The Information

Two Writers

Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry have been friends since they were young men with literary ambitions in London. They were equals then — both trying, both failing, both sustained by the belief that their work would eventually find the recognition it deserved. The decades have separated them. Gwyn Barry wrote a novel that became a global phenomenon — a feel-good fable with a philosophical title that was embraced by exactly the kind of readers Richard considers beneath notice. He has money, a beautiful wife, a country house, and the prospect of a knighthood. He is the kind of success that literary culture produces periodically, to the mystification of the writers who consider themselves better.

Richard has his reviews — mostly unfavourable, occasionally overlooked — his unpublishable manuscripts, his job at a vanity press, his crumbling marriage, his twin boys, and his envy. The envy is comprehensive, corrosive, and the subject of The Information, Martin Amis’s 1995 novel about male friendship and literary failure.

What makes Richard’s envy interesting is how precisely Amis renders its logic. Richard does not doubt his own talent — the novel neither confirms nor denies his self-assessment, which is itself a significant choice — but he cannot understand why talent and success have been allocated with such apparent randomness, with Gwyn’s success specifically a reproach to everything Richard believes about merit and literary value. The envy is not simply wanting what Gwyn has; it is the specific pain of believing that what Gwyn has has been misallocated.

The Campaign

Richard’s response to his situation is to mount a campaign of sabotage against Gwyn — petty, futile, increasingly undignified. He attempts to hire a criminal to humiliate Gwyn at his readings. He plants suggestions in the press that Gwyn is guilty of plagiarism. He tries to seduce Gwyn’s wife. Each attempt fails, often in ways that are more humiliating for Richard than for Gwyn.

The satire of literary culture that surrounds and motivates this campaign is among Amis’s sharpest. The prizes — their politics, their relationship to actual literary merit, the way they transform writers — are observed with the accuracy of someone who has spent decades inside the system being both celebrated and undervalued by it. The publicity machine, the lecture circuit, the American tour (a particularly brilliant section), the relationship between a writer’s life and his work: all of this is rendered with the specific pleasure of someone who has found exactly the right targets.

But the campaign is not really about literary culture. It is about time. Richard is turning forty — not just in the biographical sense but in the existential one. The novel’s cosmological sections, which interrupt the satire at irregular intervals, are extended meditations on mortality, on the scale of time relative to human life, on what it means to be the kind of being that knows it will die. These passages are where Amis’s prose reaches its highest pitch, and they transform what could be merely a literary-world comedy into something more serious: a novel about the information that time delivers to those willing to receive it.

The Cosmological Intrusions

The Information is structured around a recurring tension between its satirical mode and its elegiac one. The satire — Richard’s campaign, the literary world, the social comedy of his failing marriage and Gwyn’s success — is rendered in Amis’s characteristic high style: dense, allusive, energetic, funny in ways that require the reader to work slightly to catch them.

The cosmological sections operate differently. They are slower, more measured, less allusive — the prose reaching for something that the satire cannot say directly about the scale of time and what it means for human life. The information of the title is partly the information about cosmic scale — the billions of years before human consciousness, the billions after — and what it says about the significance of Richard’s envy, Gwyn’s success, the prizes, the reviews, the marriage, the career.

Some readers find the juxtaposition jarring — the cosmological passages feel like a different book interrupting the satirical one. Others find them the novel’s essential dimension: the thing that prevents The Information from being merely a very good literary comedy. Amis seems to have intended both effects: the interruption is the point, the intrusion of mortality-consciousness into the middle of the envious competition being the formal equivalent of what time actually does to the mid-life protagonist.

The Prose

Even readers with reservations about the novel’s length and structure tend to acknowledge that the prose is Amis at or near his best. Individual sentences in The Information are as good as anything he wrote — dense with information, multiple things happening simultaneously, funny and serious in the same gesture.

The extended set piece in which Richard attempts to read a chess manual — a gift from Gwyn that has become, in Richard’s interpretation, an act of aggression — is a minor masterpiece of comic prose. The American tour sections are a sustained exercise in comic observation that remains funny thirty years after publication. And the cosmological passages contain images of mortality’s scale that are among the most striking in contemporary British fiction.

The Achievement

The Information is too long and its architecture is imperfect — the middle sags, the ending doesn’t fully deliver on the scope the cosmological sections have established. But imperfect architecture can still contain extraordinary rooms, and the rooms Amis furnishes here — the satire, the set pieces, the elegiac passages, the portrait of Richard’s specific and recognisable despair — are worth the difficulty of finding them.

It is also, beneath the comedy and the satire, a novel about something genuinely important: the gap between what we think we deserve and what we get, the way this gap can consume a life, and the information — terrible, unavoidable — that time eventually delivers about the scale of that gap relative to the scale of everything else.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Amis’s darkest and most ambitious comedy, containing some of his finest prose alongside significant structural indulgence. Essential for admirers of the literary novel as a form.