Amis’s prose, in those early novels, was lush and slangy and vivid, packed with startlingly funny word combinations. The influence of Vladimir Nabokov was palpable.

By the time he wrote The Information, Amis had another stylistic guru: Saul Bellow. The quality Amis most admired in Bellow was “weight of voice.” In The Information, you felt Amis lowering the verbal treble and boosting the existential bass. It was still a wickedly funny book, but the comedy was darkened by an undertow of angst.

Published when Amis was 46, The Information was about middle age and mortality. That’s what “the information” is: the news that you’re going to die. The novel was written in the third person, but sometimes Amis stepped into the text to speak in his own voice. “The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye,” he wrote.

That always struck me as a throwaway line, when Amis was alive. He was only 46, for Christ’s sake. He seemed a bit young to be so stridently worried about death.

But the cold facts now say that Amis never made it past the age of 73. At 46, he had every right to believe he was on the back nine of his life – just as Spike Milligan, in middle age, had every right to insist that his gravestone would one day be chiselled with the words I told you I was ill.

“Death,” said Saul Bellow, “is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” Backed by the dark fact of his death, Amis’s books have acquired new and deeper resonances. There are beautiful effects in them I never properly heard before, until his death threw them into relief.

Experience is full of such effects. The book opened up an autobiographical seam in Amis’s work that proved richly productive. His novels, for my money, got less vital after the turn of the millennium. His non-fiction – his journalism and literary criticism, his life-writing – increasingly became the main event.

Experience was a book about several deaths in Amis’s family, including that of his father – “the intercessionary figure,” as Martin called him, “the man who stands between the son and death.” When that figure goes, “there is nobody there between you and extinction.”

That’s another line that sounds crucially different now its author is dead. As long as he was alive, Amis was an intercessionary figure himself. He could write about his own mortality and you could kid yourself that he wasn’t really writing about yours.

That fact can no longer be dodged. The conversation with Amis goes on, but his side of it sounds more urgent and authoritative, now that he’s had the ultimate experience. He’s got weight of voice now, all right.

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One of the most moving lines in Experience is spoken by Martin’s mother, Hilly, at Kingsley’s deathbed. “You can go to sleep now, darling,” she says. “You’ve done everything you needed to do … You’ve done all your work.”

Sadly, that is now true of the son as well as the father. The work is all done; there won’t be any more of it. As long as our favourite writers are alive, we cling to the hope that there will be more masterpieces. Why can’t they write like that all the time? we think. When they die, our quibbles give way to an overwhelming gratitude. They wrote like that some of the time, and that’s everything they needed to do.

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