The moral monstrosity spawned by this obsession with success is the central vehicle of Amis’s social satire in Success. The novel was published the year before Margaret Thatcher rose to power as head of England’s Conservative Party; Terry and Gregory’s acrimonious coexistence prophetically captures the increasingly intertwined, antagonistic relationship between the monied classes and their envious, entrepreneurial rivals. As Graham Fuller has written, Success is ‘a parody of England’s class war, with Gregory and Terry symbolizing the spiritual decay of the landed gentry and the greedy self-betterment of the “yobs”, each appraising the other’s position with eloquent disgust or shameless envy’.56 In one sense both Terry and Greg personify versions of the philistinism and greed that many of Thatcher’s critics predicted would be her ideological legacy.57 □
With the benefit of historical hindsight, Diedrick is able to perceive a prophetic quality in Success, and to argue, with some plausibility, that Amis’s third novel is more insightful and enduring than its first reviewers realised. But it remains the case that if Amis’s literary career had stopped with Success, he might still be regarded as a minor figure. Neil Powell’s essay on Amis, an extract from which was included in the previous chapter, appeared when Success was Amis’s most recent novel. The overall aims of this essay were to provide a considered assessment of Martin Amis’s first three novels, to characterise the kind of success he had so far achieved and to identify general problems which his work seemed to raise. Powell acknowledged that Amis had ‘certainly been the most praised and the most publicised new writer of full-length fiction in England in the past decade’, but suggested that the sort of success his novels had enjoyed so far was that of ‘books which are distinctively of their time and which … succeed through accuracy of detail and of tone’;58it remained to be seen whether they would be promoted to the category of books which are enduring successes. At the end of his essay, Powell picks out what he sees as three major problems with Amis’s work to date:
■ The first, rather slippery one involves the distinction between pornography and literature: it seems to me that in all three novels -but most noticeably in Dead Babies - there are passages where the ironist’s or satirist’s distancing fails entirely. This is an aspect of the uncertainty of tone which so often weakens Amis’s writing. Pornography fulfils a simple and perhaps necessary purpose; whereas literature is altogether more complicated. We need to distinguish between them not for censorious reasons but because the two things demand different kinds of intention and response. A work of literature may be endangered where the simpler level of intention and response gets in the way of the more subtle and complex one: such a confusion happens too often in Amis’s novels and provokes those familiar comments (‘Extravagantly sexual… highly enjoyable’) which are quoted on the paperback editions of his books and in which reviewers, understandably enough, attempt to have it both ways. Among a novelist’s desperate remedies, the gratuitous, knowing obscenity - like the one-line joke - is a stand-by to be used sparingly.
The second problem is related to the first. Because Amis’s characters live in an echoing present (‘The past? They had none.’ (Dead Babies, p. 180)), their allusions and their vocabulary belong to a world of crazily foreshortened historical perspectives. A central passage in The Rachel Papers (pp.97, 98, 102) presupposes a detailed knowledge of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Andy, in Dead Babies, habitually adds a redundant ‘is all’ to the ends of his sentences; Terry, in Success, obsessively uses the word ‘tonto’, in italics, an extreme example of localized slang which seems to mean ‘mad’. These are random instances of an overstrained contemporaneity: the cumulative effect of such things is drastically to restrict the potential range of the novels.
But what about the potential range of the novel? What effect is Amis’s success, or Success, likely to have upon the language of fiction? In Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), the final section is called ‘What Life Is’. That too is a second-division novel, though a remarkably good one, and in its intention of providing a detailed record of two contrasting sisters’ lives it has something in common with Success. Amis is in many ways the more polished and skilful of the two writers, but it is Bennett’s ‘life’ which moves and convinces. Why? Not, I think, because life has changed (though obviously it has) but because, whereas in Bennett language is enriching, in Amis it is deadening, reductive. One has, in The Old Wives’ Tale, a deep sense of both change and continuity in historical time, sustained by Bennett’s allusions to real events of some importance and to alterations in the texture of life. In Amis, the resonance has gone and the language of fiction has become as formulaic and as ephemeral as last year’s pop music. Stifled by its insistence on the present, by its pop and media allusiveness, and by its introverted slang, Amis’s language becomes only of its time and lacks even the ambition of timelessness.
Except, that is, for those moments - the occasional patches of brilliance in Dead Babies, the end of Success - when Amis seems to reach out towards a larger fictional world: then one can see what a fine writer he could be if he were to allow himself a greater historical range, a deeper commitment to the enduring realities of time and place. I hope that his future novels will show a decisive break with (to borrow a line from Thom Gunn) ‘the limitations where he found success‘59 and will find him using his talent more positively, less defensively. But success is a funny thing, and it may take time to grow out of it.60 □
It could be said that Amis began to try to grow out of success in his fourth novel, Other People. As the next chapter will show, the results were not judged to be wholly successful, but they certainly proved to be perplexing and fascinating.
CHAPTER FOUR
Descent into Hell: Other People: A Mystery Story (1981)
IN THE Novel Today (1990), Allan Massie, a reviewer and critic who is himself a novelist, proposed that ‘[i]t was not till his fourth novel, Other People, that Amis began to escape from the limiting condition of being bang up to the minute, of having the ear of his exact contemporaries, and only theirs’.61 But initially, Other People proved perplexing to reviewers, presenting problems of definition and comprehension. In the Listener, for example, Victoria Glendinning began her review by an apparently confident categorisation of the novel - ‘Martin Amis has written a modern morality’ - only to call herself into question in the next sentence - ‘[a]t least I think he has’,62 and to start her final paragraph by reclassifying Other People as ‘a fable’.63 She also acknowledged that she found the novel ‘quite hard to understand’.64 That challenge to understanding was also addressed by Blake Morrison, who, as with Success, once again provided, in the Times Literary Supplement, the most substantial review of an Amis novel, registering the perplexity that Other People produced, the change of style it exemplified and, along with some other reviewers - for instance, Alan Hollinghurst65 and John Sutherland66 -affixing a label, perhaps too easily, to its technique: Martian - the technique associated above all with the poet Craig Raine and his poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ (1979),67 in which familiar objects and activities, like books, telephones and going to the toilet, are described in unfamiliar ways, as if seen with the estranging eyes of an alien visitor to earth:
■ We knew where we were with Martin Amis’s fiction, or thought we did. Black humour, metropolitan satire, Swiftian obsession with the bodily functions - with three novels and a handful of short stories the boundaries of his fictional world looked to have been decisively drawn. But where are we now? A young woman wakes in an institution of some kind. She walks down its corridors with ‘heavy curved extensions [shoes]’ (p. 14) attached to her feet. She watches packs of ‘trolleys [motor vehicles]’ (p. 16) charging noisily along the street. She classifies people, bizarrely and it seems arbitrarily, into six different kinds. She gazes upwards at ‘extravagantly lovely white creatures - fat sleepy things [clouds]’ (p. 17) and ‘slow-moving crucifixes [aeroplanes]’ (p. 18). She feels to be on the verge of some �
�inscrutable, ecstatic human action’ (p. 17). She appears to have lost her bearings; and so have we.
Other People is subtitled [A Mystery Story] and like most mystery stories withholds its chief secret until the end. But one of its mysteries - Martin Amis’s change of style, and the resources he draws on in order to bring it about - is to be solved by looking not at the last page but at the back cover. [This is, of course, the back cover of the first hardback edition in 1981 - some public library copies retain this cover and photograph, which confirms Morrison’s description of it.] This shows the author sitting, cigarette in hand, reading what we can just about make out to be the New Statesman, a magazine of which he was once the literary editor (and it’s the arts pages he’s perusing), but which he left in order to write full-time. The photograph is perhaps a way of reminding cognoscenti [those in the know] that one of Amis’s achievements on that paper was to give some prominence to a poetry which specializes in presenting the familiar world through the eyes of a fascinated alien - a poetry associated with Craig Raine, Christopher Reid and others which has since been given the name ‘Martian’. Other People is a Martian novel - not the first perhaps (William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955) and a host of science fiction novels have prior claims) and not the whole way through but to an extent that suggests he has adopted some of the techniques of recent poetry for his own ends (the fact that his name is an anagram of ‘Martianism’ may not be entirely beside the point).
Amis is a self-confessed raider of others’ texts, and makes no attempt to conceal the borrowings (especially those from his contemporaries) of Other People. Indeed the shift in mode is one which the second chapter explicitly draws attention to. ‘Between ourselves, this isn’t my style at all really. The choice wasn’t truly mine, although I naturally exercise a degree of control. It had to be like this … she asked for it’ (p.2l). ‘She’ is the heroine, Mary Lamb, who - as the voice also tells us at this point - appears to be going through an experience not unlike amnesia. She is also, it seems, suffering from nominal aphasia, a complaint which afflicts George Zeyer in Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up (1974) and which is defined there as ‘that condition in which the sufferer finds it difficult to remember nouns, common terms, the names of familiar objects’.68 For Mary, innocent as her name suggests, the world is a riddle, and we are forced to do a certain amount of decoding on her behalf…
The ‘dirty sheath of smudged grey paper that came and went every day’ (p. 57), with men on its back pages costing lots of money, is a tabloid newspaper; knitting needles in a restaurant are chopsticks (p. 120); a ‘glistening dumb-bell’ (p. 112) proves to be the receiver of a phone.
That last image might come from Christopher Reid’s poem ‘Baldanders’;69 other passages read like prose drafts for the ‘Yellow Pages’ section of Craig Raine’s The Onion, Memory (1978)70……The proliferation of correspondences, of everything looking like something else, reinforces the novel’s main theme, which is Mary’s search for her double, the person she perfectly resembles, the lost self of a former life. The search begins in the lower levels of society, where Mary is befriended by an alcoholic half-tramp, half-prostitute, Sharon, who takes her money, cleans her up and pairs her off with Trev, whose speciality is sex with violence … Mary batters his face with a brick, runs for it, and hides out with Sharon’s alcoholic parents, Mr and Mrs Botham[,] who allow her to go about educating herself in earnest. She explores her body … reads Shakespeare and Jane Austen, gets to know London. The idyll ends when Trev comes for his revenge: he is repelled, but in the process Mr Botham’s back is broken and Mary has to move on.
Breakage is a dominant motif in the novel and wherever Mary goes she leaves a trail of destruction behind her: broken backs, broken jaws, broken noses, broken necks, broken spirits, broken hearts. Her next home is a hostel for girls who … have ‘gone out too deep in life’ (p. 70) … Mary stays there long enough to find a job as washer-up in a café and then moves into a squat… with two men from work. Russ and Alan are a re-working of Gregory and Terry in Success. Russ is slim, loose, sidling and in some of the novel’s funniest scenes fantasizes about his peremptory treatment of famous film actresses … Alan is pale, frightened and prone to wrench fistfuls of hair from his scalp, thus adding to an already serious baldness problem. Here are the classic dualities of Martin Amis’s fiction: buoyant self-assurance as against self-loathing [;] preening, arching, craning and gliding as against whining, whing[e]ing, fawning and breaking down. But, as in Success, the gap between the two gradually narrows: Russ is hung up about being illiterate; it is Alan who manages to sleep with Mary; and the rivalry of the two men proves to be a form of mutual dependence, a desperate double act.
Mary’s search for her own double is meanwhile proceeding. Through the mysterious policeman, Prince, who is called in on each of her various mishaps, she learns about Amy Hide, a girl whose disappearance has led to a man being held on a murder charge. Is Mary herself Amy Hide? … It is on Prince … that Mary depends for her ultimate revelation, and with whom she is paired in yet another strange doppelgänger [double]……
Though it has its twists and surprises to the end, the plot of Other People is somewhat perfunctory … there is none of the tightness and narrative subtlety of Success. Interest is concentrated, instead, on the playing off of two narrative voices: one knowing, the other unknowing. The latter is Mary’s or something like it, bemused by ‘the astronomical present’ (p. 29). The identity of the second voice remains a puzzle until the final pages, and is indeed the novel’s chief thriller element. Snappy and snappish, this voice hectors the reader, corrects misapprehensions, parades its familiarity with the ways of the world. At times it seems to be an authorial voice exulting, in self-conscious post-modernist fashion, in its omniscience and control. At other times we suspect that it must belong to the person at the heart of the novel’s crime mystery. These impressions are perfectly compatible, of course: both people may be said to control Mary’s outcome; both have the power to kill her off.
There is in the end no single answer to this novel’s mystery…71 □
Despite the thoroughness of his review, Morrison seems finally to remain perplexed by Other People. Tackled by John Haffenden about the confusion the novel caused, Martin Amis himself acknowledged it meant that he had, in a sense, failed, and proceeded to provide some very helpful explication:
■ [John Haffenden:] I think readers can often feel defeated by the riddle of Other People. Among other critics, I think, Paul Ableman said that the end of the novel left us with what he called ‘the shoddy enigma of an author’s refusal to clarify his meaning rather than the authentic one of a mystery too profound for clear expression’.72 Could you take this opportunity to provide a little explication?
[Martin Amis:] There is a consistent but not a realistic explanation of the book. In fact, only Ian McEwan ‘got’ the book, as it were, and I must admit to failure here - because I thought readers would understand by the end. The simple idea of the book - as I point out several times in the text - is, why should we expect death to be any less complicated than life? Nothing about life suggests that death will just be a silence. Life is very witty and cruel and pointed, and let us suppose that death is like that too. The novel is the girl’s death, and her death is a sort of witty parody of her life. In life she was Amy Hide, a character who was privileged in all kinds of ways and made a journey downward through society - as some very strange people do: downward mobility is largely a new phenomenon, and it’s a metaphor for self-destruction which some people seriously do enact - and therefore her life-in-death is one in which she is terrifically well-meaning and causes disaster. In her real life as Amy Hide she was not well-meaning, and brought disaster on herself. The Prince character, the narrator, has total power over her, as a narrator would, and also as a demon-lover would. At the very end of the novel she starts her life again, the idea being that life and death will alternate until she gets it right: she will go through life again, she will meet the man at
the edge of the road, she will fall into the same mistakes … but actually I wanted to suggest on top of everything else that she would in fact get it right this time. There is another complicated layer which has to do with the fact that in the Amy Hide life the Prince character was as automaton-like as she was, and didn’t realize what was going on; in the death he does realize what was going on, and at the end he doesn’t any more - he again becomes an actor in this life. The idea is that you are on a wheel until the point where you can get off purely by behaving well - by meaning well and doing well.
So the narrator and Prince are the same voice - I think I picked up one clue in the fact that the narrative voice and Prince describe squats in the same terms: ‘[p]eople are serious about living together’ (pp. 106,125) - and I’m glad you confirm the identification.
Yes, and as narrator and as murderous demon-lover he has equal power to knock her off: they are exactly analogous.
In one sense, I suppose, it’s an epistemological novel - being concerned with how we know anything - which matches your consuming interest in punning and the place of language in interpreting the world.
Yes. As you know, it was said to be a Martian novel, although I began it a year before Craig Raine’s Martian poem appeared.73 The donnée [basic assumption] for me was the chance to describe the world as if I knew nothing about it, and perhaps it did fall prey to a rather elaborate set of metaphysical notions. It is not an ideas-novel in the sense that I believe in reincarnation or anything of that sort; it’s just a way of looking at life.74 □
Although Amis takes issue with the view that Other People is a ‘Martian’ novel, James Diedrick, in Understanding Martin Amis, firmly reiterates this view. Diedrick points out that Amis himself, just over a year before Other People came out, had published a poem in the New Statesman, called ‘Point of View’, which might itself be seen as ‘Martian’ in its disturbing representation of the perceptions of social deviants - ‘To the mature paedophile/A child’s incurious glance is a leer/Of intimate salacity’.75The whole poem appears as prose in Other People (pp. 186-7), and provides, Diedrick suggests, a microcosm of ‘the denaturalizing of conventional understanding that characterizes the novel as a whole’.76
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 6