Martin Amis once wrote, 'the literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like.' Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, puts his theory to the test.

History - it tends to catch people in the end, even the most reluctant. Personal or public, local or international, history has the answers, it holds the facts. It records what we do, who we are. In the mid 1980s, history began to stalk an unlikely prey, the gifted street satirist Martin Amis, by then the author of five novels, including Money. He gave it the slip for a while, but then, nagging and heavy, history pounced. It gripped his mind as well as his maturing conscience. And the result was a volume of polemical short stories, Einstein's Monsters (1987), all marked by fatherhood and his growing concern about the apocalyptic threat of nuclear armaments.

In 1991, the still history-shy Amis took an even closer look at history and focused on the Holocaust. Time's Arrow was brave and daring, a fast rewind, playback narrative hosted by a narrator who was not all that reliable. It was an impressive technical achievement and was deservedly Booker short-listed, although many reviewers challenged his right to write about the Holocaust.

Of the many critical pastings Amis has received, he has never forgotten that one. A couple of years later, he told me about it, and reliving his indignation said, "How do you earn the right to write about the Holocaust?" More than a decade on, even after a poorly received book about Stalin, history continues to preoccupy Amis.

"I read a lot of history now, and far less fiction."

His new novel, House of Meetings, is one of his finest books. It is a raw, savage, rueful romance, a heart-rendingly bleak novel, possibly a great one. Unusually for Amis, it is emotion-driven. "It was very hard to write, very difficult, I don't write emotion easily."

He has already explored fear in another of his best works, The Information (1995). House of Meetings, which draws on the horrors of the Russian Gulag camps, is sustained by male guilt and delivered by, as Amis stresses, "a reliable narrator", an elderly man intent on telling his American step-daughter the truth.

BRIGHT SUNSHINE toys with the cold, sudden breeze on an autumn day during which London is giving summer a final spin. Workmen had decided to repair the footpath outside a small cafe, a couple of feet from the metal table at which Amis is sitting. The half-hearted waitress is dispensing equally half-hearted coffee. It's all very quiet, despite the pounding of the pneumatic drill. This part of west London looks smart, with tall cream-coloured Regency houses, trees and a hint of civility. Amis has a newspaper and a floppy satchel, as well as the makings of those roll-up cigarettes favoured by veteran smokers, and his well-chronicled smoker's tremor. He looks up and half smiles.

House of Meetings is his 11th novel, and his 19th book. Since the publication of his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973, he has been the resident Bright Young Man of British fiction, writing stylish, often horrifically funny novels and insightful journalism, much of it collected in volumes such as The Moronic Inferno, and Visiting Mrs Nabokov.

He became the best of the British literary interviewers. It was Amis who wrote when interviewing John Updike, "the literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly, to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview." Fame was instant, and stayed.

It must have been fun at first. After all, Amis from the beginning of his career was impossibly clever, a kind of literary superbrat with a natural feel for language, who was the middle child of Kingsley Amis. His clever, good-looking girlfriends didn't mind that he was short. There was no nepotism, he had a double first in English from Oxford, comic timing and literary flair, formidable reading to draw on, and sufficient one-liners to silence any smart-alec interviewer. Journalists tended to limp home and get their own back later, in print.

But then it became tougher, the criticism more personal and life more serious. As is Amis. He's now 57 - this realisation alone causes us both to pause, as if for a minute's silence. His father is dead, as is his sister, Sally (at 46), and he is the father of five children, including a 30-year-old daughter he was unaware of until she was 19. Life - not nicotine - has left Amis shaking.

In the 22 years since the publication of Money, I have interviewed him five times. The Bright Young Man is a long-established international writer and if not quite a literary elder statesman, is not so young. How's his tennis?

"Not good. My game kind of fell apart." He describes the demise of his service, miming the toss of the ball, before laughing outright and saying in that great sonorous voice of his, "It's hard to get used to it, this business of ageing. Literature does not prepare you for it."

Art is better on death than old age. He looks weary, not as watchful, but still twitchy, given to pauses and saying "yeah". Uncertain of himself but confident of his views, he is clever and interesting, just a good deal milder, less defensive, but always friendly.

He used to say he had a "squalid imagination"; now he talks, with meaning, about getting older, old. If he brooded in the past, he now reflects. How does he feel about what is a substantial body of work?

"I don't look back on it. I used to love reading me. I could sit and read me for about three hours; now that's all the past, the future is what matters and", he shudders, "there's not so much future." On cue the workmen scatter as a van lurches onto the pavement. Part of Amis's newspaper flutters away and we move to another table.

THE FIRST TIME I interviewed Martin Amis, he was the second writer I'd met. It was 1984. He was then almost 35, looked about 21 and was still living an extended student-hood in a messy flat complete with dartboard and pinball machine. He was polite, languidly intellectual and intimidating, speaking in paragraphs shaped by the books he had read, and the quotations he could summon at will - all delivered through an upper-middle-class accent. Now he can quote, as he wrote in his memoir, Experience, that his son laughed "when I told him it used to be cool to be posh".

Time passed and the books accumulated. Martin Amis, posh-sounding but street-wise, infiltrated the yob camp, and his grasp of popular culture gave him credibility. Liked by women, recognised by most men as a good bloke and still spawning imitators such as Gautam Malkani, whose hyped debut Londonstani came out earlier this year, Amis always had fans. He has also, always, had enemies.

By 1989, the Boy Wonder was 40 and friendlier, less studied and freely admitting that he was tired. Remarking "death begins at 40", he had finished London Fields, in which death was an important theme. One character, Nicole, was even plotting her own murder. "She is the ultimate woman, she's incredibly intelligent and she's tired. There's a lot of me in her," Amis confirmed.

Also present in that novel is the TV-eyed, vomiting Keith, one of Amis's classic sub-monsters who had also featured in Dead Babies, his third novel. London Fields proved a worthy successor to Money, although feminist critics objected to it, and it would be overshadowed by the achievement of The Information, the dazzling, cautionary novel - that in turn became lost in the fuss about dental work, bust-ups and big advances.

All of this seems irrelevant as he speaks about having returned to London for school. His daughters, from his second marriage, are now aged nine and seven. Amis and his family have been living in Uruguay "on and off" for a couple of years. It seems ideal and it was relaxed and civilised but now the girls need tougher schooling.

"In Uruguay, children are loved. They hold up their faces when they meet you because they expect to be kissed." Amis says even the Spanish spoken there is gentle. "I go to Spain a lot: my mother and brother live there. The Spanish spoken there is different, is more aggressive, it is not as kind [as in Uruguay]." He also notices that children of today in general are tougher, "particularly girls".

Although they are protected by their life in Uruguay, Amis has noticed that his two younger daughters are impressively shrewd. He speaks about the differences of raising daughters - his two sons are now 21 and 20 - and seems to regret not having had the experience of raising sons and daughters "at the same time".

His first marriage ended when the boys were 10 and nine, and Amis, aware he then became absent for his sons, seems very involved with his daughters. He also admits to having "missed everything" the first time round when his eldest child (the daughter of whom he was unaware until she was 19) was growing up. His five children all know each other and "get on well". When he sees his five children gathered together, he says, "I think 'this is what I've created'," and he looks happy, even relieved. After all just as his father had left a marriage, so in turn had he.

It is easy to forget novels as he discusses his children, the realities of bullying at school and his handling of a "Santa crisis". As he speaks I keep remembering the facts of his early life, including his disrupted education and that ultimately it was a crammer that prepared him for Oxford.

Since the publication of Experience, his appealingly candid memoir in 2000, a book inspired by his need to set the public record straight, the subject of Martin Amis has become wider and wider, as have the layers of personal tragedy.

As I listen to Amis, flashes of some of the great comic set pieces from his novels come to mind, but then so does the memory of his remarkable fourth novel, Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) a dark metaphysical thriller which confirmed exactly how good Amis was even that early, and with time and revelations (such as the discovery that his cousin Lucy Partington had been one of Fred West's victims), how prophetic. Here is a writer who, in common with the great JG Ballard, a fellow literary maverick of an earlier vintage, knows that boredom is society's defining evil.

CONVERSATION KEEPS nudging the interview out of the way, as does the effort of considering the many aspects of Amis, a writer who shaped a distinctive style yet proceeded to attempt different books along the way. Even at its most satirically funny, his fiction has often proved effective social commentary. Only weeks after the publication of a lengthy and demanding essay on Islam "The Age of Horrorism", which again had opinion-makers questioning his right to tackle such a subject, Amis now offers a novel based on Russian history - four years after being pilloried for writing about Stalin in a memoir history, Koba the Dread.

Amis has never been to Russia, but its story has gripped him. Why? "It is the greatest tear, tear as in rip, of fascination. There's nothing like the horror and dynamism of the Russian experiment from 1917-1953. Russia had its civilised century, the 19th, then everything changed. But yeah, Russia, you can't help it, all those novels."

For him, the effort of writing a book about guilt brought its own guilts. "I could hear the sea from where I writing [in Uruguay] but I had to imagine what it was like in the Arctic Circle."

He also had to think like a victim. There are two half-brothers, sons of a schoolteacher mother. One suffers horribly and the other, the narrator, survives. He is tough and ruthless, a Red Army soldier who raped because that was what some soldiers did. Not a nice guy, but human, and haunted by a nasty shameful secret. There is a Jewish warmth to the book. Amis agrees. It could be the Bellow influence or because his wife is half Jewish "and my daughters are Jewish because it comes down through the mother's side."

Facts cut through House of Meetings, but it is not essayistic - a device he quite likes - Amis has done his reading but keeps the historical and political research at bay. The cultural stuff he already knew, although Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance features in his acknowledgements, and Amis owes a debt to Anne Applebaum's Gulag (2003). His growing interest in history has been handled with typical Amis near-scholarly thoroughness: he set out to read it. "It's the history of my lifetime as well," he says.

The young tend to be of the moment, and the Amis of The Rachel Papers, Success and Dead Babies was. In addition to that, could his initial lack of interest in the past be due to his father having belonged to the war generation? "Maybe. I think there were differences. He was an ideologue, he had his ideologies, communism. I didn't. He liked to be outrageous, to shock, to say things like, the health service expenditure should be cut so we could buy nuclear weapons."

He smiles, not at the opinions, but at the memory of his father, whom he misses. Another absentee is Saul Bellow. As a man and as a literary mentor, Bellow meant a great deal to him. Money was a hymn to Bellow and to the American Novel, in which Amis has always been interested.

Money was the book which announced that Amis had an interest in the US, and while he looked to Bellow, he was also drawn to John Updike. While he has the energy of Bellow, he may have more in common with Updike, a fellow stylist with a quick mind and a feel for journalism. "I'm a journalist and I've always admired good journalism," he says.

Mention is made of Jonathan Raban and his latest novel set in Seattle, where Raban has settled. In spite of his vivid evocations of London, Amis, shaped by Nabokov, Bellow and Updike, has tended to be seen as a writer with a foot in both camps, that of the US as well as Britain.

"Oh, I am a British writer and I'm proud to belong to that tradition." Mention of Peter Ackroyd's persuasive study of the English imagination, Albion (2004), prompts him to comment on the glories of the English intellectual tradition, particularly the poetry.

If he has a literary territory it is London, and now he has returned to it, albeit for family reasons. Place, he says, has never been that important to him; it mainly provides a backdrop to surreally autobiographical imaginings, but he does mention Philip Roth. "When he returned to the States, after those years in London, the big books came. It was as if he was refreshed. I think American Pastoral is the best of them . . . but it has worked for him, going home, coming back."

Amis was initially more of a stylist than an ideas writer, but he has always been a thinker.

House of Meetings has already had some good reaction, along with disparaging comments about his choice of subject. He is either philosophical or too tired to care or perhaps both. It was not longlisted for the Man Booker, but then nor were Ballard, Raban or Christopher Hope.

"That was my fault, I wasn't entered," says Amis who appears to have long since given up on the prize. Writing is what remains important to him, and he refers to "waiting for the throb" that makes him write. His forthcoming novel, The Pregnant Widow, also looks to history, and he explains that the title refers to women who became mothers by soldiers who never returned from war.

There have been great books and poor books, such as his excursion in crime fiction, Night Train (1997), a monologue voiced by a troubled US lady cop which failed to convince, despite Amis always having had one ear to America.

Within a year he had made up for that with Heavy Water, a strong collection of short stories dominated by the virtuoso yarn "State of England", featuring Big Mal, a bouncer and thug-on-the-climb, who arrives at his son's sports day, intent on social glory. Then three years ago came another boo-boo, Yellow Dog, a cartoonish, crude gag of a novel about a tabloid journalist, Clint Smoker, and his pornographic musings, all running parallel to a number of chaotic sub-plots. It never settled into more than a hit-and-miss variation of Money, London Fields and The Information, yet it was Man Booker long-listed.

You win some, you lose some. Amis has. This time he is bouncing back with a novel worthy of his gifts. House of Meetings is both public and private. "I think there is always the guilt. Men are left with the guilt about women and children, but the women survive - they move on. Men don't."

Another interviewer is waiting in the old-style pub across the narrow street. Amis is ready. "Publishing has got so big. The newspapers are greedy, there is space to fill. When I started out, it wasn't like this, there were no launch parties, no interviews."

He thinks it is indicative of trouble or panic when a newspaper asks a writer for an opinion. He glances at the pub. "Until the next time then."

Who does he write his books for? "For the faceless student in the college library or bookshop who picks up one of my books, likes it and want to read on."