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Article published In:
When Dialogue Fails
Edited by Anja Müller-Wood
[Language and Dialogue 12:1] 2022
► pp. 91–109

“Decorum will be strictly observed”

Generic tensions and failed dialogue in Martin Amis’s London Trilogy

| Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Martin Amis’s London Trilogy constitutes a body of work that has variously been categorised as comic, satirical, or simply postmodern. Given these assessments, the present essay concentrates on forms and functions of dialogue in these novels to identify its use as a generic marker. What emerges is that – while individual passages of dialogue are demonstratively structured along conventional generic lines – their function is to temporarily mislead the reader into trusting those ostensibly univocal signals, and thus contributing to their undermining by the remainder of the text. Fusing divergent generic aspects together into a form that is here termed anti-comedy, and consistently establishing and undermining readers’ expectations is one of the central functions of dialogue in Amis’s London Trilogy, the essay claims.

Keywords: dialogue, anti-comedy, comedy, satire, postmodern, genre, discrepant awareness, distribution of knowledge, humor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Martin Amis, form and failed dialogue
  • 2.Comedy: Divergent expectations
  • 3.Satire: Distribution of knowledge
  • 4.Postmodernism: Intertextual references
  • 5.Conclusion: Failed dialogue and the question of genre
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00113.gil
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