Sympathy for the devil

Martin Amis's 'Money' is at the same time a brilliant and deeply disturbing read. As a portrayal of the excesses of its central protagonist John Self, a vain and hedonistic would-be film director with an insatiable appetite for food, booze and pornography, the book is a wicked jet-black satire on the virulent greed of the 1980s London and New York of Thatcher and Reagan, far more searing in its power than Tom Wolfe's 'The Bonfire Of The Vanities'. But what often makes reading 'Money' such an unsettling experience is also what sets it apart from similar fictional critiques.

Self is not only the novel's central character but also its narrator. Everything is filtered through his consciousness, the reader left unsure of the reliability of his word. The fact that it is a first-person narrative allows Self to recount his adventures and misadventures in his own voice. For the most part he comes across as a loveable rogue not too dissimilar to Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon, who uses his sly charm to put an amusing and self-deprecatory gloss on his personal misdemeanours:

"My travelling-clock told me eight fifteen. I leapt out of bed feeling full of fight, really tiptop, apart from the sweats, the jerks, the shivers, a pronounced dizziness - and a sensation, hard to describe and harder to bear, that I had missed my stop on the shuttle and was somehow due yesterday at the next planet but one."

"In the next booth I caught a quarter's worth of film with a sylvan setting: the romantic interest of the piece focused on the love that flowers between a girl and a donkey. There she was, smiling, as she prepared to go down on this beast of burden. Ay! The donkey didn't look too thrilled about it either."

"I had three handjobs yesterday. None was easy. Sometimes you really have to buckle down to it, as you do with all forms of exercise. It's simply a question of willpower. Anyone who's got the balls to stand there and tell me that a handjob isn't exercise just doesn't know what he's talking about. I almost had a heart-attack during number three."

"Morning came, and I got up... That doesn't sound particularly interesting or difficult, now does it? I bet you do it all the time. Listen, though - I had a problem here. For instance, I was lying face-down under a hedge or bush or some blighted shrub in a soaked allotment full of nettles, crushed cigarette packets, used condoms and empty beercans. It was quite an appropriate place for me to be born again, which is what it felt like."

Not only are such passages laugh-out-loud funny (and the value of 'Money' as a profoundly comic work shouldn't be understated), they also serve to seduce the reader into a fondness for a character who, if presented more objectively by a third-person narrator, might come across as a degenerate, self-destructive and conceited waster with precious few redeeming features. Having beguiled his way into the reader's affections, Self seems to relish the opportunity to cosy up to him or her, using direct address and maintaining the same jovial and chummy tone of friend to friend at all times, with results which are on occasion brutally striking:

"I've hit women. Yes, I know, I know: it isn't cool. Funnily enough, it's hard to do, in a sense. Have YOU ever done it? Girls, ladies, have you ever copped one? It's hard. It's quite a step, particularly the first time. After that, though, it just gets easier and easier. After a while, hitting women is like rolling off a log."

"So then I tried to rape her. In all honesty I have to confess that it wasn't a very distinguished effort. I'm new at this and generally out of shape. For instance, I wasted a lot of time attempting to control her hands. Obviously the proper way to rape girls is to get the leg question sorted out and take the odd slap in the face as part of the deal. Here's another tip: undress before the action starts."

Moments like these aren't simply about cheap shock value: rather, they suddenly alert the reader to the fact that they've been duped, unwittingly drawn in to Self's world to the extent that they now find themselves implicated, complicit in his narrative confession and, by extension, in the events themselves. As a reader you might reject his rape advice, but you can't quite shake the feeling that by condoning and exonerating his thoughts and actions before this you've somehow encouraged him into the belief that, as a trusted confidante, you might be receptive to his suggestions. The instinctive reaction is one of disgust (perhaps, appropriately enough, self-disgust), but even here in the offhand casualness of Self's admissions there is an appalling kind of comedy.

These issues of sympathy and revulsion are at the centre of Amis's novel. At one point Self openly confesses his need for the reader's sympathy, and yet it is highly debatable whether he ever actually gets it. 'Money' resolutely refuses to conform to the standard demands of the tabloid literary critic and the default expectations of the majority of the reading public - there is no wholly sympathetic character, there is no-one with whom the reader can "identify" and empathise, possessed by the conviction that he or she "understands" them and their thoughts, feelings or motivations. Books like 'Money' resist this sort of facile approach that impedes any other response, and that is perhaps what makes it particularly unsettling.

The author himself steps into the novel, invited by Self to rewrite the script for the prospective film. More than simply a clever and fashionable bit of postmodern window-dressing, this metafictional device is used to make a serious point. The Martin Amis character reflects on a couple of occasions about the nature of novel-writing and in the process offers some telling comments on what 'Money' is about and how to read it:

"'Is there a moral philosophy of fiction? When I create a character and put him or her through certain ordeals, what am I up to - morally? Am I accountable.'"

"'The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous.'"

In a beautifully comic touch, the bored Self interrupts the Amis character, unaware of his status as a fictional creation and thus of the relevance of such musings to his own situation. This concern with the responsibility or otherwise of an author for his or her characters recalls a similar metafictional passage in John Fowles's 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', and also with a brief piece on Bret Easton Ellis which appears in Will Self's volume of journalism 'Junk Mail'. In novels like 'Money' and 'American Psycho' a sense of distance between author and narrator is essential for the satire to work; but all too often the two are confused, and the author consequently found guilty of the crimes perpetrated by the characters or implicitly endorsed by the narrator. Of course, this is unforgiveable as it denies the imaginative and creative aspect of fiction. In 'Money' Amis drives a wedge between author and narrator and also forces the reader to contemplate and reconsider the way he or she has approached the novel.

A superbly written book, 'Money' is provocative in all the right ways.

(Thanks to Loaf for the recommendation.)