Money by Martin Amis: a Book Review

 

The subtitle of this 1984 published novel is: A Suicide Note but don’t let that frazzle your new-found, health-kick, neuron-autobahns or morality chops, no, this novel is about a character’s excessive, desperate union between death and life and that fine-line which straddles both; and if you’re from Belfast, think of a kind of Duncairn Gardens – a nether worldly kind of deal where you are not sure exactly where you stand but you know, roughly.

On Twitter, I once followed a guy who was residing in Belfast and went by the handle of ‘John Self’. This intrigued me as I did not know who John Self was, so I asked him and he replied, laconically, ‘I’m me.’ I unfollowed him for now some unknown reason; I am sure he can sleep well in his cot knowing this. He didn’t follow me anyway and I summarised he saw me as nefarious social-media noise and traffic. I asked him to read some of my work and he replied in the negative. And so I moved on from John Self for a while until I recently tweeted him saying ‘John Self, Martin Amis’s Money, I get it now.’ He never replied. Just noise and traffic. Noise, and, traffic.

Anyway, Money is as Money does, and it does so in a very specialised, nuanced way; it is a driven novel of ferocity and drive and of narrative voice, first person, of the character John Self; a bloated ape with ideas of schlonging into the glass edifices, and the slippery ivory tower(s), of power and portents. He’s in the porn business, is John, and it’s hard to keep one’s end up when there are swagmen, and women, out there with tanned warm handshakes and white Hollywood smiles which enthuse calm and cool.

From when the whistle sounded, page one, I was there reading, absorbing and on the crest with him what with his Alpine-like slalom runs of drunkenness through black-outs and elicited handjobs from off-the-street prostitutes, his trouble with the Fiasco, women, money deals and passing outs and coming to’s; the flitting between New York and London. John Self, let me add, has zero class as he is ever-ready to point out.

There were lines of writing in this novel which were so crisp, fresh and tantalizing to me, writing of the tenure of such motes as this visceral nicety: ‘And once I get through with you, sunshine, there’ll be nothing left but a hank of hair and teeth.’ Such barbarity; such caveman-like, meat-wad wrenching, belly-beating brouhaha.

And, ‘She wore a low-cut silk dress in a razzy grey – it rippled like television.’

Coined contractions and compounds and prefixes and suffixes and fixity of tenure flush each page with their anti-conformity demonstrations. This is not your Tom had a bad day and went around to Michelle’s with a bottle of red wine for talk kind of novel; this is a side-street, sniffing among the trash, along with the whining dogs, kind of work. It is a novel of fags and their burning lamps, and deep illustrious inhaled heat working away in the throat and lodging in the ventricles kind of deal.

What John Self encapsulates is the oncoming limbic-system wanton desire of money and power of the Money Generation of Thatcher’s – Reagan- initiated, of Milton Friedman’s  theory Free Market Economy, Adam Smith institute, late twentieth century – children and Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ act.  What John desires is pounds of the noted variety, and dollars and their green-backed humps rising in his bank account.

But John Self soon finds that the money Gods have come down and taken a large bite out of his rug. (My own rug, my own hair real-estate, gone all privet-hedge, unruly, lately and I must get myself along to the coiffure’s till they shear, and clip-clip and purr with their snazzy clippers.)

There isn’t a millennial in sight of this work which was written in the eighties but it is the bastard child of the post-modern literary world and an easy work to follow, say, Ulysses.

Martin Amis said that the true testament, which this reviewer concurs with, of a work of literature, is the best reviewer out there: is time. If a novel is still read after fifty years then it is something. And this sure is something. My eyes still pump iron for the sheer audacity and tenacity of the thing.

John Self is part bastard, the same palpating, panting animal which lurks in all of us. He is also a king for a day when the money rattles into his tin…

At least, John Self, at least he’s honest.

I’d rate Money eleven out of ten, if you could turn it up to eleven. I will read it again. It is that good.

N