Diedrick also draws attention to an older practice of defamiliarization which may inform Amis’s fourth novel - that represented by William Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads (1798)77 which, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, aimed to ‘give the charm of novelty to things of everyday … [to awaken] the mind’s attention from the lethargy of cus- , torn … [and to remove] the film of familiarity’ which inhibits our full appreciation of ‘the loveliness and wonders of the world‘78 - but with Martin Amis, defamiliarisation can also reveal the ugliness and horrors of the world - not least its violence.
It is this aspect of Other People which Brian Finney explores in his 1995 essay ‘Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields’. As his title suggests, Pinney’s focus is on the relation in Amis’s fiction between narrative and the representation of violence and murder; Other People is the first of Amis’s novels to combine violence with the presence of the narrator in the story, a combination exemplified by the identification, confirmed by Amis in his Haffenden interview, of the narrator with Prince, who is also Mary’s murderer:
■ Why do death, murder, and victimization appear so frequently in Amis’s fiction? The answer lies not just in the murderous nature of contemporary civilization. It also has to do with the nature of the narrative act. In his later novels, beginning with Other People, this prevalence of violence against one or more of the characters is accompanied by the introduction into the narrative of the narrator in person … This typically postmodern device draws attention to the highly ambiguous role played by any narrator in fiction. Whoever narrates a story both creates and annihilates characters……
Other People opens with a confessional Prologue by the narrator. ‘I didn’t want to have to do it to her. I would have infinitely preferred some other solution. Still, there we are. It makes sense, really, given the rules of life on earth; and she asked for it’ (p. 9). The narrator simultaneously expresses his sense of guilt and immediately proceeds to spread the responsibility for what he has done and is about to do to the novel’s protagonist, Mary Lamb, as she calls herself at first. He blames both ‘the rules of life on earth’ (or the fallen nature of humankind) and Mary whose fall from grace leads to her demand for retributive justice. Other People is subtitled A Mystery Story, and its first mystery is the identity of its narrator. This narrator never allows us to forget his controlling presence for long. Every chapter, except the first and the final four making up Part Three, has a section typographically distinguished from the rest of the narrative in which the narrator directly addresses the reader in the second person. Even the first chapter has the Prologue, just as Part Three has an Epilogue, in which the same device is employed.
Invariably these sections encourage readers both to reflect on whatever topic has governed the preceding action and to recognize their own complicity in it. In effect his readers repeatedly are being removed from the fiction by a philosophizing narrator only to be returned to the action by the narrator who forces them to recognize the similarity between whatever action the narrator has been describing and their own experiences. In Chapter 7, for instance, Mary enters a Church-Army Hostel for Young Women where everyone has taken a smash to be there. ‘Have you ever taken a smash in your time?’ asks the narrator. Not content with dragging us in, he proceeds to offer advice that simultaneously subtly adds to our knowledge about him. ‘If you see a smash coming and can’t keep out of the way - don’t break. Because if you do, nothing will ever put you back together again. I’ve taken a big one and I know. Nothing. Ever’ (p. 70). In describing his own fall, this Humpty-Dumpty narrator is also returning us to the action of which he is a mysterious part. Is his fall involved in Mary’s fall prior to her loss of memory? We are forced back into the narration to find out. These metafictional interruptions do not have the effect that Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley, always charges him with creating - they do not alienate the reader from the story.79 They are a basic ingredient of narration, one that has been employed in rather different ways by comic novelists since the time of Cervantes and Fielding.
At the same time the narrator never lets us forget that we share with him the responsibility for subjecting Mary to the hell that the book’s title alludes to. In Huis Clos (In Camera) (1945) Sartre depicts hell as other people.80 Amis’s Other People is a depiction of a modern hell in which Mary, suffering from memory loss, is forced to rediscover her debased earlier self (or other person) overseen by the all-seeing narrator who enters the action in the form of a police detective called John Prince. It takes the reader most of the book to appreciate the fact that Prince and the narrator are the same person. This is because Prince, like Mary, has a past - as her murderer. He is simultaneously Prince Charming and the Prince of Darkness. He is a Manichean demon-lover. In her previous existence as Amy Hide, her sister tells her, ’”[y]ou said you loved him so much you wouldn’t mind if he killed you”’ (p. 186). And it appears that he did kill her. Amis provides a clue to the significance of this dual role: ‘the narrator is the murderer and the writer and the murderer are equivalent in that each has the power to knock her off’.81 As readers, we are invited to enjoy a story about a woman who gets murdered by participating ourselves in her literary murder. We are both spectators of the action and aiders and abettors of the murdering author/narrator.
At the beginning of the novel, Mary finds herself in a kind of limbo where she is forced to rediscover her past life from a position of innocence. This Martian aspect of the book is more original than many of the reviewers allowed … Mary’s amnesia allows Amis to bring to life the present unencumbered by the preconceptions of the past. ‘When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable’ (p. 56). Without a memory Mary is dazzled and dazed by her perceptions of the moment. She begins her life in death as a natural victim for whom sex, for instance, is a strange practice she cannot get the hang of. Trev, the first man to have sex with her, is a natural sadist. But all she can make out is that ‘[h]is two tongues wanted her two mouths’ (p. 46). Repeatedly Amis is able to achieve effects as unusual as this, to defamiliarize our automatized response - in this case to the modern novel’s statutory sex scene. At the same time, Amy’s experience is being vividly evoked by a narrator who is responsible for subjecting Mary to the pain she undergoes from Trev’s brutal sexual exploitation -of her body. The narrator could interfere at any point, but does not. What is more, we would not want him to. We participate in his sadistic treatment of her. And he will not let us forget it. ‘I’ve done things to her, I know, I admit it. But look what she’s done to me’ (p. 106). Having made her the type of character she is (one who is to be found in contemporary life), the narrator then exonerates himself and us by claiming that she has invited his (and our) victimization of her.
The entire book can be seen as living through or living back her life at or after the moment of her death at the hands of her lover … In life, as Amy Hide, she started off leading a privileged existence and gradually descended the social scale as she self-destructed. In the novel she begins her fictional existence among tramps and slowly rises through the book’s circles of living hell to sadistically dominate a decadent aristocratic household headed by Jamie. Amy Hide was malevolent and consciously brought disaster on herself and others. Mary Lamb is well-meaning and unconsciously brings about the same effect. The innocent Mary of the nursery rhyme who had a little lamb is patiently brought by the narrator to rediscover within her self the Amy Hide hiding there. Mary, the Dr. Jekyll figure of this novel, sees Amy, her Mr. Hyde, lurking in her reflection in the mirror. ‘She is afraid that her life has in some crucial sense already run its course, that the life she moves through now is nothing more than another life’s reflection, its mirror, its shadow’ (p. 97). She has passed through the looking glass of death to confront her life in reverse. It takes her almost the whole of the book to rediscover ‘the power to make feel bad’ (p. 116) that caused Prince to murder her in life and that she finally turns on Jamie wi
th such devastating effect that she breaks through the mirror to her old self: ‘[s]he had torn through the glass and come back from the other side. She had found her again. She was herself at last’ (p.200). She is other people. Mary is also Amy. Prince is not the only character to reveal Manichean duality. Mary/Amy also has to be restored to a sense of her power for good and evil. She is representative of her era - complex, neither heroine nor villainness, yet capable of moral choice.
Amis’s concept of life-in-death has proved difficult for most readers to grasp, and many reviewers of the book have complained that the mystery was unsolvable. Amis insists that he does not believe in reincarnation (though the book makes use of the concept). … In other words he has employed a purely fictional device to make strange … the ordinary and everyday. Words, language come to be associated by Mary with structure, meaning, the meaning of the past. ‘Each word she recognized gave her the sense of being restored, minutely solidified, as if damaged tissue were being welded back on to her like honey-cells. Even now she knew that language would stand for or even contain some order, an order that could not possibly subsist in anything she had come across so far’ (p.40). But language is the lethal instrument of the murderous narrator. It returns Mary to knowledge of her past existence as the destructive Amy. At the same time, language, Mary discovers, can be deceptive. Put to narrative use it can fabricate events. Reading popular romances, she realizes ‘that stories were lies, imagined for money, time sold’ (p. 74). Amis, of course, is simultaneously reminding his readers of their part of the narrative bargain -they have paid him to murder Mary for their amusement and to make her torments sufficiently empathetic to induce those readers to feel drawn into her predicament, to feel that their money was well spent. Is Amis deliberately employing language as a metaphor with which to associate order (especially narrative order) with fabrication? …
So Amis employs a fiction on which to predicate this novel. But he does provide the attentive reader with clues about the nature of this narrative premise. For example, when Prince takes Mary to the hell-like night club where she gets murdered a second time, he says to her: ‘[i]s there life after death? Who knows. Actually I wouldn’t put it past life, would you? That would be just like life, to have a trick in its tail …’ (p. 125). The section following this in which the narrator addresses the reader takes the question up:
Is there life after death? Well, is there?
If there is, it will probably be hell. (If there is, it will probably be murder.)
If there is, it will probably be very like life … (p. 127)
All versions of life after death have been modeled on life, the only experience we are permitted. If we have made the present-day world a form of hell-on-earth, Amis posits, then why should we expect the afterlife to be any different. And yet there is still the possibility of exercising moral choice, both in this world and in death. Prince acknowledges this possibility when he pleads with Mary: ‘get it right next time, be good next time. Oh Mary - heal me, dear’ (p.82).
[Amis] chooses to follow Mary’s rediscovery of her past fallen self, the self that has the power to make Alan, her lover, feel bad enough to hang himself when she breaks with him, just as Amy made short work of her lover, Michael Shane, in her past life. The long Part Two follows Mary’s journey of upward social mobility and downward ethical behaviour as she becomes ‘like other people’ - ‘getting fear and letting the present dim’ (p. 96). Part Three, a mere eighteen pages long, opens with Amy (as she now acknowledges herself) living with Prince in a state of blissful domesticity. ‘She wasn’t sure whether this was love’ (p. 210). Yet she feels that she has lived long enough. ‘He can come for me now’ (p. 217). He does just that. He takes her back to the now deserted hell-like night club. ‘“You’re already dead - can’t you see?”’ he asks. “‘Death is terribly easy to believe”’ (p.222). That message is spoken both by Prince to Amy and by the narrator to the reader. We have all made a similar mess of life in general. Prince murders her once more. The last chapter ends with Amy aged sixteen finding herself back home just prior to meeting her demon-lover who made her turn bad in her first life. This circular definition of hell is reminiscent of Sartre’s Huis Clos, which ends, ‘Eh bien, continuons‘82 (‘Oh well, let us go on’). Amis seems to be asking us, are we destined to continue making the same errors as those who have gone before us? But also, are writers (and readers) condemned to go on murdering their characters to create new worlds that are always old?
Amis claims that the novel implies that this time round Amy will get it right, although it is unclear where in the text this is definitively suggested. Of more interest is his remark that the Prince figure who is about to encounter her at the end of the Epilogue has reverted to someone ‘as automaton-like as she was, and didn’t realize what was going on‘83(p.48). The narrator says, ‘I’m not in control any more, not this time’ (p. 224). He appears to be suggesting that by the end of the narrative the near omniscient narrator is as much in the power of the character he has been victimizing as she was in his power earlier. Her power has finally worked on the conscience of her murderous creator/narrator. He is a prisoner of his own fiction and is returned to the hellish cycle from which only a reformed Amy can set him free. Both the narrator and the reader (who has been encouraged throughout to identify with him) end up caught in the web of the fictional construct they have been conspiring together to weave around the hapless Mary. But Mary is also Amy, and only Amy can release the narrator from his guilt at having ended her life. This is a refusal of narrative closure with a vengeance.84 □
The ‘hellish cycle’ identified by Finney is one of those elements which make Other People more unsettling, and more powerful, than Amis’s first three novels. The start of this chapter cited Allan Massie’s judgement that those first three novels might have shocked Amis’s elders but in no way disturbed his own generation. Other People was different; while it was ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘principally because of its indeterminate centre’, it was ‘disturbing as none of his previous books had been, because [Amis] was now admitting to ignorance of certain aspects of personality, which he had formerly presented with a glib assurance’. Amis’s fourth novel demonstrated his ‘ability to develop’;85 as the next chapter of this Guide will show, that ability would be spectacularly confirmed by his fifth novel, whose very title seemed to sum up the mood of the 1980s: Money.
CHAPTER FIVE
Self’s the Man: Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
THE PUBLICATION of Money marked a new phase in Martin Amis’s career. A sustained and substantial work, it aroused interest in three main respects. The first and most immediately arresting was its vibrant narrative voice; the second was its portrayal, through that voice, of a narrator-protagonist, John Self, who could be seen to embody the acquisitiveness of the 1980s in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, the desire, above all, for money; the third was its use of what Richard Todd, in an essay quoted later in this chapter (pp.70-3), calls ‘the intrusive author‘86,’ the author who appears as a voice, perhaps even as a character, in his own text, as one ‘Martin Amis’ does in Money. In a lively and perceptive review in the Times Literary Supplement, Eric Korn responded enthusiastically to the narrative voice, highlighted the novel’s exploration of corruption by money, and discussed the ‘intrusive author’: he also pointed out how the quality of the narrator’s discourse exceeds, at times, the confines of John Self - a feature that Richard Todd will explore further (p. 71) - and criticises the plot of the novel. Finally, Korn relates it to Amis’s earlier work and suggests that he should now shed some of his recurrent themes:
■ One of the chief glories of Martin Amis’s elaborate, enticing, subtle, irritating, overpowering new fiction is the astonishing narrative voice he has devised, the jagged, spent, street-wise, gutter-wise, guttural mid-Atlantic twang, the buttonholing, earbending, lughole-jarring monologue with all ‘the energy, the electricity … all the hustle and razz’ (p. 96) of midtown, fastfood, fastbuck, fastfuck Manh
attan, of the dangerous districts uptown where everything is frazzled, charred, blistered (like the narrator), the sleaze and grate of louche [disreputable, shifty] London-on-the-make, a compelling, obsessive, obscene voice that carries the reader through this longish, dense, full, at times overlong … novel, a voice that carries you unresisting to unexpected endings …
Who is this prole, this Goth, this foul-mouthed clockwork orange, this upstart, this servant-when-he-reigneth, and what is he doing in New York, pawing and porning and porking about, on a business assignment that apparently offers unlimited money in exchange for little talent, and endless time for booze and hangovers and drugs and junk food and junk sex? He is called John Self (a nudging sort of name, but you will be nudged much harder later), chain-smoking (‘[u]nless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette’ (p. 8)), wrecked (‘200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout, and fast food … charred and choked on heavy fuel’ (pp. 31-2)), and he is there to make a movie with the apparently limitless funds of younger, smarter, fitter Fielding Goodney. Behind him he has left poor faithless Selina Street, streetsmart, bedsmart, with her brothel underwear and pornographic games; in New York is his good angel Martina Twain (another nudge); she’s uncorrupted, unbarbarous and - I thought - unzestfully (or at least a little too reverentially) described, but alcoholic excess makes him miss their breakfast date by twelve hours …
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 7