The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  Once Richard is up and about the next morning we discover what it is he has to cry about. He is a novelist who no longer publishes novels. He is a father of disruptive twin boys, from whom he seeks to escape even as they turn the family home into a battleground. He is impotent, naturally. His marriage is moribund – Gina was once his ‘sexual obsession’, which was why he married her, but that was a long time ago. He has no money. He has just turned forty, and has a cyst on the back of his neck, which he disguises by growing long what is left of his hair. Worst of all, his closest friend, Gwyn Barry, is a successful novelist: a bestseller, a prize-winner.

  The writers are in continuous competition. They compete in the snooker hall, over the chess board and on the tennis court – as well as, naturally, in the shower, where Richard furtively watches Gwyn ‘toweling his humid bush’ while speculating on how ‘nice’ it would be ‘to have had a big one’. Richard beats Gwyn at chess, at snooker, at tennis. None of this matters to him because, when it comes to writing, to the literary high stakes, Gwyn is winning. Gwyn has everything that Richard wants: wealth, a readership, Hollywood interest in his work and a beautiful young aristocratic wife he adores and fucks as often as he can. As if this weren’t enough, as the novel opens, Gwyn discovers that he is on the shortlist for a prize, the nicely named Profundity Requital – which, if he wins, will provide him with a considerable income for the rest of his life. Good work if you can get it.

  Amis enjoys taking us through the routine of Richard’s days, contrasting his calamities and woes with Gwyn’s successes. Richard dresses ridiculously in bright waistcoats, reviews literary biographies, edits the arts pages of The Little Magazine, sells scraps of literary gossip and moves without purpose through the degraded streets and sordid parks of west London, the familiar Amis territory of Holland Park, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, his fictional patch, his manor.

  At night, Richard retreats to his study to work on his latest novel, Untitled, a novel so opaque and experimental that it induces a migraine in whoever tries to read it. We have been here before in the company of Amis, most obviously in the early novel Success (1981), an engaging caper in which two foster brothers are set against each other in perpetual competition, especially over women, with one more successful than the other, until their fortunes are reversed, as in the story about the poet and the screenwriter, ‘Career Move’. The rivalry between the writers in The Information is darker and far more treacherous than in these earlier fictions, at one with the unremitting bleakness of the urban setting – and there is to be no dramatic reversal for Richard. If anything, his luck is destined to run out altogether, especially once he decides that he can escape the prison of his envy only through destroying Barry, through ‘fucking him up’ once and for all. This becomes his consuming mission. What sustains him in his unhappiness and envy, what keeps him going as he trips and stumbles in his various attempts to topple Barry, is the knowledge that his rival’s novels are worthless and shall have no afterlife. ‘Gwyn’s success was rather amusingly – no, in fact completely hilariously – accidental,’ he tells himself. ‘And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time. Enthusiasm for Gwyn’s work, Richard felt sure, would cool quicker than his corpse. Or else the universe was a joke. And a contemptible joke.’

  To smooth his mission Richard enlists the help of a street thug he meets one afternoon by chance. He is Steven Cousins (aka Scozzy) and, together with his two black sidekicks, a driving instructor called – wait for it – Crash, and 13, a man who answers not to a name but a number, and an unlucky one at that, certainly for Richard, as it turns out. Amis, like Bellow before him, invariably introduces criminals into the mix with writers and aristocrats. He likes the comic possibilities of this cross-cultural slippage and he likes experimenting with different modes of speech. Here is 13, complaining about the enhanced powers of the police in Thatcher’s Britain:

  ‘The titheads … is like a gang. The Old Bill is like a gang. Hired by the government. When did it happen? It happened when they upped the pay. 1980 or whatever. They saying: It’s gonna get rough. Unemployment is it. Riots or whatever. You keep a lid on it and we pay you extra. Where’s the money come from? No worries. We’ll fine the fuckers.’

  This amusing passage is evidence of Amis’s fine gift for listening and then for replicating the multiracial patois of the inner city. The trouble is: he is seldom prepared to loosen the reins of narrative control; he is always insistently and tiresomely present, pre-empting the reader. So 13’s riff about the police is prefaced thus: ‘13 drew breath: he was about to give voice – and in the high style. His intention, plainly, was to speak not just for himself but for all men and all women, in all places, in all times – to remind the human heart of what it had once known and had now long forgotten.’

  Haven’t we heard something like this before? ‘The High Style,’ wrote Amis of Bellow, ‘attempts to speak for the whole of mankind … to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten …’

  Because this is an Amis novel it must necessarily follow that Cousins – and 13 and Crash – shall be a comic grotesque, rather than a comic surprise. It follows that he must conform to (stereo) type, even though he introduces himself to Richard as ‘an autodidact’, in a way that is against type. This interests Richard and, for once, he stops thinking about himself and thinks instead about Cousins. ‘Autodidact – that’s a tough call,’ he says. ‘You’re always playing catch-up, and it’s never wholly that you love learning. It’s always for yourself.’

  This is one of the most poignant observations in the book, because true, but Amis never takes it anywhere. He never attempts to develop Cousins as a character or explore the possibilities of his quest for knowledge as, say, Forster did with the character of the yearning suburban clerk Leonard Bast in Howard’s End or Zadie smith did in the character of a young black American rapper in On Beauty, her homage to Howard’s End.

  This is, above all, a failure of imaginative empathy, a failure that extends most problematically to Richard’s wife, Gina. We are told often that Richard is impotent. Indeed, Amis repeatedly riffs around the theme of impotence. Richard, he writes, was ‘impotent with her [Gina] every other night and, at weekends, in the mornings too … Nor did the bedroom mark the boundary of their erotic play. In the last month alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting room and on the kitchen table.’

  Later, he returns to the subject:

  After each display, after each proof of his impotence, it was into his excuses that Richard poured his creative powers … In the early weeks they explored the themes of tiredness; and then re-explored it … There they lay together, yawning and rubbing their eyes, night after night, working their way through the thesaurus of fatigue: bushed, whacked, shattered, knackered, zonked, zapped, pooped … As excuses went, tiredness was clearly a goer, amazingly versatile and athletic; but tiredness couldn’t be expected to soldier on indefinitely. Before very long, tiredness made a natural transition to the sister theme of overwork, and then struck out for the light and space of pressure, stress and anxiety.

  All of this is tolerably amusing, if only as adolescent dormitory humour, but it is also unbelievable, especially in the context of the marriage as depicted in the novel. Amis insists on telling rather than showing the details of Richard and Gina’s sexual difficulties. When on the few occasions they are shown together, fretting over unpaid bills or discussing Richard’s chances of finding a publisher for Untitled, their encounters are brief and rather fraught. This marriage is ashen and deathly. Richard and Gina are emphatically not portrayed as being a couple who, when chance would have it, are attempting to make out on the stairs or kitchen table, heady and reckless with mutual intoxication. Nor does Richard and, by implication, his puppet master Amis pause to reflect on how all this rejection may be affecting Gina. This would be to cross a border into altogether unfamiliar terrain. So instead of pathos, we have pontifi
cation; instead of empathy, we have stylised effect.

  *

  To Martin Amis prose style is not mere decoration; it reveals moral character. ‘When I read someone’s prose I reckon to get a sense of their moral life,’ he wrote, preposterously, in Koba the Dread. So what of his own moral life? If you read Amis’s prose against itself, seeking meaning in the ellipses and omissions of his style, you find an empty space where once the consolations of faith and belief might have been for the nineteenth-century novelist, where for later writers, perhaps, a political programme would have been, and where now love ought to be, however tangentially expressed. Many of Amis’s best non-fiction pieces are enriched by love – the love he feels for his father and siblings and children and for the writers and books that mean most to him. There is no love in his fiction, certainly for or between characters. There is only a love of style, something that precedes and is anterior to the fiction. So the very act of writing for Amis must be an act of love, even if he is repeatedly drawn to what is most morbid and debased in the human story, even if in his land of the make-believe the word itself catches amen-like in his throat. It cannot be spoken or expressed.

  Amis inhabits a resolutely post-religious world, in which everything is perishable and there is no redemption. The universe, he keeps telling us in The Information is not, emphatically, about us. He returned to this theme in his next work, the novella Night Train, narrated by a tough, lonely Irish-American female cop with a man’s name (Mike Hoolihan). Night Train is, like The Information, un livre sur rien – a book about nothing. Or, rather, about nothingness. Hoolihan is investigating the death of a young woman, the well-named Jennifer Rockwell, who has been shot in the head. But this is a detective novel without a murderer and it soon becomes apparent that Jennifer, a family friend of Hoolihan’s, was not murdered. She committed suicide as she sat one day alone in her apartment – but why? We learn much about Jennifer during the course of Hoolihan’s sad investigation, most pressingly, and oddly, that she was happy enough and largely fulfilled in her life.

  So why did she do it? There is a clue to the mystery of her death in the work she did. Jennifer Rockwell was an astronomer; it was her professional duty to study emptiness and voids, to be paid to think about being and nothingness. Pascal wrote that ‘man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed’. Not so with Jennifer Rockwell. She, Amis suggests – and the reader must accept, because nothing else in her fine bright life of achievement and opportunity indicates that she would have killed herself – evidently saw into the nothingness of Pascal’s ‘immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me’. This knowledge, this terror of the infinite void, destroyed her.

  A terror of the void is also what keeps disturbing Richard Tull in his sleep, awakening him to the reality of his earthly failures. When Amis is not pushing these fears on to the hapless Richard, he stands apart from the narrative, taking time out, as it were, to talk about time – and space. Long passages of the novel are given over to astronomical equations and calculations. ‘Out there, in the universe, the kilometer definitively has it over the mile. If the universe likes roundness. Which it seems to do. The speed of light is 186,282 mps, but it is very close to 300,000 kps. One light hour is 670,000,000 miles but it is very close to 1,000,000,000 kilometres …’

  Even the characters think of themselves in cosmological terms. If people were planets, Richard thinks, he would be Pluto, and Charon his art. Pluto was the smallest of the planets, so far away from the sun. How would he feel now, all these years later, to discover that Pluto is no longer even a planet; that in 2006 it was downgraded to the status of ‘dwarf planet’?

  The universe’s first appearance as a major character in an Amis novel was in London Fields, published in 1989 but set a decade later, on the eve of the new millennium. Despite the title, this is an anti-pastoral, a study in urban psychosis and alienation. The sense of crisis is once more acute: time is out of joint, London’s streets are polluted, crowded and violent; the weather has gone wrong (in 1989, Amis knew all about the heat waves ahead) and the threat of nuclear and environmental catastrophe is omnipresent. Samson Young, the narrator, alone in his flat, and dying, writes, ‘We have all known days of sun and storm that make us feel what it is to live on a planet. But the recent convulsions have taken this further. They make us feel what it is to live in a solar system, a galaxy. They make us feel – and I’m on the edge of nausea as I write these words – what it is to live in a universe. Particularly the winds. They tear through the city, they tear through the island, as if softening it up for exponentially greater violence.’

  Many scenes take place in a west London pub called the Black Cross, where a promiscuous and jaded woman of thirty-four called Nicola Six (or should that be Sex!) is searching for a murderer – her own. She ends up meeting Keith Talent, a wife-beating, small-time crook and darts player, and perhaps Amis’s most energetic low-life creation. (Keith – he has no talent at all, of course. Ha ha.) London Fields is sprawling and fragmentary, a novel about writing, full of intertextual jokes and self-references – Samsom Young is staying in the flat of an absent writer, one Mark Asprey, who may or may not be the same ‘MA’ who, in Nicola’s diary, is referenced as her most accomplished lover. MA – get it? The plot, such as it is, is incoherent. Nicola knows that she is to be murdered and when, on her next birthday – when she will be thirty-five, such a resonant age in literature – but not by whom. How she comes to know this is never properly explained, as Amis is no major realist, with minors in psychology, motivation and agency. The suspense turns on who is to be the murderer. Is it to be low-lifer Keith Talent, over whom Nicola exerts considerable sexual control, or high-born Guy Clinch, the naive and gullible posh boy with the demanding wife and demented child, who Nicola gleefully teases and torments?

  It doesn’t really matter in the end who the murderer is, though the murder takes place all the same as we knew it would, because Nicola, Keith and Guy have all the garish unreality of cartoon characters. We are encouraged to care little or nothing for them. What we are encouraged to care for, instead, is the big picture: the language, the artifice, the art. To read London Fields is, in many ways, to encounter a writer with too much talent. He wants to try everything – anything – because he can, and more often than not it comes off. Look at me, he seems to be saying, I can juggle with all the balls in the air.

  *

  Shortly after the publication of London Fields, Amis was interviewed in the New York Times. At the age of forty, he had begun to feel old. ‘It’s a little death, middle age. Romantic possibility … changes. It’s calmer waters now, windless seas – if not the doldrums. You always thought it was a hilarious secret that while everyone else got old, you weren’t. But children redefine everything for you. A lot of the self is lost, thank God; the internal gibber of wants and need dies down.’

  Ah, calm seas, the doldrums … as it turned out, Amis could not have been more wrong, because he would soon find himself adrift in very turbulent waters indeed. If The Information is a book about a mid-life crisis it was written, as Amis told me when I interviewed him at home one evening in the summer of 1997, at the end of what he called his own ‘cataclysmic midlife crisis’. In retrospect, the entire book reads like an extended crisis – of ambition, of confidence, of over-reach. In the last instance, it is an exercise in heroic decline, the monumental work towards which Amis had long been moving as each novel became more complicated and multilayered, as each novel strove to be truly novel: new, urgent. A superpower novel!

  Yet approaching the final 100-page stretch of The Information, once the two writers have returned from a protracted and hysterically rendered book promotional tour of the US, the structure begins to mimic that of its central character. It begins to atrophy. It begins slowly to collapse in on itself. The strain becomes palpable. In the fourth and final part of the book, Amis starts closing each discrete section with a ruled line, a technica
lity introduced for no apparent reason. He begins to shift points of view and, intermittently, we are inside Gwyn Barry’s head. The weather becomes more extreme (‘All the rumours of the wind now gathered themselves, in riptide’) and the astronomical musings even more overwrought, as if it is not only Richard Tull who feels he is running out of time: ‘The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos … The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.’

  During our meeting, I was baffled as to why the experience of ageing should have been so traumatic for Amis. The complacency of youth, no doubt. Now, having reread The Information all these years later, I understand how the real subject of the novel is not literary envy or male rivalry, the ordinary motors of comedy. It is the fear of death, a fear that can come upon some of us suddenly, nightmarishly, in early middle-age. ‘During a mid-life crisis you feel stupefied,’ Amis told me. ‘You are living in a land you no longer recognise. You don’t know the language anymore. You feel lost. Women have a biological change; men don’t. It’s a pity because the whole thing might be understood more if they did. A mid-life crisis is really about reaching an accommodation with death.’