The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-91025-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

We last glimpse the ‘handsome couple’ three years later, in Buenos Aires. Handel’s Tamerlane is playing at the Teatro Colón. Jewels ‘winked’. A Mercedes Maybach ‘whispered to the curb’. You’ll have to stop minding about the tenses here, because Harris switches freely from past to present, sometimes in the same paragraph. During intermission in their ‘ornate box’, ‘the gentleman took a champagne flute from a waiter’s tray and handed it to the lady …’ And after the show the Mercedes ‘purrs’ off and ‘disappears into the courtyard of an exquisite Beaux Arts building near the French Embassy’. How does it go for them – for Count and Countess Lecter? Us scum, of course, are given only a few tantalizing glimpses. Clarice often talks Italian at mealtimes (‘She finds a curious freedom in the visual nuances of the language’). Hannibal is committed to the daily ‘penetration of Clarice Starling, which she avidly welcomes and encourages’. Ah, but now Harris tastefully withdraws, murmuring in gnomic valediction, ‘We can only learn so much and live.’ In The Silence of the Lambs, when Clarice began her interviews with the caged cannibal, the National Tattler, that vicious slur-sheet, called her the ‘BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN!!’ It is a symmetry, of a sort, that Harris should work himself around to giving that headline flesh.

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