Other People

Other People isn't a tale of Visitation. The just sleep of the Elect isn't to be shattered by ghostly moralizing. The world of our entitlement is instead simply upended, allowing the dark bits to pour to the fore. London is revealed through a Ballardian lens. Colors and smells are enhanced, but thinking is pruned, reduced to Money, Sex Death.

The title refers to Hell. We harbor such within. It is nursed at our breast. Martin Amis is astonishing.

By the time I was finished with it, I was surprised to find that I enjoyed Martin Amis’ Other People (and, if you have seen my recently finished books, fiction at all). I like the ambiguity of the frame structure, and that the reader never gets full information on who the first-person narrator is or how they have all the information they do. Mary Lamb’s observations about the world were fresh, and Amis managed to avoid making her into a pathetic victim, which is remarkable considering the pain he puts her through. The question this story asks are about the nature of our society and the way we treat each other, about what we see and what we ignore because we’re used to it. It was engaging, and enough.

As I often find when Martin Amis's fiction.. I'm not sure how I feel about this book. It is at times deeply, DEEPLY disturbing. The actions of many of the characters are really pretty abhorrant.. and I often felt like I needed a wash after putting this down. And yet I couldn't stop reading it! The mystery at the heart of this novel pulled me in and I wanted to know what had happened to this woman.. unfortunately you don't exactly get ALL the answers. It probably does need another read to pick up more clues but I don't think I can quite cope with that just yet.

Still, any book that provokes such strong feelings is one worth reading. Might not be for those not yet initated into the dark, seedy world of Martin Amis. Be warned.

Stylized language often perceptively detailed (river like dented armor), occasionally gets in the way of story of life after / in death, retribution, self-awareness and duality. Downwardly mobile in life, heroine climbs upwardly in death yet with corresponding deteriorating innocence. Mary Lamb / Amy Hide duality reflected in Prince Policeman / Prince Murderer characters, minimally fleshed out as they are not the subject of a Kafkaesque novel. Themes of Time, second chances, fatality.

I've never read a book like this before. I loved the narrative style - inside the mind of the innocent amnesiac Mary, and that of the omnipresent narrator. It was witty and intense, and darkly-humourous.

I am amazed at how many people--here and elsewhere--review this book without, apparently, paying much mind to its title. To call it a tour de force is merely to do it justice. This is one of the finest examples in recent times of what "fantastic fiction" should be like.

Quite disappointingly squanders an interesting premise with a story that really goes nowhere. It is deeply unsatisfactory to me (as it was to Aristotle who made the same remark on dramatic plots that get magically solved by the intervention of a deus ex machina) to read a self described mystery story where there is no engaging or recognizably intelligent set up and solution of the mystery. I think I am done with Martin Amis.