Certain writers work in a genre because that's where their talents lie. Among the latter are Philip K. Dick in science fiction, Kenneth Grahame in animal adventure, and Raymond Chandler in mysteries. The product of such pens is as unwholesome as that of the adolescent black fly. Here Amis adapts hard-boiled cop fiction to his own purposes. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a suicide that doesn't make sense because the dead woman is beautiful and seemingly fulfilled.
Black holes mean oblivion.
And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. This may be the time, too, to confess my aversion to Martin Amis's novels in general. I find them smug, wordy, and busy with unrevelatory figures of speech. It is certainly worth putting up with in order to enter the wonderfully imagined world of the ant that Werber creates. His ants are both sympathetically anthropomorphic and joltingly alien.