The Amis Effect: A Fan Piece

Martin Amis died last Friday. He’s been my favourite novelist ever since, aged eighteen, I first read The Rachel Papers. Eighteen was a good age to be reading a literary novel about impending adulthood, first love and the problem of having to make life-defining decisions without the relevant experience, written by an author who was only six years older, when he wrote it, than I was when I read it. Never before had I known someone to write – to speak – in a voice that, to my innocently self-regarding sensibility, sounded so much like my own. Later, of course, I would come to realise just how pretentious the comparison was; yet, to this day, when I read Martin Amis, I don’t hear his voice in my head so much as I hear mine coming out of his.

Before you wheel away, retching, a placatory word. This isn’t some self-aggrandizing exercise in smarm dressed up as an obituary. It isn’t, even, an obituary. I’m too old and lazy – besides rather conspicuously lacking in the talent – to compete with the august hommes de lettres now rushing into print with appreciations of their late colleague (I think we can take it for granted that there won’t be many femmes). Besides, Matthew D’Ancona has already written, in the New European, pretty much the same things I should have done, even making the affective comparison with the death of David Bowie that came over me the instant I heard the news. The Amis Effect Redux, I suppose; but at least it saves me the trouble.

I came here, instead, to write a short list for a couple of friends who, implicitly or explicitly, asked me to recommend something of his for them to read. One is a lately-retired English teacher whose speciality used to be squeezing the distended spawn of well-heeled semiliterates through the needle’s eye of the GCE examinations. Appropriately enough, her literary tastes run to Thomas Hardy and Alice Walker. The other friend is also a teacher, one who struggles to impart the principles of economics to English schoolchildren (I gather that the traditional method, which involved us teaching them to one another on the playground or behind the lavatories, is no longer favoured). His bread is hard-earned and although he is spending it at the bookseller’s rather than on me, I am anxious that he should obtain full value. Having heard me mention that Amis’s own literary heroes were Bellow, Nabokov and Updike, he modestly averred that he had found the road-trip in Lolita ‘tedious’. I was a bit shaken by this confession: one doesn’t, after all, read these people for the stories they tell – imagine reading Herzog or Pale Fire or the Rabbit novels for their plots – but for how they tell them and, beyond even that, the incomparable, unspeakable pleasure of just reading their words. When Nabokov, in one exquisite sentence, makes the sight of shit coming out of a horse beautiful, questions about where the horse is going and who is riding in the sleigh it draws after it become, temporarily at least, less germane than the words themselves, which one savours – you can retch now if you want – in isolation from the narrative in which they are functionally embedded. Nabokov’s prose is full of moments of this kind, epiphanies in which the world, under his minute scrutiny (the eye of the lepidopterist), seems on the brink of revealing the mysteries at its heart. ‘Spiritual’ is a word one hardly dares utter in connection with Nabokov, whose contempt for mumbo-jumbo of any kind was scathing; all the same, I think it is the right one to use to describe the meaning he extracts, the implied essences he distils from the translucence of a melting icicle or the bereft questing of a displaced caterpillar condemned to spend its last hours endlessly circling the rim of a picnic-table. It’s easy to see how, if your expectations are largely primed by fiction in the plain style, by the habit of reading for the story, you could find Nabokov tedious. And Lolita is, of course, too notorious to be read at a first pass for anything but the story. Its infamous opening sentence, however, is mere camouflage for the author’s intentions – his obsessions: but these are adumbrated almost immediately thereafter in that arguably even better-known sentence, perhaps the most quoted of the whole novel: ‘Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.’ Again the lepidopteristic scrutiny, the painstaking dissection with the micro-forceps and teasing-needle – though we soon learn that it is not Lolita, the butterfly, who is really being dissected, but the perverted, self-deluded pouter who devours her.

But I was talking about Martin Amis. He isn’t like that. His novels move at a faster clip than his heroes’ – often, in fact, at a run. Not that he isn’t capable of the parenthetical discourse, the arch stylistic excursion, the vagrant rumination wilfully extended: London Fields and, particularly, The Information, are full of that sort of thing. But he doesn’t make too much of a habit of it, and besides, there’s always the humour: anarchic, sardonic, surreal in the English manner with a thick streak of the sixth form running down it – the vrai vice Anglais to snap you back to attention when your energy or intellect begin to flag. It isn’t to everybody’s taste, this humour: if you are a prig or a propagandist of any kind, a devotee of today’s obnoxious New Puritanism, say, or some kind of authoritarian revenge-fantasist, you won’t like it at all. You will be angered or offended, and I shall laugh all the harder for knowing how much it upsets you.

I’m rambling again? Okay, down to business. To the lady whose heart’s furniture has been, by her own report, traumatically rearranged more than once by Alice Walker, I offer the novels that, in a world that had the courage of its convictions, might have won their author a Nobel Prize: House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest and, of course, Time’s Arrow. The first two are, in my opinion, nowhere near his best, but all three offer the great, terrible subjects, the nightmare settings (a Soviet slave-labour camp above the Arctic Circle in one, Auschwitz in the other two), the doomed principals with their doomed principles, the lopsided auctorial rictus registering your propensity and mine for self-deception and the bottomlessness of our common capacity for evil. The third, however, sits high on my personal chart of The Best of Amis: a preening virtuoso piece, a showy exercise in technical contrivance that, before you quite realise what is happening, has morphed into a harrowed first-person exposition of genocide-in-progress. When she’s done with that, she’s sure to need a pick-me-up; I recommend Mart at his most generic in Night Train, with its gender-sensitivity and – gasp – likeable female narrator-protagonist. I think my friend will enjoy that one, though of course it won’t be enough, in view of what she’ll have read or heard elsewhere, to offset its author’s reputation for good old-fashioned sexism.

That accusation has, of course, been thrown at Amis so many times that it now qualifies as one of those clichés he was eternally at war against. He never really rebutted it; some things are too silly to argue about even when the consequences to yourself are as unpleasant as the consequences of this were to him. His mild response was that, as an author, he treated his male characters far worse than his female ones. I think it will more than serve (being true), but you, especially if you’re a woman with the opinion that a lot of women seem to have about men nowadays, may not. Amis’s women are, not unreasonably, women as seen through a man’s eyes. They bear no resemblance to the wax dolls and marionettes that furnished the works of male authors for most of the last century (save, of course, for Nicola Six in London Fields – the fictional fictive, the stilettoed anima, the custom-made mantrap), but they’re still women as we – we men – see them. You don’t like that, ladies, do you? You’ve apprised us as much, times without number, though your behaviour towards us often tells a different story… Then again, modern writing by women tends, more often than not, to present men as nasty, coercive, thick or just useless: male characters in ‘quality' fiction by women tend to be objects of hilarity, terror or contempt. I note this without resentment: it is simply another manifestation of the eternal conflict of interest that obtains between the sexes, a struggle in which a peaceable truce is the best we can ever hope for, and even then, the terms must be constantly renegotiated as the world changes about us.

Perhaps I should be more defensive still with my friend the economics teacher, who will surely be on the lookout for other symptoms of privilege and patriarchy besides sexism. Having lately had cause to read an awareness pamphlet published for them by HM Government, I know that such vigilance is specifically enjoined on teachers within the British school system. All the same, I shan’t bother, because – come on – art and literature at the highest level define the bloody patriarchy and, the history of the world being what it is, cannot help but do so. Besides, he’s going to find them anyway, so let’s forget about the woke stuff for a bit and just steam in.

Thus: Money is the acknowledged masterpiece, the one that caused a sensation when published, made its author rich and famous and is now regarded as the literary distillation of life in the metropolitan West during the Eighties. If my friend is planning to read only one novel by Martin Amis, this should be the one. But if he’s willing to consider making a habit of him, as I have, I would advise saving the cream till later and begin, instead, with Lionel Asbo, which is as outrageous as Money but set in a world more recognizable to a Gen X-er than the yuppie inferno in which its predecessor was forged. Or he could try Success, which I think may be Amis’s most typical novel without necessarily being among his best.

After that, I’m afraid, my questing pedagogues are on their own. Perhaps they’ll work their way up, via some of the less successful works (Yellow Dog, The Pregnant Widow) to Other People, chronologically the first open revelation of Amis’s, ah, tender and sensitive side, but unsatisfying to me because the ending remains a puzzle no matter how many times I re-read it. Most people, though, would go straight for the biggies: Time’s Arrow, The Information, or my own favourite (preferred, though only by a hair, to Money), London Fields. Some of the nonfiction is also excellent, particularly Koba the Dread, Amis’s passionate indictment of Stalin, which led to his public feud with Christopher Hitchens (reportedly it never affected their private friendship), and The War against Cliché, a brilliant collection of critical essays and reflections. Finally and perhaps best of all, we come to his personal memoir, Experience. This deals, inter alia, with such persons and matters as the author’s father, a novelist nearly as celebrated in his time as his son is now; the stingy strangeness of Philip Larkin, who (young Martin speculates) might just have been his real father; middle-aged Martin’s discovery of a son he never knew he had; his relationships with other authors, in particular the elderly, dying Saul Bellow; and, most terrible of all, a portrait-biography of his well-loved cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in December 1973 and whose dismembered remains were discovered in 1994 alongside those of the other victims of the mass-murderers Fred and Rose West. The Information is dedicated to her memory.

I haven’t yet talked about the novel I started with, The Rachel Papers. I love it, as the song says, for sentimental reasons, but it is very much of its time, culturally as well as in outlook. It’s the most blatantly autobiographical of all his novels, and one of its unexpected pleasures, nowadays, is that it contains numerous scenes played out between its twenty-year-old narrator-protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Amis himself, and his best friend, a hulking ‘city bumpkin’ who, with hindsight, is a dead ringer for Christopher Hitchens. 

What of the turkeys? Are there turkeys? Sure there are. Amis once wrote a book about Space Invaders, a now-defunct arcade game. It’s for obsessives and I haven’t read it. Dead Babies, the difficult second novel, is to be avoided at all costs. I don’t care for The Information, either (its protagonist is an unsuccessful author; you can see how that might put me off), but it does contain some of his most brilliant comic writing, the kind that has you laughing so hard you can’t see to read. Of the short-story collections, Heavy Water is uneven, as short-story collections as a rule tend to be, and Einstein’s Monsters is (are?) breathtakingly good. 

Is that all? It’s all I care to write. Like David Bowie, Martin Amis was someone I thought of as a kind of elder sibling, hero, avatar, even scapegoat: one of those icons to whom the term ‘role model’ scarcely applies because they embody not (or not just) our aspirations but some aspect of our true selves, or perhaps just an aspect of the kind of person we think we really are. There’s no need to get sentimental about this. Still, if one has chosen well, we find that, even after they have left us, these figures not only continue to live for us, but go on paying back, with interest, the representation of ourselves that we have invested in them. I chose well with Martin Amis.

The Double Afterlife of Maali Almeida

 Chats with the Dead and
The Seven Moons of Maali 
Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

When Chinaman came out in 2010, I described it in a review as the first really credible contender for the title of Great Sri Lankan Novel. Sadly, there haven’t been any worthy entrants in the category since then – apart, perhaps, for Shehan Karunatilaka’s own second novel, originally published by Penguin India in early 2020 under the title Chats with the Dead and later re-published in the UK as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I was at the Colombo launch of the first version and ended up buying three copies, one of which I excitedly added to the tall stack of to-be-read books on my bedside table, meaning to take it up as soon as I had finished whatever it was I was reading just then. 

Several things happened to prevent this. The first, of course, was Covid. The lockdown certainly gave me plenty of time to read, but amid the prevailing gloom and paranoia I found it quite impossible to face a story about civil war, terrorism, murder and dismemberment narrated in the second person by a dead man. Nor did it help that the novel is set during a particularly ugly period in Lanka’s recent past, a period I lived through myself and still shudder to recall.
The second thing that prevented me was the book I was then writing, an ‘unauthorised biography’ of St Thomas’s College that delves deep into modern Lankan history. This daily engagement with the sorry catalogue of avoidable disasters that comprise the latter was, frankly, enough; I hadn’t the stomach to read about generic Lankan folly and malice in my off-duty hours as well. 
While I havered, others with greater intestinal fortitude completed the challenge. From them, I learnt that the narrator and protagonist of Chats with the Dead is modelled loosely on my long departed, still-lamented friend Richard de Zoysa, who was murdered, evidently by a state-sponsored death squad, in 1990. This, I’m sorry to say, took away what little appetite for the book I still had left.

But then, of course, Chats with the Dead was picked up by an independent UK publisher, Sort of Books, much revised under editorial supervision and reissued in an eye-catching new cover under a new title. Next thing I knew it had won the 2022 Booker Prize. Alright, that’s it, son, I sighed to myself: you’ll have to read the bloody thing now. So I worked my copy of Chats out from the bottom of the bedside-table pile, where it had settled as other books were promoted over it in reading order, and made a start.
I began reading with pencil in hand, having some vague idea of reviewing the novel for this blog. About two dozen pages in, I gave up the scheme. This was not a book I could review without causing its author, who is by way of being a friend of mine, some pain. Oh, there was much to praise in it, certainly: the framing conceit was original, the descriptive passages full of colourful detail and the action non-stop; but it was all a bit ramshackle and rough-cut and even I, experienced reader though I am, found the story difficult to follow. I thought at first that the slap-bang-tumble narrative was just Shehan’s way of conveying the confusion and anxiety felt by the newly-disembodied soul of Maali Almeida, but as I read on and Maali began to find his feet in the afterlife, it became clear that my sense of struggling to stay afloat amid a tsunami of distractions was due to inherent narrative problems rather than any fault of my own. Other difficulties also began to obtrude themselves: for example, the period and setting, which I remember, as I say, all too well, were unconvincingly evoked, and the characters didn’t fit into it.
For all that, I made it to the end of the book speedily enough, and found the conclusion satisfying in spite of all that had gone before. Yet as I closed the volume for what I expected to be the last time, I did so with a quiet sigh of relief and a sense of duty done.
Then, only a few days later at Liberty Plaza, I saw the colourful devil-mask cover of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida goggling down at me from a bookshop window. I’d read a few reviews of the novel in the foreign press by this time: all were full of praise and none of the reviewers mentioned the sort of problems I’d had with the earlier edition. Perhaps they’d been rewritten out. According to what I’d heard, Shehan’s editors had demanded that he make ‘extensive’ changes to his original text before reprinting it… As I pondered this, the crafty little yakka that bedevils all writers hopped up on to my shoulder and hissed at me that it might be worth reading this version too, just to see how much had been changed. You’re an editor yourself, he reminded me; here’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see how the real pros operate. Call it a research opportunity.
I know the little wheedling bastard shills for the publishing industry, but reader, I fell for it.

*   *   *

The difference was apparent from the very first page. The chaotic anteroom to the afterlife in which Maali finds himself at the beginning of the book was much easier to visualize, as was the action taking place therein. A lot of the detail that Shehan had included earlier seemed to have disappeared, though much of it, I realised as I read on, had only been moved, reappearing in later – often, much later – paragraphs and chapters. Where earlier these details had provoked confusion, they now filled out and clarified the picture being built up in the reader’s mind. Maali’s misadventures had become a whole lot easier to read.
That opening scene also had a short, important new section tagged on to the end of it. Subtitled ‘The Box under the Bed’, it foregrounded a central plot device which, in Chats, was introduced in a rather less obvious way. This was the first instance I noticed of how much more skilfully Seven Moons guides the reader along: the current of narrative is much less agitated and a great deal of irrelevant flotsam has been cleared out of the water. Some sections within chapters have been given helpful titles, which they earlier lacked: the actual ‘chats with the dead’, for instance, are dated with the year of each speaker’s demise, which makes their relevance to the plot and subtext much easier to decipher. Auctorial sleights of hand – misdirections, foreshadowings and red herrings that tended to be obscured by drifts of verbal sargassum in the first version – are carried off much more elegantly here.
Perhaps this needs to be explained a little better. When a reader opens a novel for the first time, she feels that she is setting forth on an adventure, a journey of discovery across parts hitherto unexplored. Much of the pleasure and excitement of reading fiction come from that sensation, and if the author has done their job well, it will be sustained until the very denouement. But, as a moment’s thought makes clear, reading a novel is (to drag my slowly drowning metaphor out of the drink) no journey through virgin wilderness; rather, it’s a gently coercive guided tour through a cunningly designed garden in which every feature, every shrub and tree, every flower-bed and fountain, has been put in place by hand and shaped until it conforms as nearly as possible to the gardener’s – that is, the author’s – design. All art is contrivance, and much of the trouble with Chats is that it is less than perfectly contrived. The editing and rewriting that produced Seven Moons have greatly improved the quality of artifice, making it both less visible to the ordinary reader and more admirable to the professional. This is the most important difference between the two fictional afterlives of Maali Almeida.

Much has been expunged in order to achieve it. Early on in the reading, I was impressed by how little had been cut. By the final quarter of the book, however, I was well used to seeing big scenes and even complete chapters disappear wholesale. An entire sub-plot, which seemed to be of critical importance in the earlier version, had vanished without a trace. It sounds drastic, I know, but such excisions are meant to improve the reader’s comprehension and enjoyment of the book, and by George that’s just what they do. Hemingway is said to have advised a tyro writer that the more ‘good stuff’ he left out, the better his novel would be; a comparison of Seven Moons with Chats more than bears out the value of this advice, and not just for tyro writers.
Notably, the most obvious victims of the cull are the supernumerary throngs of demons, dead souls and other spooks that infest Chats with the Dead. I imagine it gave Shehan a special pang to kill these undead darlings; ghosts and Sinhalese folk-demons were, as I have learnt, the one factor that remained constant through the many changes of plot, cast and setting that the novel underwent during the years he spent writing it. Yet I, for one, was not at all sorry to see these unlovely bit-part players canned; even among the shades there can be such a thing as too much local colour, the more so when the colours are those of bruised flesh, dried blood and putrid offal (there’s plenty of it still left, by the way, if you go for that sort of thing).
Killing off the dead has, however, produced an unexpected side-effect: the novel has become a bit less specific in its ethnic character. Yet even so, Seven Moons is – as, given its authorship, it should be – a distinctly Sinhalese book. This is not at all a question of who the good guys and the bad guys are; among the many villains of the novel are, in fact, a trio of murderous Sinhalese ethnic supremacists, two living, one dead. Still less is it a charge of bias levelled against the author, whose revulsion against all nativist ideology, obscurantism and violence is amply reflected in both books. It is, rather, a question of inherent perspective, a product of the fact that no-one can really help seeing things from the angle determined by their own social and cultural position in the world. Even so, a little more research into the modern history of Lanka might have resulted in a slightly different novel and, dare I say it, a more penetrating one.
Certainly, it would have been a book with fewer historical bloopers in it. Most of them are trivial, but they are especially easy for readers of my generation to spot, and the launch of a new edition should have been taken as an opportunity to remove them. I wonder whether the UK publishers employed a local fact-checker – and if so, who that person was. I should like to have a quiet word with them.
I don’t want to give the impression that Seven Moons is a completely different book from Chats. The plot (well, most of it), the characters and nearly all the actual text are held in common between the two. But it would be equally incorrect to claim that they are the same book. The two versions don’t tell the same story in slightly different words; they tell slightly different stories in much the same words. Of the two, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is by far the better novel. The agony through which his editors put poor Shehan – who clearly had to do all the revising himself – has proven its worth in the shape of a Booker Prize. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?
It would be impossible to list all the changes that have been made – to use an appropriate metaphor, their name is Legion – but I will mention a few insertions that seem, amusingly, to have been added to render the book more attractive to a ‘global’ readership. One of these comes in the key ear-check scene, when ‘Yahweh and Zeus’ are substituted for ‘Allah, Vishnu and Karma’. Elsewhere, devilled pork – a classic Lankan bar snack or ‘bite’ – is transmogrified into devilled prawns and a ‘Semitic’ nose becomes, absurdly, ‘Hawaiian’. A British journalist’s taste for ‘village prostitutes’ becomes a partiality for ‘village maidens’. Mild Orientalisms sprinkle the text; there are none at all in Chats with the Dead. Less trivially, I was sorry to see a reference to Dollar Farm, the scene of an infamous massacre perpetrated by the Tamil Tigers, dropped; I suppose the publishers were afraid of a lawsuit from Dollar Farm Products, a massive American agribusiness firm with multibillion-dollar annual revenues.

*   *   *

So what did I think of Seven Moons, I hear you ask? It’s a fair question, but I don’t know whether I can answer it fairly. I finished Chats, which is now effectively an early draft of Seven Moons, before taking on its successor. My first impressions of the plot, setting and characters were formed, therefore, by meeting them in relatively unpolished, arguably unfinished form. When I re-encountered them in Seven Moons, they hung together better and were more smartly turned out, but they could not produce for me the surprise, the invigorating fizz, of a first impression. The fault, if there is one, is entirely mine. I should have read v.2.0 first.
It turned out, though, that the thing I had worried most about – being uncomfortably reminded of Richard de Zoysa – was never a problem, because Maali doesn’t resemble Zoysa (as his mother used to call him) in the least. Richard was, to put it bluntly, a creature of his times; he lived and died immersed in them, yoked to them if you like. It is what gave him power and relevance as an individual for as long as he lived, and it is what makes him the icon he has become in death. Maali Almeida, by contrast, is a figure of a type that did not exist in the Lanka of the Eighties; he is the product of a later generation, the one to which his creator belongs. In action, attitude and philosophy, Maali is recognisably a Gen X-er.
I don’t believe that human nature changes from generation to generation. On the contrary, I am convinced that it is changeless and will remain so unless we evolve into another species. But the physical and political world changes continually about us, influencing contemporary hopes, fears and beliefs – the Zeitgeist, if you will – and shaping us as it does so. Human nature stays the same, but humanity is Protean. Lankans in the 1980s were under enormous stress: we were acutely aware, day in, day out, of the fragility of our lives. People, vehicles and buildings blew up before our eyes; we walked or drove past charred corpses lying on tyres, bodies crumpled in pools of blood, one-legged landmine victims faltering along on crutches. There were guns everywhere, wielded by the military, the police, the Tigers, the JVP, thuggish political ‘security’ operatives and heaven knows who else. We defied JVP hartals to go to work, knowing full well that the mandated penalty for this was a bullet. Our streets were obstacle-courses of checkpoints, zig-zag chicanes, speed bumps and potholes; military bases and government buildings became improvised fortresses, skulking behind battlements of oil-drums, sandbags and razor wire. There was no freedom of speech; Emergency regulations and personal threats of violence kept most of us silent until the bheeshanaya finally ended in the early Nineties. Every so often, someone we knew would disappear or be forced to leave the country in a hurry.

Under such conditions, my generation – real-life contemporaries of the fictional Maali Almeida – dared not indulge in the luxury of detachment. We were, perforce, fully engaged with the realities of war, politics and business, desperately leveraging whatever scraps of influence, acumen and culture we had to keep us alive and sane. It was no era for old men (or women); with a few key exceptions, even politicians, generals and terrorist leaders were mostly in their thirties and forties (Prabhakaran, in 1990, was thirty-six). From driven, risk-addicted Colombo yuppies to the desperate youths with blighted futures who slaughtered one another by the thousand in the wars and dirty wars that racked our country, we all had skin in the game. There could be none of the fastidious dissociation from the world of serious affairs that prevails among Maali and his circle of elite friends in Seven Moons – and which does, in fact, seem to prevail among many of the author’s generation in real life. No doubt it’s the fault of their predecessors, the Boomers, for selfishly clinging to the tiller for so long…
When the main characters of Seven Moons come face to face with the workings of the world, it is as children do; everything is run by their elders, to whom they must apply in order to get anything done. Even Maali, who maintains connexions to the world of grown-up affairs in order to pursue his profession (best described as that of atrocity photographer), doesn’t quite understand how it all works. Richard de Zoysa, I hasten to assure you, understood how everything worked, and who, moreover, was working it – and why. Maali is a tourist in this world, an untethered, breezily cynical opportunist; Richard, on the contrary, was full of idealism, hope and yearning, and when he committed himself to anything (or anyone), he dedicated himself body and soul – at least until something (or someone) else came along to capture his devotion. However closely their curriculum vitae may resemble each other’s, the characters of the invented man and the real one could not be less alike.
But let this be clear: the fact that Maali and his friends are anachronisms, resembling figures from an era later than the one they’re supposed to be part of, is not in any sense a literary failing. Authors write for their own generation first and foremost, and they express, inevitably, the mind of their generation. This is true even if they write historical novels, though readers rarely notice the implausibilities that result from it. Such anachronisms are, I think, unavoidable in any case:Wolf Hall may well be the most closely-researched historical novel ever, yet for all the pains Hilary Mantel took over its characters and setting, there is something ineluctably twenty-first century about her Thomas Cromwell. I don’t think it is possible to avoid this, especially in our era, when events as recent as twenty years past are thoroughly mangled by the folklore-mills of the media industry and the internet. But if, as Shehan Karunatilaka has done, you take the risk of writing a historical novel set in a period that still lies within the memory of some of your readers, you’d better expect to hear from codgers who will insist that no, the story didn’t go quite the way you tell it...

Kudos, then, to my friend (and erstwhile bandmate) for attempting such a risky enterprise. In my somewhat biased opinion, he has carried it off admirably. The world, which has awarded him one of its most coveted literary prizes, seems to think so too. As for the cavils of those who actually lived through those times, there are too few of us left alive and compos mentis to matter. The Zeitgeist is different nowadays. People live different lives. They read differently, too. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, like the late Richard de Zoysa, is eminently a product of its time – just as it should be.