SOURCE: Edric, Robert. “Kicking Him While He's Up.” Spectator 287, no. 9030 (1 September 2001): 39.

In the following review, Edric maintains that “the real problem with Fury lies not so much with its absurd and near non-existent plot or with its failure to deliver, but with the writing itself.”

Several weeks ago, a Guardian article asked disbelievingly why the readers among us remained in thrall to the heavyweight literary quartet of Amis, Barnes, McEwan and Rushdie. Disregarding the obvious—that all four writers are at least a decade past the genuinely ground-breaking and forward-looking work once produced by two or three of them—this question reveals more about the intellectual laziness and commercial opportunism of many publishers, and the media and literary cliques which remain in obeisance to these four at a time when a vast diversity of imaginative, daring and engaging writers has risen struggling towards the light beneath the spreading...