Douglas Woolf’s The Timing Chain, with its delicate and ironic account of an author’s visit to his publisher, makes Amis’s version look leaden-footed.The writer who stands in the way of Amis’s claim to be the laureate of Notting Hill is the protean Falstaff of late-century English literature: Michael Moorcock. There’s nothing more that needs to be said about a culture that can come up with Newt Gingrich But America is where the money is – and the teeth Chicago, Bellow’s turf, like a gleaming lakeside denture. It’s a Herbie Hide of a novel, a pumped cruiserweight, flashy, fast, brave and hopelessly overmatched.The American picaresque which provides the book’s central section satirises things that are beyond satire. Which is why his prose works best in kit form, as a sample, a promo He is the apotheosis of Granta Man.

The Information reads like 500 pages of smart, highly finished extracts It doesn’t add up. (Just as Tull tries to denounce Barry as a plagiarist by producing a pseudo ur-text of his best-selling novel.) These books engage with London on the level of style journalism: fashions, lingo, indoor sport, the entropy catalogue Dosed with significant weather and cosmology implants. Material the poets, who are at the bottom of the pecking order, were exploiting 20 years ago. Amis is an authentic dandy, an intelligence who has to live with boredom, the demands of narrative, the necessity of walking some character across the room and out of a door. An insomniac, he doesn’t count sheep, he counts Powys brothers.The Information has been seen as the conclusion of a London trilogy that opened with Money and London Fields – but that argument doesn’t stand up.

They’re all the same book, a template worked over three times, retyped rather than rewritten. He’s a part-time anthropologist of the metropolitan scene, terrified of becoming one of those old men with a suitcase in a callbox The legion of the “reforgotten”, the unread. He’d like it to be a tragicomedy, so he invokes Beckett, Borges, Evelyn Waugh He does the English country-house weekend routine He associates with post-Yardie freelance bother squads And gets the chat spot-on. Their names – Gina, Belladonna – not so much the names of Potter characters as of the actresses who play them Which seems very appropriate.