The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Independent on Sunday December 1993

  Popularity Contest

  Chandler Prolonged

  Perchance to Dream by Robert B. Parker

  If Raymond Chandler had written like Robert B. Parker, he wouldn’t have been Raymond Chandler. He would have been Robert B. Parker, a rather less-exalted presence. The posthumous pseudo-sequel never amounts to more than a nostalgic curiosity, and it is no great surprise that Perchance to Dream isn’t much good. The great surprise (for this reviewer) is that The Big Sleep isn’t much good either; it seems to have aged dramatically since I last looked at it. Still, The Big Sleep has its qualities, and they include originality and a tremendous title – two departments in which Perchance to Dream is conspicuously shaky. Would Maybe to Dream have been any better? Or To Dream (Maybe)? Or how about The Bigger Sleep? Or Sleep Bigger? Come to think of it, this exploratory, drawing-board stage might have been the right point to abandon the project. But Mr Parker didn’t abandon it until it was finished. And here it is.

  1 ‘The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile.’

  2 ‘His grin had all the warmth of a pawnbroker examining yr mother’s diamond.’

  3 ‘She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch.’

  4 ‘The room was as charming as a heap of coffee grounds.’

  Quotes 1 and 3 are Chandler; 2 and 4 are Mr Parker. True, these are among Mr Parker’s best shots, while the Chandlerisms aren’t much more than routine; but I see no yawning gulf in class. I remembered Chandler’s prose as being hypnotic and frictionless, without false quantities. It isn’t like that; it is full of stubbed toes and barked shins. In this area Mr Parker can match and easily outstrip his mentor. Hardly any of Chandler’s sentences, after all, are outright catastrophes, as Mr Parker’s often are: ‘I looked at the lock and tried a key that looked like it would match from the key ring I’d taken from the Mex’, for instance, or ‘She was in … a bell-sleeved silk top with a plunging neckline and wide floppy silk pants that hid the great legs but hinted to you that if you got a look they would indeed be great.’

  Sexually, Chandler is constrained and ambiguous, whereas Mr Parker is candidly puerile: ‘She leaned forward toward me, showing me a white lace bra and a good deal of breast as well.’ Chandler’s Marlowe may be a snoop, but he’s no peeper (and he would never say ‘bra’). Then again, Mr Parker’s Philip Marlowe has much rounder heels than the original, who, although irresistible to all women (‘My God, you big dark handsome brute!’), is an old hand at just saying no. Indeed, degraded female sexuality is The Big Sleep’s heart of darkness: drugs, dirty pictures (‘indescribable filth’), drooling nymphomaniacs. It sounds both tame and creepy to the modern ear, as do the persistent – and related – snarls about homosexuality CA pansy has no iron in his bones’, and so on). Revisiting the scenes of the first murder, Marlowe senses ‘a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.’ Well, ‘a fag party’ no longer sends shivers up the spine. But it’s less laughable, I suppose, than Perchance to Dream’s climactic depravity, where the sicko billionaire and the zonked heiress are surprised in the act: ‘She stood over Simpson, giggling her giggle and spanking him with a gold-inlaid ivory hairbrush.’ Which is certainly no average hairbrush. Sin, it would seem, has come a long way since 1939.

  So has profanity, and the general style of crime. The underworld advances more quickly, and dates faster, than the overworld. As a result, Chandler’s heavies just aren’t heavy; his mean streets are clean streets – they are positively Arcadian. Thus, in The Big Sleep, he substitutes a dash when the sneering murderer tells Marlowe what he can go do to himself, and the hissing, frothing murderess is reduced to calling him ‘a filthy name’. Verbally, Chandler is as chaste as the New York Times. Mr Parker has plainly made an effort to transport himself to this more innocent era. But he remains a man of the Nineties. He lets Marlowe swear, and can’t resist allotting him a (highly unsuitable) amourette, and stands by while he fraternizes with a known pimp, which The Big Sleep’s Marlowe, with his pipe and his ‘six-mover’ chess problems, is far too literary for. One definite gain is the restoration of ‘Okay’ in place of the ridiculous and distracting ‘Okey’. (Reading The Big Sleep, you keep stressing ‘Okey’ on the first syllable, and then fruitlessly picture a resident of rural Oklahoma.) Apart from a telltale mention of ‘abusive treatment’, meaning cruel rather than insulting, Mr Parker avoids specific anachronisms. He manages to get through the novel without having Marlowe fasten his seat belt or lose sleep over global warming.

  One might expect Mr Parker to make up some ground on the plot, because Chandler is far too glazed and existential for efficient storytelling. The Big Sleep’s premise (the dying General, the two wild daughters, the vanished son-in-law) is elegant, but the murder-trail stuff is repetitive, implausible and hard to follow. Every few pages, it seems, there’s a knock on the door and another new gun barrel for the reader to peer into. Mr Parker starts strongly, and for a while Perchance to Dream trundles along with more uncomplicated thrust than Chandler ever cared to generate. Marlowe is furnished with an impregnable adversary and long odds against. But the denouement is a chaos of tawdry short cuts. The impregnable villain confesses instantly, and his main sidekick disappears ‘in the scuffle’, paving the way, perhaps, for Ay, There’s the Rub, the pseudo-pseudo-sequel of a thriller-writer yet unborn.

  Most seriously, the character of Marlowe collapses. Raymond Chandler created a figure who hovered somewhere between cult and myth: he is both hot and cool, both virile and sterile. He pays a price for his freedom from venality; he is untouchable in all senses; he cannot be corrupted, not by women, not by money, not by America. The ‘big dark handsome brute’ makes an interesting contrast with the photo on the back of my green Penguin edition: spectacles, receding hairline, lips so thin they seem to be licked away. Finding the rich nympho in his bed (‘You’re cute’), Sleep’s Marlowe tells her to leave before he throws her out ‘by force. Just the way you are, naked.’ When she goes, having called him that filthy name, Marlowe airs the room, drinks his drink and stares down at the imprint of her ‘small corrupt body’ on the sheets. ‘I put my empty glass down,’ the chapter ends, ‘and tore the bed to pieces savagely.’

  Mr Parker’s Marlowe, more modernly, would have given her a soft drink and a long talk about her substance problem. He has no turbulent soul, no inner complication to keep in check. Mr Parker neither understands nor respects Marlowe’s inhibitions; he fritters them away, unconsciously questing for some contemporary ideal of gruff likeability. By the end of the book, Marlowe has become an affable goon. This guy grins and preens and jollies things along. This guy talks too much.

  New York Times Book Review January 1991

  Park II

  The Lost World by Michael Crichton

  When the dino colouring-books have at last been put aside, and they’ve cleaned their teeth with dino brushes and dino paste, and they’re lying there in dino pyjamas, under dino duvets, what do children want to talk about? Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs as brought to them, vivified and literalized, by the dream team of Michael Crichton (the novel) and Steven Spielberg (the film). And for two years now my sons and I have been tossing the scenarios back and forth. What would they give us, what would we be looking at, in Park II?

  Discussions with my pre-teens were, as Crichton might put it, dogged by controversy. But we were sure we knew where the sequel would have to begin: with that steel cylinder full of dino embryos dropped by fatso computer dweeb Dennis Nedry, just before he got smeared by the dilophosaurus. One or other pre-teen would then go on to remind the company that dilophosaurs didn’t spit. And they didn’t have that mad-granny frill around their necks. Modern parents hover at about A-level standard on prehistoric fauna. Children are all PhDs. Anyway, that embryo cylinder had to be the germ of Park II. That can had Park II written all over it.

  Not that speculation ended there. John Hammond, the megalomaniac geneticist, or megalomaniac fundraiser, who c
reated the dino park, was killed off by Crichton in the novel, pecked to death by a gaggle of ‘compys’ (compsognathus: a carnivorous dino fowl). But Spielberg spared him. Maybe Crichton would clone us up a new Hammond, or provide a like-minded twin brother. Towards the end of the novel, raptors start escaping from the island, stealing rides on ferry boats. Would they hit the mainland? Would the monsters take Manhattan, or at least Miami?

  On one point we all languidly agreed: there would be an array of new dinosaurs. Avians, for instance, which were deftly yet briefly introduced by Crichton but ignored, for now, by Spielberg. Conversely, how could the creator of Jaws fail to steer Crichton towards the dino cousins of the deep? Imagine it: the beach party, the blonde skinny-dipper, the looming plesiosaur or mosasaur or ichthyosaur … Half of all known dinosaurs have been discovered in the last twenty years: they find a new one every seven weeks. So what about a role for the utahraptor, officially named and described in 1993? This beauty resembled a velociraptor but was three times its size. A twenty-foot kickboxer with a fifteen-inch ‘slasher’ claw on each foot, utahraptor was hailed by palaeontologist James Kirkland as ‘the most vicious of all dinosaurs, as well as one of the most intelligent’. It seemed that the fossil record was jumping with fresh talent.

  Here comes The Lost World, and here come the answers. No embryo cylinder, no Hammond, no mainland incursion, no dilophosaurs, no giant predators of the oceans or the skies. And only one new monster. Let us quickly deal with the new monster, which shows promise. It is a carnotaurus, a light-heavyweight with horns, and the possessor, according to Crichton, of near-magical chameleonic powers. ‘Diet: Meat’, as my dinosaur encyclopaedia bluntly assures us. This is good. In the Jurassic era, as in our own, vegetarians are a drag. Meateaters get around more, and have more energy. I welcome carnotaurus, and only wish it had been given somebody to savage. By the time it appears we’re down to the two kids and a skeleton staff of goodies. The villains have all been used up. And no kid is going to buy it in a mere PG.

  On with Crichton’s tale! After 131 remarkably leaden pages we find ourselves on an island very like and certainly very near the island in Jurassic Park. But that island was Isla Nublar (since shut down). This island, Isla Sorna, we learn, was ‘Hammond’s dirty little secret. It’s the dark side of the park.’ Hammond’s cloning lab and dino hatchery were just window-dressing. With any new manufacturing technology, ‘initial yields are low’. To get the good specimens for his park, Hammond must have been churning out embryos on an industrial scale. Where? On the mist-shrouded isle of Sorna …

  The reader’s heart soars like a pterodactyl. Isla Sorna, it seems fair to expect, is a kind of dinosaur borstal, where all the real hardcases are confined: the lowlifes, the hopeless recidivists. Or maybe it’s a holding pen for mutant dinosaurs: half-breeds, hybrids, mongrels. Then, too, we would tolerantly settle for diseased dinosaurs: pathopods, toxoraptors, carcinosaurs. Whatever way Crichton spins it, the stage is set for escalation. We expect nastier dinosaurs. But what we get, on the whole, is nicer dinosaurs.

  Fossils are static things, but they are elastic in our imaginations and we shape them to our needs. As Crichton explains, in one of the mini-lectures slotted shamelessly into his text, our image of the dinosaurs has undergone clear changes since their discovery so years ago. It seemed to suit the upwardly mobile Victorians to regard the dinosaurs as contemptibly retrograde: slow, dumb, torpid and blundering towards extinction. ‘Dinosaur’ became a synonym for something that didn’t deserve to be around. The twentieth century saw the beginning of a long course of rehabilitation. Gradually the dinosaurs’ blood temperature rose; their movements quickened; their brains expanded. Nowadays, or so Crichton has it, they have been enveloped by a kind of Disneyfication: anthropomorphized, euphemized, sentimentalized. The filthily careening gas-guzzlers have all been traded in for two-door saloons, running on unleaded fuel – and, yes, with a bumper sticker saying Baby On Board.

  Crichton is neither mawkish nor censorious. What he wants to emphasize is the weakness of our grip on a world of vanished complexity. Still, the artist in him (a diminutive personage, true, but a definite presence) insists on test-driving the two rival models. Thus dinosaur herds now practise ‘inter-species symbiosis’: the powerful and myopic apatosaurs hang out with the smaller, sharp-eyed parasaurs, forming a united front against predators. Triceratops are drilled in ‘group defensive behavior’. Maiasaurs engage in ‘complex nesting and parenting’. There are rituals of courtship and display. These animals sleep together and stick together. They even go to the bathroom in packs.

  The unlikeliest beneficiaries of the new-look ecosystem are the tyrannosaurs. Mr and Mrs Rex, as here portrayed, are outstanding citizens, ‘cautious, almost timid animals’ with ‘an extended parenting role’. It is the velociraptors, fortunately, who buck the trend. For reasons not altogether clear, they have gone downhill in the last five years, and now form the island’s underclass. Their nest is a disgrace – even Crichton is scandalized: ‘the eggshells crushed; the broken mounds stepped on … the youngsters looked thin, undernourished’. In the earlier book the velociraptors were a crack platoon; here they’re a mob of squealing squaddies. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they are a delight. These glittering yahoos steal The Lost World, just as they stole Jurassic Park, both book and film. If Hammond was Nublar’s Prospero, then the velociraptors are Soma’s Calibans.

  At his best Crichton is a blend of Stephen Jay Gould and Agatha Christie. He emplaces a series of zoological mysteries which are far more arresting than the conveyor-belt jeopardies of his plot. Animals – especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors – are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.

  When you open The Lost World you enter a strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences. You will gaze through the thick canopy of authorial padding. It’s a jungle out there, and jungles are ‘hot’ sometimes ‘very hot’. ‘Malcolm wiped his forehead. “It’s hot up here.” ’ Levine agrees: ‘ “Yes, it’s hot.” ’ Thirty pages later it’s still hot. ‘ “Jeez, it’s hot up here,” Eddie said.’ And Levine agrees again: ‘ “Yes,” Levine said, shrugging.’ Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free. You will listen in ‘stunned silence’ to an ‘unearthly cry’ or a ‘deafening roar’. Raptors are ‘rapacious’. Reptiles are ‘reptilian’. Pain is ‘searing’.

  The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. Dodgson shook his head irritably’; ‘ “Handle what?” Dodgson said irritably.’ So Dodgson is irritable. But ‘ “I tell you it’s fine,” Levine said irritably.’ ‘Levine got up irritably.’ So Levine is irritable too. ‘Malcolm stared forward gloomily.’ ‘ “We shouldn’t have the kids here,” said Malcolm gloomily.’ Malcolm seems to own ‘gloomily’; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving ‘gloomily’ too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving ‘irritably’. Forget about ‘tensely’ and ‘grimly’ for now. And don’t get me started on ‘thoughtfully’.

  After a while you come to realize that this is prose from another medium:

  Levine removed the black anodised Lindstradt pistol in its holster, and buckled it around his waist. He removed the pistol, checked the safety twice, and put it back in the holster. Levine got to his feet, gestured for Diego to follow him. Diego zipped up the backpack, and shouldered it again.

  Recast those sentences in the present tense and you see them for what they are: stage directions. I certainly hope that that’s what this book is: a creative-input memo to Steven Spielberg. Crichton has an anti-talent for dramatic speech (‘Brace yourself, Sarah!’, ‘There’s no time to waste’, ‘There’s something funny about this island, Ian’), but many of his scenes are blueprints for something vivid: a mysterious carcass torched by flamethrowers on a volcanic beach; a velociraptor feeding-frenzy glimpsed through an electric storm. Reading these passages, why, you can almost hear the cinematog
rapher unscrewing his lens cap; you can almost see the rewrite team activating their laptops.

  Never mind. Crichton has pushed dinosaurs yet deeper into our psyches. And we seem to enjoy having them there. Dinosaurs remind us that our planet is as exotic as any other we can imagine. In essence, The Lost World is a children’s book. Like all good bad stuff, it is conjured with eagerness and passion.

  Sunday Times October 1995

  Maintaining on Elmore Leonard

  Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard

  Let us attempt to narrow it down. Elmore Leonard is a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers. He belongs, then, not to the mainstream but to the genres (before he wrote thrillers, he wrote westerns). Whereas genre fiction, on the whole, heavily relies on plot, mainstream fiction, famously, has only about a dozen plots to recombinate (boy meets girl, good beats bad, and so on). But Mr Leonard has only one plot. All his thrillers are Pardoner’s Tales, in which Death roams the land – usually Miami or Detroit – disguised as money.

  Nevertheless, Mr Leonard possesses gifts – of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing – that even the most snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet. And the question is: how does he allow these gifts play, in his efficient, unpretentious and (delightfully) similar yarns about semiliterate hustlers, mobsters, go-go dancers, cocktail waitresses, loan sharks, bounty hunters, blackmailers and syndicate executioners? My answer may sound reductive, but here goes: the essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle.

  What this means, in effect, is that he has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence – or let’s say the American sentence, because Mr Leonard is as American as jazz. Instead of writing ‘Warren Ganz III lived up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County’, Mr Leonard writes: ‘Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County.’ He writes, ‘Bobby saying’, and then opens quotes. He writes, ‘Dawn saying’, and then opens quotes. We are not in the imperfect tense (Dawn was saying) or the present (Dawn says) or the historic present (Dawn said). We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players’ hidden minds. He doesn’t just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breathe.