STALIN WAS BAD SHOCK

Simon Carr believes Martin Amis

has turned from brilliant stylist to ludicrous moral poseur

THERE are very few novelists of our generation (I'm assuming you're 50) whom we can quote by heart. Perhaps there aren't any. When you cast back over your reading list — Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Sebastian Faulkes, Salman Rushdie, David Lodge, Clive James, even — what are your favourite lines? Anything spring to mind? At all?

But then there's Martin Amis. And it's astonishing what has stuck. There are well over a dozen passages I can quote verbatim; shamingly, about the same as from the Bible. 'There was no reason to suppose that with her clothes off she'd smell of boiled eggs and dead babies.' In the 1970s, his was the funniest prose in England, perhaps even in English. P.G. Wodehouse couldn't have been more inventive. In Success, a tramp's benediction was rendered as: 'Gob less.' The narrator replied, 'I'll try.'

There was a certain heartlessness, perhaps, but that's what young men were like in those days. Jan Morris complained to the paper which carried Martin's review of her sex-change book. Martin had written that Morris had gone to Morocco `to get his rig lopped off. Ms Morris said something like: 'I suppose he wanted to make me cry. I want him to know that he succeeded.' That made us laugh as well; it's a little uncomfortable to remember how much.

In Money, the yob narrator is persuaded to read Animal Farm. He likes it. It's quicker to read than most books because, apart from anything else, it starts on page seven. He gives Orwell his approval — except for the thing about the pigs. He knows about pigs. He'd once done a commercial for a 'pork-character rissole . . . and believe me, pigs are fucking disgusting creatures . . . Eating your girlfriend's tail while she wasn't looking counts as old-world courtesy by the standards of the sty . . . Ifs no accident they're called pigs.'

But what happened to the finest comic novelist of our time? London Fields I read out of sheer loyalty, and the huge-advance novel The Information I read for a bet. There was a line in it about his plane trip with a .. . oh, it doesn't matter: 'Jack knifing over a sick bag looking up "assassins" in the Yellow Pages' was the most quoted line. But they don't have assassins in the Yellow Pages, and they don't have Yellow Pages on airplanes. What's funny about it?

Martin's comic genius had collapsed into crepuscular plotting and page upon page of prose poetry. The victory of his dark, serious side was complete.

There had been warning signs. During the 1980s he had been worrying about seriousness, in the same way that Diana. Princess of Wales worried about her hair. It was something they had to get right if the public was to see them in the right way. Martin's chosen field of anxiety was nuclear warfare. He was against it. In the preface to Einstein's Monsters he reflected on what he would have to do if war broke out. 'I must find my wife and children,' he said, 'and kill them.' There is something unshirkably comic (a phrase we'll return to) in that idea. Was this a unilateral idea? Had he consulted Mrs Amis? Or perhaps Mrs Amis had come to the same conclusion? Were they both to be wandering through the nuclear rubble trying to kill each other for their own good?

The fact is that he had no talent for the task of being our generation's guide to moral seriousness. His instincts aren't up to it. Look: he claims that all his characters are working class: he claims always to have been a feminist writer. Even if these claims were true, they wouldn't be worth much because his foundations aren't sound. Here's one glimpse; there are others, but try this.

While promoting his autobiographical memoir Experience he began a reading at a literary festival by asking whether Lucy Partington's sister was in the audience; the passage he wanted to read involved Lucy (she'd been Martin's cousin, murdered by Fred West), and he wanted to make sure the family didn't mind.

Now, that was unshirkably comic. Precisely the opposite effect was created from the one intended. We were meant to think 'What a considerate fellow!' and we actually thought, 'Why on earth didn't he clear it with her before getting up on stage in front of a thousand people?' And 'What if she had been in the audience? What kind of pressure to agree would she have been under? What a bully!'

His latest book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million takes on communism's great dictator. Stalin committed terrible crimes. Perhaps you already knew that.

He compiles an impressive collection of Bolshevik atrocities from various books. He attacks his friend Christopher Hitchens for atrocity denial, and asks the useful and interesting question: why have Bolshevik attempts at genocide been so overlooked, not to say excused, by the liberal Left?

He has an answer, but it's wrong. He attributes it to — famous phrase — something `unshirkably comic' at the heart of Bolshevism. They promised freedom and equality but delivered torture and death. These things are only comic, surely, if you discount the pain involved to something close to zero. Then you can laugh, as we laughed at James Morris 'having his rig lopped off'.

Gitta Sereny appeared in a recent documentary about Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator. She recalled seeing a group of upper-class Viennese Jews on hands and knees cleaning the pavement with toothbrushes while a crowd taunted them. 'One almost laughed, it was so terrible,' she said. Not laughed, but almost laughed. And if that humiliation were terrible, would she have 'almost laughed' at torture, and death camps? I don't know Ms Sereny but I guess the answer is No.

There is a reason why communist societies are indulged in this extraordinary way, and Amis glances at it. It derives, he says, from the 'universal fondness of that old, old idea about the perfect society'. Those who believe in a perfect society excuse the crimes of those who pursue it.

This impulse is still strong today. When an old man dies of starvation in an NHS hospital, there is little outrage; had he died in the same way in a private hospital, the heavens would have been called down. If 5.000 people were killed in private hospitals because the wards were dirty, as happens annually in NHS hospitals, there'd be street marches. We wouldn't put up with it. They promise to heal you; they kill you.

Is there something `unshirkably comic' about those — what? 50,000? — patients killed by dusty wards? Laughter and the Fifty Thousand? It would take a certain moral courage as well as moral seriousness to denounce the National Health Service, but it's unlikely that Martin Am is would go so decisively against the zeitgeist. It's only just become safe enough to attack Stalin, after all.