talking about his own car! Martin Amis says, ‘Fascinating. Pure transference’, because at that moment Fielding Goodney had thought he himself had been betrayed, whereas in fact he had been the betrayer.

I’m not a great Orwellian, but I wanted Animal Farm because of the animal imagery in the book, and I thought it would be wonderfully funny if someone could read Animal Farm just thinking it was an animal story and not an allegory.

Did you have any sense of Fielding Goodney being a type of O’Brien, persecuting this victim of modern society, John Self?

The wised-up operator, the one who knows all the uncomfortable truths: there was a glimmer of that, but it doesn’t have particularly wide emphasis. The point of it is that John Self’s education is under way, but he still sees himself as on the O’Brien side, whereas in fact he isn’t: he’s a victim. He likes the sound of Oceania, and he sees himself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police, but the reader suspects that he’s more of an occupant of Room 101.

Is John Self a nihilist, and would it not have been logical for him to have died at the end of the book?

He does end up dead in a way – outside the novel, in completely ordinary life. To describe him as a nihilist is stretching it. What he lives through may be a sort of nihilism, but he has no informing ideology of the way he lives.

What do you feel you’ve learned from your father’s writing?

The most obvious thing is the English tradition of writing about low events in a high style, which is the tradition of Henry Fielding. I think I’ve inherited it and haven’t had to work much at ear – although it’s not as good as my father’s – the importance of rendering the way people speak as exactly as you can: that is quite easy, in fact, because you don’t contrive it, you listen to it.

Can you read his books in a way that is divorced from your relationship to him?

When I first read him it was like talking to him, but now I’m much more conscious of the art in what he writes.

William Empson once remarked that the point of art is just to be good art, whereas another writer will insist that art has to do with discovering form. Do you think literature has a function?

I would say that the point of good art is remotely and distantly an educative process, a humanising and enriching process. If you read a good novel, things must look a little richer and more complicated, and one feels that it should eat away at all ills. The only hope is education, and one is vaguely – though not centrally – involved in that process of education.