“The information is telling me –” wrote Martin Amis in his 1995 novel The Information. “The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.” It was an intimation of mortality typical of Amis, who died on Friday at the age of 73 – as interested in how stylishly the thought was expressed as in what it was expressing.
The Information was published when Amis was 45 years old: for almost half his life he was overwhelmingly interested in the end of life. In London Fields (1989), written in his 30s, he said that “Death gives us something to do. Because it’s a full-time job looking the other way.”
