Dan’s schizophrenic consciousness is manifested in a lack of connectives between his thoughts, passivity (Ned’s diary records the way Dan sits for hours in one spot), and a heightened sensitivity both to physical pain (mosquito bites are ‘exquisite’ but also ‘torture’) and to communicative signals (Fran’s glances are misread as sexual invitations, the baby’s stare as an existential challenge). Temporal and spatial scales are schizophrenically skewed in Dan’s imagination, as he himself is aware. He recognizes, for example, that when he perceives Harriet as growing to cosmically huge proportions, he is experiencing a routine symptom, ‘size-constancy breakdown’ (p.58). Tensions imperceptible to Ned mount up in Dan until he decides to ‘foreclose the great suspense’ (p.65). Ned records finding the boy’s room in chaos the next morning: ‘[t]he bedclothes and curtains had been torn to pieces, torn to rags. As I stood there and stared I had the sense of great violence, violence compressed and controlled - everything was scrunched up, squeezed, strangled, impacted, imploded’ (p. 66). Up to this point, Amis has held the reader, as well as Ned, in suspense about the effects of Dan’s illness. But a sense of foreboding has been instilled in the reader, who, unlike Ned, is made aware of Dan’s worsening condition. The silent debates Dan holds with Harriet, together with a number of references to ‘dead baby’ stories in Dan’s notebook and Ned’s pervasive but unfocused anxiety about child abuse, all contribute to the reader’s anticipation of Dan’s killing Harriet. At this point, however, the reader discovers that Dan has killed ‘only’ himself. And the actual image of his frail body, seen through Ned’s eyes, immediately cancels out the reader’s imagined sense of the boy as threatening and dangerous: ‘at once I saw his thin body, face down in the shallows’. Just before finding the body, Ned thinks to himself, ‘so the lake was a dud, a fizzle - it never quite went off (p. 66). At a symbolic level, then, Amis represents Dan’s death as another act of disarmament, like Bujak’s. Because the immanence of nuclear power is greater in this story, a more violent response is required from Dan to cancel out the threat of imminent explosion. In both stories, though, the fulfillment of expectation is blocked by an exercise of choice in an apparently determined sequence of events.
Again the textual chronotope is open-ended and invites active, ‘writerly’ reading. The text, consisting of fragmentary, nonconcurrent diary and notebook entries, must be assembled and interpreted. An overtly rationalistic reading is one possible way of interpreting Dan’s death, for example, as suicide associated with schizophrenia and having nothing to do with Ned’s family. This is clearly Dr. Slizard’s interpretation. Read ‘paranoically’, however, the story might seem to suggest that, since there is more bufotenine [a chemical with hallucinogenic properties] in the boy’s blood than is normal and his father’s blood showed the same high levels, an inherited form of nuclear-aggravated schizophrenia led to Dan’s death. While we might privilege the ‘sane’ voice of Ned’s diary (reflections of a narrator expecting to return to his text and to a self coexistent with the person who wrote it) over the tentative and self-questioning voice of Dan’s notebook, a schizophrenic reading yields a pattern of correspondences among different types of violence (child abuse, social violence, expansion of nuclear industry, the heat of the lake, mosquitoes biting, infantile growth, and female fat). It is after all this same notebook, written in the midst of Dan’s illness, that gives us the clearest ‘insight’ into a possible connection between his own pathological condition and nuclear energy:
Dad was one of the fathers of the nuclear age. Then, when the thing was born, he became its son, along with everybody else. So Dad really threw an odd curve on that whole deal about fathers and sons. First he was the thing’s father, then he was the thing’s son. Great distortions and malformations should clearly be expected to follow on from such a reversal (p. 58).
This escalation of hostile energy may be insidiously related to a national increase in violence (i.e., more cases of child abuse and murder). If Ned remains perplexed, stating numbly, ‘I don’t know what is wrong’ (p. 67 [This is the last sentence of ‘Insight at Flame Lake’]), the reader is nevertheless able to make connections, perhaps rational, perhaps schizophrenic, among the different types of actual and immanent violence.
‘The Little Puppy That Could’ takes place at some point following a nuclear holocaust when, ‘after its decades of inimical quiet, the planet earth was once again an hospitable, even a fashionable address’… . Earth [now] seems to operate according to the laws of a contracting universe. Thus not only is chronology reversed, but our whole conception of time hangs in the balance between chronology and randomness. At first it would appear that the holocaust has unleashed countless genetic possibilities on the world, the current chaos of which also constitutes an opportunity for the surviving ‘low-level’ life-forms. ‘In the deserts the lower forms flourished unchecked in their chaos: you could hardly turn your head without seeing some multipedal hyena or double-decker superworm pulsing towards you over the mottled sands.’ Such scenes are common in science fiction and reflect the influence of contemporary scientific thinking on the popular imagination … As Amis explores the implications of this world of seemingly endless potential, his style acquires a demotically liberating energy, as in this passage: ‘[n]atural selection had given way to a kind of reverse discrimination - or tokenism. Any bloody fool of an amphibious parrot or disgraceful three-winged stoat had as much chance of survival, of success, as the slickest, the niftiest, the most singleminded dreck-eating ratlet or invincibly carapaced predator’ (p. 95). The linguistic inventiveness of this description, with its neologisms [newly coined words, for example, ‘ratlet’] and internal rhymes, is proof enough that the narrator, despite his expressed disapproval, can be as exhilarated as any Star Wars fan by the idea of genetic mutability.
But more problematically, the survivors lack agency; even the survival-of-the-race instinct has become muted and ineffectual: ‘[d]own the soft decades they had lost the old get up and go - the know-how, the can-do. Predation and all its paraphernalia had quite petered out of their gene cams and pulse codes’ (p. 101). Communal decisions (e.g., whether or not to ‘move out and go nomad for a while’) are made by genetic instinct rather than conscious thought: ‘[s]ite-tenacity was, alas, pretty well the only stable element in the local DNA transcription. How could you run when, in your head, this was the only place?’. Thus, rather than fight off the giant, ravenous dog that comes to prey on the village, they offer it a weekly human sacrifice. At the level of macrocosmic analogy, the dog signifies the last contraction of the universe to a crushing density of matter, for the animal has gravitas [solemn demeanour, seriousness] in its own right; heavy with the weight of its diseases and not so much evil as an instrument of the end, it inspires the reluctant respect of the villagers. (‘[E]veryone was secretly impressed by the dog’s asceticism in restricting himself to one human per week’ (p. 105).)
The regular appearances of this new ‘Natural Selector’ (pp. 95, 107) help to establish a rhythmic, ritualized form of temporality. This scenario gives a sinister slant to Elizabeth Ermarth’s celebratory concept of postmodernist ‘rhythmic time’, in which ‘neither large-scale narrative sequence nor, indeed, coherent individual identities can be envisioned’.123 Here the incoherence of individual identity opens the way for fascist-style ritual and religiosity: ‘[a]lthough the village was godless, the crater was agreed to be at least semi-sacred, and the people felt its codes, sensed its secrets with reluctant awe’ (p. 103). While the present and future of the villagers may be described as overdeter-mined [that is, determined, in the sense of caused and/or constrained, by many factors], their sense of the past is comparatively open-ended. Revival of memory functions as a kind of future, such as when, toward the end of the story, Andromeda’s name is drawn for sacrifice in the weekly lottery. Andromeda (for never explained reasons) still acts as an individual; she has named herself, for example, and has adopted a puppy that appeared (again, with no explanation) out of nowh
ere. Although the others want the puppy destroyed, Andromeda gets her way because of her exceptional status in the village. Even here, the narrator reflects, ‘everyone has time for beauty, for art, for pattern and plan. We all come round to beauty in the end’ (p. 102). Thus to the villagers, she clearly embodies some lost but remembered humanity - its art, beauty, youth, and agency. The prospect of her loss awakens a somnolent capacity for resistance in the villagers: ‘on this night of sacrifice, of new nausea and defeat, the shouldered heads would not bow to receive their blows … Now you could feel the low rumble of hot temper, of petulant mutiny’ (p. 108). Andromeda’s puppy, the ‘antimatter or Antichrist’ of the dog, acts spontaneously where its counterpart does so by habit. But ‘spontaneity’ is associated here with instinct or genetic memory (i.e., as what ‘puppies do’). The puppy’s temporal universe retains its openness because it looks back, and here only the past provides any possibility of what we would recognize as a future. Thus the puppy wins its first victory over the dog when its memory is aroused, and, its ‘inner templates shuffling and dealing’, the dog searches ‘for stalled memories, messages, codes’ (p. 110).
The story’s conclusion plays out an Einsteinian scenario where matter (the dog) and antimatter (the puppy) spiral toward a central gravitational point:
For a time the puppy seemed freer than air, whimsically lithe, subatomic, superluminary, all spin and charm, while the dog moved on rails like a bull, pure momentum and mass, and for ever subject to their laws (p. 111).
Following up the nuclear analogy, the puppy tricks the dog into self-detonation, which leads to the destruction of both canines:
With a howl of terror and triumph he hurled himself high into the flames - and the dog, like a blind missile, heat-seeking, like a weapon of spittle and blood, could only follow (p. 112).
Again, it is the genre that makes this juxtaposition of temporalities work. Generically speaking, the clash of values between puppy and dog is manifested as a contest between realism and romance, each with its own distinct chronotope. While the dog’s weekly appearance imposes sequentiality on the villagers’ lives, the puppy simply appears out of the blue and then stays, as is characteristic of events in the romance … In the romance chronotope, actions are not motivated or caused by preceding events but occur symbolically, allegorically. ‘Where had the little puppy come from? Where was the little puppy heading?’ asks the narrator. ‘Of course, the little puppy had no idea where he had come from or where he was heading’ (p.87). From the romance perspective, the dog, with its calculating nature, its miasmic hide sporting a squad of post-Darwinian life-forms, its ‘doggedness’, is nothing but a freak, a monstrous anachronism; the puppy’s concluding metamorphosis as a boy (and a prince at that), however, is as unbelievable and symbolically apt as a romance ending should be (as well as suggestive of time’s renewal with Adam and Eve’s return to Eden). Many short story theorists have explored the genre’s flexible allegiance to the traditions of fantasy and romance, on the one hand, and to those of realism, on the other.124 Here the choice of romance over realism opens up a greater range of possible futures than those available to ‘Bujak’.
The last story of the collection, ‘The Immortals’, dramatizes a significant problem for the author/narrator: how to articulate the end of time. Strictly speaking, you cannot locate yourself within either a place or a time if both have become meaningless, while human history’s value can only be assessed with critical distance, the very perspective that is then lost … Here, Amis invents a narrator who believes he is immortal and thus possesses that now impossible panoramic perspective on historical process. From this perspective, the narrator can induce a sense of pride in the implied reader over humanity’s historical accomplishments. The ‘immortal’ is impressed by ‘our’
efforts in the Renaissance, for example: ‘[y]ou really came through. To tell you the truth, you astonished me’ (p. 122). He has to hurry to get there in time to witness it, though, before the whole thing is over. He can see patterns of destruction emerging in what seem to him just a few minutes of eternity: ‘[w]hat was the matter? Was it too nice for you or something? Jesus Christ, you were only here for about ten minutes. And look what you did’ (p. 126). Although the narrator’s position outside history enables him to discern its larger patterns, his macrocosmic perspective actually achieves the opposite result from the human perspective, reducing history to a few transient moments in the eternal existence of the universe.
The narrator thinks he is exempt from the general fate of humanity, including the apocalypse that is said to have happened in 2045, but, as the reader understands by the end of the story, he is one of the last human survivors of the nuclear holocaust… The immortal also stands for the contemporary postmodern observer, who, though perhaps possessed of an abstract knowledge of space, time, and history, lacks any sense of personal addressivity in time. The immortal catches glimpses of his own ‘eventness’, but dismisses them as delusory: ‘[i]t’s strange how palpable it is, this fake past, and how human: I feel I can almost reach out and touch it. There was a woman, and a child. One woman. One child … But I soon snap out of it’ (p. 126). Ironically, even with all the time in the world at his disposal, the immortal is the only protagonist in Einstein’s Monsters who lacks any agency whatsoever. Not only does he fail to acknowledge his real world (if it can be called ‘real’), but even in the world of his imagination he is an observer, someone who cannot afford to get too involved. Set in a post-apocalypse future, ‘The Immortals’ is the darkest story of the collection, not least because its chronotope is one in which agency seems to have been lost, and time to have been utterly foreclosed.
Here again, however, we find resistance to closure at the level of reader-text chronotope. As Amis remarks in the introduction to Einstein’s Monsters, ‘[i]f we could look at ourselves from anything approaching the vantage of cosmic time, if we had any sense of cosmic power, cosmic delicacy, then every indicator would point the same way: down’ (p.24). This vantage point is achieved by the ‘immortal’ narrator, although he himself necessarily remains unaware of his pre-nuclear holocaust readership; his chronotope may be wrong for him while still working for us, including Amis, for whom ‘the pessimistic view would seem … to be the natural one’ (p. 21). As we have seen, the representation of contemporary culture in Einstein’s Monsters is often a negative one. Most of the characters are victims who, lacking agency to various degrees, conform to [Fredric] Jameson’s anatomy of postmodern culture as a whole.125 At the same time, however, Amis suggests various ways in which value, weight, and space for individual agency may be acquired in the present, as is reflected by his own exercise of agency at the narrative level. Applying a puppyish ‘spin and charm’ (p. 111) to his plot development, Amis plants a surprise twist in each story: Bujak does not kill the murderers, Dan does not kill Harriet, the ‘time disease’ is youth, the puppy becomes a human being, the immortal is not so. This narrative ‘lightness’ of touch (in Italo Calvino’s sense126) is in itself a deliberate gesture of defiance against the temporal determinism that spawned the nuclear arms race.
If this is so, there is still space, and a need, for the reader’s agency in the reception of this collection of (post)holocaust ‘postcards’. When these stories are read in order, an increasing ‘unbelievability’ becomes apparent at the level of technique. ‘Bujak’ opens the collection with an assured, third-person commentary on another’s tragedy, and the suspense is manipulated with perfect control. The slippage in tone from satire to sentimentality becomes more ragged in ‘Time Disease’ with a more noticeable narrative strategy. The saccharine tone of ‘Little Puppy’ is difficult to take seriously, seeming strained, even gooey, while the suspense in ‘The Immortals’ falls a little flat, compared to its execution in ‘Bujak’: we know from the beginning that the speaker is deluded [not necessarily], since he calls himself the immortal (in the singular), while the plural title indicates otherwise. Although these may be technical lapses on Amis’s p
art, as narratorial lapses of insight they paradoxically contribute to the effectiveness of Einstein’s Monsters as a whole. An increasingly improbable narrative style corresponds to an increasingly improbable world. As is typical of contemporary short fiction, the collection unravels in its telling, then leaves it up to the reader to think through and discard each ‘unthinkable’ text.127 □
Falconer’s fascinating account demonstrates that Einstein’s Monsters, slender though it may be in physical size, can bear sustained, serious critical attention, and prompts the thought that it would be rewarding to apply the same kind of close and theoretically informed reading to Martin Amis’s full-length fiction - and, as this Guide shows, some critics have begun to do this. But the reactions to his next novel would give little time at first for close reading. Throughout the 1980s, the expectation had been growing that Amis would produce another book that would equal or exceed Money. It appeared in 1989, and, as the next chapter will illustrate, it would prove his most exciting, substantial and controversial work yet: London Fields.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pity the Planet: London Fields (1989)
LONDON FIELDS conveys a strong sense of impending apocalypse, of the end of the millennium and perhaps the end of the world: in these respects, it is a powerful and disturbing book. But it does not seem to have been primarily these portents of doom that debarred Martin Amis’s sixth novel from the 1989 shortlist for England’s best-known annual literary award, the Booker Prize. Amis was not the only well-known writer excluded that year - other ‘remarkable omissions’, according to the Times, were Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, William Golding, Christopher Hope, Francis King and Iris Murdoch128 - but he was the most conspicuous by his absence. As the novelist and TV presenter Melvyn Bragg remarked: ‘Amis’s exclusion from the Booker shortlist got him more column inches than most of those on it.’ Bragg also referred to an article in the Guardian newspaper - he did not give its title - about the ‘supposed sexist offensiveness’ of London Fields that had ‘set off an avalanche of correspondence’.129 That article was Jane Ellison’s ‘Battle Fields’, which asked pointedly:
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 13