The mid-to-late 1950s saw an explosion of youth subcultures in Britain – teenagers, Teddy Boys, jazz fans, hipsters, beatniks, mods and rockers, each of which generated a combination of moral panic and media fascination. In Doris Lessing's writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s youth is a recurring theme, including in her plays Each to His Own Wilderness (1959) and Play With a Tiger (1962), her critical essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’ (1957), and her novels A Ripple From the Storm (1958) and The Golden Notebook (1962). This chapter will trace Lessing's engagement with youth culture in her writing and argue that she articulates concerns within the New Left and British culture more broadly and reveals some of the tensions and fears concerning youth, while holding on to the hope that youth could still offer a committed and collective form of resistance to dominant ideologies. Her work will be read against contemporary cultural commentary from the New Left, and against other fiction and commentary on youth from the period, including works by Lynne Reid Banks, Anthony Burgess, Shelagh Delaney, Nell Dunn, Richard Hoggart, Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe and Muriel Spark.

The British New Left were split on whether to see these new youth groups as indicative of a consumer-led Americanisation of traditional working-class British culture or as potential sites for cultural (and political) rebellion. Several writers associated with this group entered this debate about the economic and cultural contexts for the rise of youth subcultures in the 1950s, including Derek Allcorn, Michael Kullman, Stuart Hall, Clancy Sigal, and on the margins of this group Richard Hoggart, Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe, Colin Wilson and Lessing (see Bentley 2005). All of these writers were interested, to differing degrees, in the way that the 1950s economic boom was changing established frameworks of social class in both cultural and political terms, and, in particular, how this trend was affecting youth (Allcorn 1958; Kullman 1958; Sigal 1958; Hoggart 1957; Hall 1959a; Williams 1961; MacInnes 1959).

Amis has often emphasized his keenness for focusing on issues of style in his writing. He stresses this at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, but it can also be identified in terms of his self-reflexive approach to the structure of his novels and the mode of narration by which he presents the story. As I have already discussed, Amis's fiction can be seen to be employing narrative techniques related to postmodernism and this is an important aspect of his fiction throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One of the most prominent techniques he uses in this context is metafiction, a form of writing that self-consciously alludes to its own status as fiction. Amis's distinctive use of metafictional techniques interrogates the narrative contract between the author and the reader that is assumed in much ‘conventional’ realism. This aspect of Amis's writing is also part of him establishing a distance from the previous generation of British novelists, a group which would, of course, include his father Kingsley. The novels Amis produces in the 1980s are perhaps influenced more than his other work by metafictional techniques, and serve to establish Amis as a postmodern writer at a time when postmodernism was perceived as an exciting, and potentially radical, new style in literary fiction. A theme that Amis develops in both Other People: A Mystery and Money: A Suicide Note is the idea of constructed and fictional characters at loose in the ‘real’ world. Amis is also influenced by (post-)Marxist theories in his use of metafiction, and both novels include characters, Mary Lamb and John Self in Other People and Money respectively, who behave in the ways they do because of their false consciousness and lack of awareness of the underlying (and often economic) factors determining their behaviour.

Alongside a Marxist-influenced conception of the unreal in Amis's fiction at this period, there is a psychoanalytic context for the use of metafiction. Amis has commented that we should always trust our unconscious, and of course the Freudian model of psychoanalysis, whereby deeper unrevealed drives affect people's behaviour, lends itself well to the metafictional framework that Amis establishes in these two novels (and others including Dead Babies and London Fields in particular).

Amis's latest two novels to date have seen him garner more controversy, to the extent that it is now evident that baiting the literary reviewers may be part of the nature of his fiction, creating a sense of expectation, undoubtedly boosting sales, and to a certain extent affecting the way in which his fiction is understood. The Pregnant Widow offended on two counts: firstly in its portrayal of the shifting mores of sexuality in the wake of the sexual revolution; and secondly in its anticipation of a new cultural politics of ageing in terms of a ‘silver-tsunami’ and the age war. Lionel Asbo shifted the critics’ wrath to castigating what was seen to be Amis's contribution to the trend in twentyfirst century culture of demonizing the white working class in Britain.

THE PREGNANT WIDOW

Amis's 2010 novel sees him returning to the terrain of The Rachel Papers. The Pregnant Widow follows the experience of a young man trying to fathom out his sexual attraction to women within the shifting mores of the period following the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. What is different in this novel is that you also get the long, backward view, supplied in short intervals from the perspective of the same character, now aged fifty, as he comes to terms with the effects ageing has on his appearance, body and outlook. The majority of the novel takes place in Italy in 1970 and is focalized through Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student holidaying in Italy with his girlfriend, Lily. They have been invited to stay for the summer at the family home of their friend Scheherazade, and the holiday sees them encountering a number of their other friends and acquaintances, both new and old. The action centres on Keith's growing attraction and possible affair with Scheherazade. Inevitably perhaps, the novel also details the decline of Keith's relationship with Lily. Hovering over this plotline is Amis's interest in mapping the effects on individuals of the sexual revolution and what he sees as some of the negative aspects of second-wave feminism.

Amis's fiction has always been concerned with exploring the ways in which social and cultural movements and ideologies impact on the construction of people's identities, morals and behaviour. The Information and Night Train are both concerned with characters in periods of crisis, who are forced to reflect upon the way their individual identities are affected and changed by social experiences. Although written only two years apart in the 1990s, the two novels are stylistically very different. The Information is a dark comedy involving two novelists, both of whom are entering middle age: Richard Tull, an unsuccessful writer who represents the novel's main perspective, and Gwyn Barry, his more successful long-time friend. The novel deals with questions of literary value through Tull's increasing jealousy of Gwyn's successes with writing, money and women. The Information shows a return to the literary landscape in which Amis is most confident, contemporary London, and can be identified as the third novel in a loose trilogy with Money and London Fields. The novel's narrative framework is less selfconscious than those of his previous novels, and produces a more direct address between author and reader through the use of a third-person narrative voice. A critical distance is established between the narrator and Richard, but this is far less than that which exists in most of Amis's previous works, and the reader's empathy is greater with Richard than probably with any other character in Amis's fiction, until perhaps Des Pepperdine in Lionel Asbo. This has led James Diedrick to suggest that the novel is Amis's most autobiographical since The Rachel Papers, although the idea of autobiography cannot be straightforwardly attached to Richard's narrative, and indeed Amis's own relationship with literary culture can be seen as an amalgam of the Richard and Gwyn characters.

Night Train is a bleaker novel that, unusually for Amis, has a female narrator. However, the narrative of Detective Mike Hoolihan is less convincing and less provocative than that of the other narrators Amis has produced: the control of the American Cop idiom is consistent, but less provoking than a Charles Highway, John Self or Samson Young. Any experiment with the female voice is largely negated by the emphasis on the masculine aspects of Hoolihan's character (as indicated by her first name).

Many of Amis's novels are interested in the shifting dynamics of social class in the period from the 1970s onwards. This interest establishes itself early in his fiction. It is there in The Rachel Papers, but forms a central part of his next two novels, Dead Babies and Success. Each of these novels has characters from different social classes, and contrasts the upper-middle class and lower-middle class as well as characters drawn from workingclass backgrounds, although his working-class characters tend to be one dimensional and are often based on exaggerations of popular stereotypes.

DEAD BABIES (1975)

James Diedrick, in his book Understanding Martin Amis, refers to Amis as ‘a postmodern Jonathan Swift’ adding, ‘consistent with his scepticism toward totalising explanations and moral positions, however, Amis's irony is far less stable than Swift's’. This reference to a sceptical attitude in Amis's work towards all totalizing theories indicates something of the postmodern form of satire that Amis employs in his fiction. In Amis's early novels in particular, the representation of a morally ambiguous universe delivered to the reader by an ambivalent narrative voice produces a radical form of satire that threatens to explode the genre completely. In several of the novels from The Rachel Papers in 1973 to London Fields in 1989, this satirical ambivalence in the narrative voice is formally represented in Amis's penchant for metafictional twists and turns that often serve to implicate the author (and by extension the implied reader) as a member of the group or attitude that is being satirized. This is produced, as Richard Todd has argued, by a series of doubles and doubling effects in these novels that often pairs characters with narrators and by implication with the author. This kind of satire, where the grounding for the satirical attack is itself made unstable by the ambiguous positioning of the satirical voice represents a postmodern version of the genre, and it is in Amis's 1975 novel Dead Babies that this kind of postmodern satire on social class is most clearly identified.

Amis's work in the early to middle part of the 2000s shows him exploring the related themes of masculine violence, revenge and the dehumanizing of aspects of political systems and contemporary culture. Looming over much of this writing is Amis's response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001. What seems to emerge from this period is a reassessment of the moral and ethical approach of his fiction writing, and arguably a move away from the postmodern playfulness of his earlier novels and towards a greater sense of realism.

Yellow Dog is Amis's first twenty-first-century novel, and it takes as its themes several cultural anxieties of the new millennium. Specific targets for his satire are the British tabloid press and its celebration of sex, sport and violence (both public and domestic); the royal family; and the porn industry. The novel is an exploration of masculinity in a post-feminist world, an examination of the abuses of patriarchal power (especially through the theme of incest), and the way contemporary culture reflects a crisis of masculinity through the valorization of sex and violence. As is typical with Amis's fiction, the novel is populated with a series of grotesques, for example Clint Smoker, the stereotypically unscrupulous tabloid journalist, and Xan Meo, an actor who reverts to a model of primitive masculinity after being physically attacked by the henchmen of a London gangster with the unlikely name of Joseph Andrews. The novel sees a return to the physical environment of Money, London Fields and The Information, and has qualities of symbolic patterning that match the best of Amis's writing. There is, however, a greater desire to establish a moral centre in this novel, a position that was rejected (or at least remained ambiguous) in the earlier trilogy of London novels.

This moral turn is also pursued in two books from this period that address the history and politics of twentieth-century Russia: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) and House of Meetings (2006).

When Martin Amis produces a new novel a certain fizz of excitement circulates the literary establishment. The reviewers line up to either trounce or laud his new offering, and cultural commentators feel bound to offer judgements on the cultural politics of his latest book. This reputation has been built over forty years and he continues to be one the most important, well known and influential of contemporary novelists. His fiction has influenced a generation of writers, and many new novelists (especially young male writers) have often found themselves judged against the Amis standard. Amis himself has been influenced by dominant trends and thematic concerns in contemporary writing, and his novels engage with social, cultural and political changes with a satirical bite that is often as brilliant as it is frustrating. He has been associated with different literary modes throughout his career, in particular, postmodernism, state of the nation satire, pornography, parody, the mixing of high literary style with popular cultural forms, and even sentimentalism. In many ways a discussion of his fiction dovetails with the trajectory of British fiction over the last forty years generally, and a close look at his novels produces a yardstick with which to measure several key cultural debates and anxieties over the period.

He is also one of the most controversial of contemporary writers. From accusations of misogyny on the publication of London Fields in the 1980s, to Islamaphobia in some of his writings after 9/11, to more recent inflammatory comments on an ageing population, and patronizing representations of the British working class, Amis has continued to provoke and often offend in his fiction and cultural commentary. His style is purposely controversial and one of the legacies he has bequeathed to contemporary fiction is the interrogation of serious moral and ethical situations couched in a style of dark satirical comedy that appears at first to be wholly inappropriate. From the presentation of an over-cocky teenager in his first novel The Rachel Papers, to the opening of his most recent, Lionel Asbo, in which the reader is introduced on the first page to perhaps the only example in literary fiction of a grandmother– grandson sexual affair, his method could be said to stimulate controversy through exaggerations.