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Martin Amis and the pursuit of pleasure
A memorial for the novelist was a reminder that language should be a source of joy.
These could be famous, burnished quotations – F Scott Fitzgerald’s boats “borne back ceaselessly into the past”; moments of deliciously throwaway comedy – PG Wodehouse’s severely hungover character who reports that “a cat stamped into the room”, the man in a Kevin Barry novel with “a face on him like a bad marriage”; Dickensian catchphrases (“What larks!”); or an ordinary but perfectly calibrated line from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room that, clipped from its context, I still think of as an instruction: “stand rigid; grasp the barrier; fall in love”. Job titleAdministration / OfficeArts and CultureBoard MemberBusiness / Corporate ServicesClient / Customer ServicesCommunicationsConstruction, Works, EngineeringEducation, Curriculum and TeachingEnvironment, Conservation and NRMFacility / Grounds Management and MaintenanceFinance ManagementHealth - Medical and Nursing ManagementHR, Training and Organisational DevelopmentInformation and Communications TechnologyInformation Services, Statistics, Records, ArchivesInfrastructure Management - Transport, UtilitiesLegal Officers and PractitionersLibrarians and Library ManagementManagementMarketingOH&S, Risk ManagementOperations ManagementPlanning, Policy, StrategyPrinting, Design, Publishing, WebProjects, Programs and AdvisorsProperty, Assets and Fleet ManagementPublic Relations and MediaPurchasing and ProcurementQuality ManagementScience and Technical Research and DevelopmentSecurity and Law EnforcementService DeliverySport and RecreationTravel, Accommodation, TourismWellbeing, Community / Social ServicesSign up Too often in our critical debates about the state of fiction we forget that turning an exquisitely funny line is as important as diagnosing the condition of the nation – more so, because the latter cannot exist without the former.
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