Overview:
Eaxctly halfway through Martin Amis's novel about young minds and bodies who sink or swim in the sexual revolution of 1970, its protagonist enjoys a quiet afternoon by the pool. Keith Nearing, almost 21, a smooth-tongued but socially insecure adopted child and literature student, is spending a fateful summer in the Italian castle of grander friends. Both his level-headed girlfriend Lily and the aristocratic bombshell Scheherezade, new target of his rampant erotic ambitions, have left on a trip. And he has yet to come to grips with Gloria, an enigmatic Scottish adventurer whose vanguard role in the bedroom wars as an archetypal phallic woman (a "cock" incarnate) earns her the nickname of "the Future".
The novel, like the castle pool, works equally as a glass and as a mirror. Subtitled "inside history", it aims to document the moods of a pivotal moment via the erection of an isolated stage for talk and for trysts – a drama with "the unities of time, place and action". These wayward children of wars, both hot and cold, will start to cut sex loose from commitment and so, for the most part unwittingly, usher in an pornographic age of sham and sheen when surface will "supersede essence".
Amis the moral and historical speculator is engagingly open to dispute; Amis the comic artist in prose remains a true master, and a model. As a virtuoso syncopator who lends a hit of rhythmic or lexical pleasure to every snatch of speech or scene-sketching paragraph, he sounds as sweet as ever. Entropy has not yet cramped his style.
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
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