David Sexton
William Empson was our last great poet- critic. He published no book in his last 25 years but we have now had three collec- tions of his matchless work since his death, including two this year. Some of the Essays on Shakespeare veer into the dotty, but all are unmistakeably the product of a great heart as well as of a great mind. Of what other contemporary literary critic could this reasonably be said? And, even better, The Royal Beasts contains some captivat- ing writing from the period when he was still producing poetry.
`The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your own', said Empson. This puts very well the achievement of Kazuo Ishi- guro's An Artist of the Floating World — an ambitious, disciplined, beautifully com- posed novel. I hope it wins the Whitbread Prize in January. Martin Amis's The Moronic Inferno is an amusing set of essays on America with a silly title. I've never quite believed his fiction (Kingsley Amis was recently re- ported as saying 'Leaving family feelings out of it, which you can't really do, his stuff is so pathetically thin, isn't it?') but have no qualms about enjoying his snappy jour- nalism. Another book I actually bought for myself without wishing I'd spent the money on wine was the first half of Martin Stannard's Evelyn Waugh biography, rather slackly written but full of interesting discoveries.
Undoubtedly the worst book I had to read this year was Sphinx by D. M. Thomas: overrated in so far as it was published if no further.
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