Money – a suicide note – Martin Amis – 1980

‘Money’ was written in the early 1980’s, and published in 1984. This was the highpoint of Thatcherism, greed is good, and ‘Money’ represents one of the high artistic points of that period.

This isn’t saying much, because while everyone else in the Arts at the time was pointing out with different degrees of vehemence that greed is not that good, ‘Money’ is far less didactic. Money is undoubtedly a corrupting influence, but absence of money is worse. John Self, the semi-autobiographical narrator of ‘Money’ is a whoring, alcoholic, masturbating monster, roaring around London and New York, ignorant of the chaos he leaves in his wake. He reads 1984, and sees himself as one of the Thought Police. He is involved in a very confused way in the casting and production of a film based upon an idea of his, but this is largely immaterial, simply providing a backdrop to the relentlessness of Self’s hedonistic orgy. There are some wildly excessive moments of hilarity, such as when he goes to a club one night. He is totally unaware of the chaos he causes, and of course is, as in most of the novel, extremely drunk:

There was a white-haired old robot at the desk, and we shot the breeze for a while as he checked me out on the intercom. I told him a joke. How does it go now? There’s this farmer who keeps his wife locked up in the – Wait, let’s start again,…Anyway we had a good laugh over this joke when I’d finished or abandoned it, and I was told where to go. Then I got lost for a bit. I went into a room where a lot of people in evening dress were sitting at square tables playing cards or backgammon. I left quickly and knocked over a lamp by the door.  The lamp should never have been there in the first place, with its plinth sticking out like that. For a while I thrashed around in some kind of cupboard, but fought my way out in the end.  Skipping down the stairs again, I fell heavily on my back. It didn’t hurt that much, funnily enough.”

 

This was quite an extraordinary read. It is not for the easily offended – John Self is an equal opportunities offender, hitting out (in some cases literally) at women, minorities, gays, and the disabled. It is also over-long – once the pattern of transatlantic excess is established it doesn’t need repeating quite so often. And don’t read this novel for the characterisation, plotting, or dramatic incident either. While the fourth wall is broken quite regularly, with ‘Martin Amis’ making several appearances, this is not really a post-modern novel either – in many ways it is quite traditional, with a heavily broadcast ‘twist’ at the end, for what it is worth, long after the reader has stopped caring what is going to happen to John or any of the other minor characters.

 

What made this novel stand out to me was Amis’s wonderful use of language. It’s not just metaphor, although these are exceptional, with sometimes four or five on one sentence. But the quality of the writing is quite poetical. Take this description of the sky for instance:

 

“when the sky is as grey as this – impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour – and the stooped millions lift their heads, it’s hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.”

 

When I first started to sketch out this review I struggled to find a novel to compare this to. Then it dawned on me that the closest writing style is the first person narrative style that characterises gonzo journalism, which the Internet defines as

 

“an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire…Gonzo journalism involves an approach to accuracy that involves the reporting of personal experiences and emotions, in contrast to traditional journalism, which favours a detached style and relies on facts or quotations that can be verified by third parties. Gonzo journalism disregards the strictly-edited product favoured by newspaper media and strives for a more personal approach; the personality of a piece is as important as the event the piece is on. Use of sarcasm, humour, exaggeration, and profanity is common.”

 

Which summarises ‘Money’ very nicely thank you. So arguably the best way to read this novel as a piece of reportage from the frontline of the 1980’s class war. Amis remains very much on my list of authors that can write well, but can also produce some absolute stinkers, but this was in many ways a redemptive experience.

The Information, by Martin Amis, 1995

Martin Amis wrote the “at pains to be offensive” “Lionel Asbo”. So why on earth would I read “The Information”? My excuses are, to be honest, slim. I originally read this novel when it was first published, in 1995. I had been impressed by the griminess of “London Fields”, and thought Amis was a writer worth persisting with. Amis was paid an astonishing £500,000 advance for this novel, which may also have had a part to play in my original purchase decision. Coming across it on my bookshelves two decades later, I could remember nothing about it, even when prompted by the blurb. So I restarted, and once going refused to give up, even though the whole exercise was in some respects a long, drawn out insult.

The premise of the novel is simple. An unsuccessful contemporary writer, Richard Tull, has a friend, Gwyn Barry, who has by some inexplicable stroke of fortune become a highly successful novelist. Both men are intensely unpleasant individuals, two sides of the same coin, with only book sales differentiating them. While Tull’s books are unreadably, painfully bad, Barry’s are bland and inoffensive, yet sell by the million. Readers, it is implied, are all idiots, writing books is pointless, all modern books are rubbish, and the publishing industry is full of crooks, thieves and scoundrels.

In response to the failure of his literary career, Tull plans a complex and rambling scheme to punish Barry for his success. This scheme never quite comes to fruition, and fizzles out when at each turn Barry has yet another outrageous stroke of luck to avert the threat of the day. As this happens so often, there is little or no interest in whether the next threat will pan out – we know it won’t.

This is another deeply misogynistic book. There are no even partly convincing female characters – they are simply wives and girlfriends, defined by their relationships with the male protagonists. They are sexually used by the men without having any visible or presented say in the matter – for example at one point Barry has sex with his research assistant, does her the gracious favour of coming quickly so as not to inconvenience her overly, and then moves to his wife’s bed to brag about it. Amis is not celebrating this behaviour of course – my point is that the women are passive in their acceptance of this abuse. Real women wouldn’t stand for this behaviour for a second.

I am not going to go on at any more length about the failures of this book – I have spent too long on this already. If you enjoy Amis you might like this, but there are many less incestuous, less disappearing up its own self referential fundament, less simply unpleasant books about the London literary scene out there.

But. The thing is, despite all this, Amis can write. At its best his writing is something to savour. Take this:

“He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.”

Or this

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It’s nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that…Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women–and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses–will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “What is it?” And the men will say, “Nothing. No it isn’t anything really. Just sad dreams.”

 “there in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.”

There is something on every page that is interesting, not just in the use of language, imagery, etc., but in the author’s ear for how people speak and think. One example of this is his fascination with idiom. One character consistently makes mistakes with her idiom, and a whole section of what passes for a plot revolves around her confusion between the phrase “Gwyn can’t write for toffee” with what she meant to say, which was that he wouldn’t write for peanuts – different foodstuff, utterly different meaning.

“Demi’s linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like “Up you” or “Ballshit”. For I am referring to Demi’s use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase – Demi’s speech bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant given the context… So Demi said “vicious snowball” and “quicksand wit” and up gum street”; she said “worried stiff” and “beyond contempt” (though not beneath belief”); she said “on its death legs” and “hubbub of activity” and “what’s with it with her” (257)….” And so on at length.

Another example is the way he captures a character’s fractured internal monologue, in this case thinking about an article being written about him:

“Although Barry was no. A keen. While no jock or gym rat, Barry responded to the heightened life of fierce competition. He loved games and sports….with his old sparring. …As a novelist Tull was no. Unfavoured by the muses, Tull was nevertheless.” (404)

Finally, is it just me or is it hard to forget that Martin is his father’s son? Sometimes you can hear the grumpy old man being channelled, especially here where the reference to the waking up still drunk scene in “Lucky Jim” must surely be deliberate:

“Looking the mirror now, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard felt that no one deserved the face he had. No one in the history of the planet. There was nothing on the planet it was that bad to do. What happened? What have you done, man? His hair, scattered over his crown in assorted folds and clumps, looked as though it had just concluded a course of prolonged (and futile) chemotherapy. Then the eyes, each of them perched on its little blood-rimmed beergut…..His teeth were all chipped pottery and pre-war jet-glue.” (46)

Kingsley pretty much gave up bothering to try to write convincing female characters, or indeed anyone other than grumpy old men – is Martin heading that way?

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

A few years ago Ben Elton, he of 1980’s stand up fame, wrote a series of zeitgeist novels, each focussing on a different aspect of popular culture – Big Brother, (the TV programme, not the character in 1984), Friends Reunited, the effect of Internet porn and violence on people’s behaviour, etc. These were all fairly lightweight and disposable, and the social/political commentary was mainly intended to provide humour rather than change minds.

“Lionel Asbo” is the novel about the poverty of working class culture that Elton wisely never wrote. There isn’t a cliche about working class life that Amis doesn’t wildly embrace. His characters avoid any hint of subtlety. Cardboard cutouts would be giving them depth and nuance they don’t ever approach. I was reminded of “Only Fools and Horses” rewritten as torture porn.

Amis’s obsessive dislike of working class people is given full and free range here – this is a shout of hatred at the underclass of which Amis is clearly afraid. Lionel Asbo is indeed a psychopathically scary figure, capable of extremes of brutality. But his world is equally brutal and atavistic, devoid of any redeeming feature or figure, save the single exception of the pathetic Desmond, who responds to every racist barb thrown his way with a shrug.

I am struggling to find a single positive thing about this novel. Yes, I suppose some of the writing is not bad, but that is a bit like commenting on the lighting in a video nasty. The laziness of the plotting and characterisation is such that if this novel had not been written by Martin Amis I can’t imagine it would have ever been considered for publication. Some critics have kindly assumed Amis is aiming for over the top satire of our celebrity, money obsessed culture. While that may have been the original intention, comparisons with any other form of satire quickly expose this as clumsy and ineffective. I did read to the end, partly out of some kind of morbid fascination. I wanted to know if Amis would have the guts to follow through on the plot lines he had been signalling wildly for most of the second half of the novel – he didn’t, which is probably just as well, but by then I was long past caring. I am not going to spend any more time listing the many things that are wrong with this novel, when I really can’t get past the class hatred.

If you think working class people are disgusting pigs with no feeling, no limits, no taste, no redeeming features whatsoever, this is the novel for you. I need a shower.