A re-evaulation of the British writer’s ‘celebrity novel’
Martin Amis found an inimitable voice in Money, the sleazy, amorphous odyssey of an advertising-turned-film director’s boozy downward spiral. Passed like a kidney stone between London and New York’s elite societies, narrator John Self is a uniquely unsympathetic protagonist even by Amis’ standards.
This is both the success and major foil of the book. From 1984, the year it was published, it has been hailed by some sources as an accurate depiction of capitalism’s brave new world: immoral, commodified and indulgent. I would agree: it’s such a potent mix of these things that you’ll want to wash it out of your mouth with Listerine.
Outdated currency
Money is still being printed. That suggests to me people are still buying it. Which begs the question — who? Many critics think it’s Martin Amis’ best book — both literarily bold and entertaining. Yet by modern standards it just comes as a the monologue of a drunk, philandering uncle — only funny part of the time and literary only in the most annoying sense.
I wouldn’t be so ready to denounce Money as a stale joke though. Self is complicated as a character because the world he is situated in reflects his own corruption. Perhaps the world has corrupted him — he was born in a pub, after all, right in the throng of booze, shouty men, shouty telly, slot machines and serial laddism.
His relationship with girlfriend Selina is mutually exploitative to the point of being transactional. He throws her out, she agrees to come back if they can have a joint bank account. His relationship with his father is no better. Self’s dad sends an itemised bill of upbringing expenses; after paying it off, he learns that his father bet the money, won big and bought his beloved pub, along with a model girlfriend. When Selina cheats on him it hardly changes their dynamic, nor does it really matter that Self’s dad is not his real dad (that honour goes to the pub’s bouncer Fat Vince.) The dissonance between the characters seems to cancel itself out because almost everyone is a shit in some way.
There are other justifications for giving us a narrator like John Self. The first is the easiest — like any great antihero, he gets his comeuppance. His sense that money is abstract, something that he doesn’t have to worry about, comes back to bite him (at one stage he gives his porter Felix a large tip, insisting ‘It’s not my money, really’). Yet, it’s less clear if his lack of humanity is punished.
The second is that his character is a vessel to criticise society. This is a weaker justification because the book is not socially or politically conscious in any major way, and while giving us room to laugh at Self doesn’t really criticise him within the context of a power structure.
Amis’ approach to class here (and in other novels) is a bit patchy. He understands some street language, but fails establish a plausible identity for the working-class born Self, whose often hifalutin, poetic and self-aware language frankly just sounds like Amis. When Amis himself appears in the novel, he sounds like a truant public school boy — but this embrace of postmodernism doesn’t do much to ground our main character, or excuse his deficiencies in character study.
Despite this, the novel clearly reveals something about our obsession with wealth and the media. If we’re being charitable.
Money talks
Let’s be more charitable: Self is a tragicomic vessel to vent the author’s own disillusionment towards the wealthy. Even though he is safely one of their number. You might think this is ironic, but actually it’s a fairly straightforward position: authors are not philosophers or politicians, they are, for the most part, permitted to criticise a system while enjoying the benefits of it. It also makes sense because the Amis has inherited a certain irony and cocksureness from his father. Reading Literature at Cambridge, the junior Amis was well placed within a literary tradition, as well as a hereditary one, to rage at society.
In making Self as disgusting as possible while still conforming to the loose morals of his milieu, Amis gives us both an entertaining narrator and a delightfully corrupt playground for him to romp around in. Unfortunately, for a novel that needs its humour to make its point it’s not always funny. When the charm of his supercharged tableaus fails things begin to taste like flat soda.
When it’s not outrageous one-liners, the comedy tends to arise from the characters themselves. Almost every relationship John Self is characterised by rivalry, cynicism or outright betrayal. The actors, each with their own bugbears and insecurities, in particular are well-conceived and help drive a plot which often feels aimless.
For Self there are brief flashes of redemption, mainly spurred by friend Martina Twain. In one Christlike manoeuvre he lets a black assailant evade arrest, and later tracks down Martina’s lost Alsatian puppy. Unfortunately the ‘redemptive woman’ is another reductive, if not downright cliched, role.
There are also moments where Amis himself seems to try to justify his portrayal of women. ‘God is a woman: look around! Of course She is,’ he writes. You’re not fooling anyone, Martin.
Morally bankrupt
It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence Self’s previous occupation in television commercials echoes that of J.G Ballard’s protagonist in Crash. Both novels are a presentation of their author’s explicit, psychologically masculinised experience of modern society, and both achieve this, partly, through inserting themselves into the story. In Money, at least, Amis is cameoed as side character who reminders us this is all a literary experiment, rather than a verdict on modern culture. This culminates in a chess game, a real grinding of egos, in the final scene between Self and Amis — guess who wins.
The material for this novel, his fourth, was drawn from his experience scriptwriting for a hammy sci-fi b-movie. The character of Lorne Guyland (say that in a Brookyln slur) is essentially that film’s leading star Kirk Douglas, except instead of starring in a hammy sci-fi b-movie it’s a gangsta thriller called Good Money. And successively Bad Money. They begin to mean the same thing, honestly. If you want to know where Money really succeeds, it’s in encapsulating where the blowout, cocaine-hazed film industry falls apart.
Misfortune
In an 1985 interview with The Washington Post the writer claims ‘we’d all rather read about misfortune.’ It’s a pertinent statement in an era of nonstop drudgery in our media. However, more than anything, I think it says something about Money’s Britishness. I reject the idea that this is a book about America. If anything it’s about how the repressed filth of the British consciousness and the excess of the American consciousness have converged at the crossroads of globalism.
The vapidity of Money’s voice is also very prescient — but a novel that is both insincere and deeply cynical becomes slightly gross to read. Whether it’s good or bad I still don’t know — the only thing you can say for sure about Money is that it is dirty.
