Other People
Encyclopedia
Plot
Mary, an amnesiaAmnesia
Amnesia is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia...
c young woman, wakes and tries to piece together her previous life while using a new identity.
Style
The book starts as a comedy, slips into a thriller, and ends a horror story.Amis saw the novel as a kind of overall investigation. "Mary (the main character) doesn't know what her role is," Amis explained in 1981. "Because of this, men start questioning their own attitudes towards women, and even about themselves. When one's role is undermined, you begin to look at everything around you in a different light."
Reception
The book was well-received in Britain and the United States. The writer J.G. Ballard called Other People "Powerful and electrifying... 'Other People' is a metaphysical thriller, Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho." Writing in Britain's The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, poet, writer and critic Anthony Thwaite
Anthony Thwaite
Anthony Simon Thwaite, OBE, is an English poet and writer. He is married to the writer Ann Thwaite. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, for services to poetry. He was mainly brought up in Yorkshire and currently lives in Norfolk....
spoke the novel's "enormous confidence of address," continuing, "Other People is 'about' a descent into Hell, Hell being 'other people'-- it's a very strange and impressive performance." The Times found "For all its savagery... Other People is a funny book... an achievement light years ahead of his earlier novels." Judy Dempsey wrote in The Irish Times
The Irish Times
The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...
, "Amis has done something important in 'Other People.'" In the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Charles Champlin called Amis "an English literary celebrity who, like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote here, finds himself in the columns more often than some film stars," and found the book, "an ingenious and mischievous piece of writing, nothing like a mystery with a tidy ending...a tour de force."
Composition
Other People is the first book Amis completed after choosing to become a full-time fiction-writer; he had been on-staff at the New StatesmanNew Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
until 1979. Amis told an interviewer "I wanted to leave to devote myself to full-time writing. It was the responsibility of doing something else, not wholly connected with my writing that exhausted me from writing what I wanted. I enjoyed it, but I felt writing was more important."