kingsley amis's 'Ending Up'

You really should go out and find a second hand copy of Kingsley Amis's The Alteration.

No, wait.

I've said that.

You really should go out and find a second hand copy of Kingsley Amis's Ending Up. I've just finished it. It's funny to think, as Martin Amis puts it in his Experience, back in 1974, in Hadley Wood, Barnet, just minutes from where I myself grew up, two novels were being written.

"His study was directly beneath the bedroom I still claimed as mine on weekends and other visits. So I could hear him that morning when, after an hour at his desk, he started laughing: the sound of a man succumbing, after a certain amount of resistance, to unshirkable amusement. He was writing Ending Up, I was writing Dead Babies (and Jane [Elizabeth Howard], down the passage from me, was writing Something In Disguise). Both Amis novels were black comedies set in country houses. In his book they all died. In my book they all died except one".

Ending Up, like Dead Babies, is a savage, exuberant, hilarious book. Both novels are, to a lesser (Martin) or greater (Kingsley) effect, lost novels. Martin's is juvenilia, not satire but farce - his pen not yet enlivened by the Thatcher years. Kingsley's novel is less justly forgotten (and more seriously so, for unlike Martin's effort, it is out of print); it arrived towards the end of a golden run of novels (The Green Man, Girl, 20 and The Riverside Villas Murder - The Alteration followed two years later) which nevertheless had failed to produce either a Lucky Jim or a The Old Devils (much less, thankfully, a Stanley and the Women). During this period Amis was sublimely in control: focused, savage, pointed and hilarious.

In a way, Ending Up is a marvellous rebuke to Dead Babies, where a group of young people - revelling in their freedom from responsibility - wreak havoc in a confined space and a short, bloody weekend. His father's characters are perhaps sixty years older, and their story takes place over rather longer (although the novel barely exceeds 120 pages, each packed with wonderful, acerbic descriptions), but their behaviour is a vivid demonstration - as was Kingsley's still-burning brilliance - that age and guile beats youth, innocence and a bad haircut. Kingsley's characters behave riotously.

Bernard Bastable (surely an inspiration for Dylan Moran's droll bookseller) is an outrageous, delinquent masterpiece of cynicism, bitterness and self-absorption. His (ex-)lover, Shorty, the foil for some of the best descriptions of drunkenness I have ever encountered. George, who suffers from nominal asphasia and can't remember common nouns, is a near-genius evocation of boringness, while Marigold (who refers to everything in baby talk) and Adela (a spinster victim of her own 'extreme ugliness') are capable of provoking pity, fury and laughter in equal measures.

Dead Babies I read when I was about 16, and had a massive effect on me; the denoument shocking and delighting me like few others have ever managed since. I should perhaps refrain from labouring the comparison between the two books too much, but Ending Up, the last five pages of which sent prickles up and down my spine as I finished it on the train home tonight, shares a savage spareness, knife-sharp - brilliant.

There was apparently something in the water in Barnet in 1974.

Three years later I was born, and everything - by then - had quietened right down.