Martin Amis

With a spate of his books rejoining my collection after holidays of varying lengths in other folks' houses, I've started re-reading some of my Martin Amis paperbacks. I love the writing - the thoughts it provokes, the images it conjures up and the truths it forces irrevocably into my head...but the chap does tend to be almost overly prosaic and literary in his writing from time to time. Take the following sentence I spent a few minutes reading just now:

"Sometimes, when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really, of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt."

Aside from the happy relief I got from reading 'grey', as opposed to the horrible Americanised spelling of the 'color'; 'gray' - this sentence didn't exactly thrill me as I first read it (nor, as I pondered over it for the tenth time, oddly enough).

Having ascertained from a dictionary that a curlicue was a 'fancy, swirling pattern' and reminded myself quite what pattern was represented by 'paisley' (see below if it's irking you as much as it did me), I had one final stab at the sentence.


_Paisley

The image Mr. Amis was trying to produce simply wouldn't come however, and I'm having the write that one off and move on. It must be noted that this isn't a one-off, and that it really does help to have a solid grasp of either the English language, or a good dictionary if you want to get far with his writing. Being the kind hearted soul that I am, I've taken the more 'interesting' words from the last two pages I've read (turned out to be a relatively tame example), and listed them below:

• corralled


• primped


• omniscient


• boudoir


• premonitory


• braiding [No, not like that, 'To mingle (discrete elements, for example) as if by such interweaving']


• superannuation

I'll be disappointed if any of the above, with the possibly exception of that last one cause you any trouble.

Back to my reading..