Consider a random selection of novels published over the past twenty-five years and see if there is anything easily identifiable as a common feature.
John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure (1996) presents a fascinating, quirky spectacle and assiduously refuses to submit to anything resembling thematic interpretation. Tarquin Winot, the narrator, is beguilingly plausible – his mannered prose style is by equal degrees enviable and irritating – but beyond that it is impossible to assess him. He kills people and appears to enjoy it; there is no more to be said.
In Nicola Barker’s Behindlings (2002) we encounter Wesley, a man who steals ponds, feeds his fingers to an owl and spends a night asleep in the carcass of a horse. He attracts a band of disciples and enthusiasts who are beguiled by his unfathomable, apparently motiveless activities. He seems to stand for nothing in particular and does not even understand why he behaves as he does.
Cherry (2004) by Matt Thorne involves Steve Ellis, a thirty-three-year-old teacher, a bachelor whose lifestyle and circumstances are rendered in meticulous detail: he is a disappointed man with no aspirations beyond maintaining his routine of drinks in the local pub, occasional dinners with friends and TV at home. Soon, however, peculiar things begin to happen. Steve meets an old man in the pub, buys him a drink and invites him to his flat to watch a video he has made of a woman walking down the street. A few days later Steve is visited by an Indian man who asks him to fill out a questionnaire on his ‘Perfect Woman’. His fantasy – demure, intelligent, beautiful and with an hourglass figure – is made real and they have a relationship. She, Cherry, eventually leaves him – after his bedroom ceiling collapses and her toenails fall off – and Steve is again contacted by the old man from the pub who informs him that if he wants Cherry back he must assassinate a person called Tom who is actually a force for evil, known to some as the Fox. Does he? The ending is bizarre and unspecific, and the entire book seems designed continuously to incite and extinguish the desire to discern cause and continuity.
Toby Litt’s Ghost Story (2004) appears focused upon a particularly distressing event, a couple’s experience of a stillborn child, but grief is by no means straightforwardly dealt with. Agatha, the stillborn child’s mother, experiences weird sounds and movements in their new house and adopts a complicated and potentially dangerous attitude to their other child. Sometimes we perceive events via Agatha’s troubled mind and then without reason the perspective will shift elsewhere, in one instance to a manic chapter-long description of the builders renovating the house, written in a single bravura sentence. Also the main narrative is prefaced by two brief stories, one about someone who turns into a hare, another about a man whose wife gives birth to fox cubs and, perhaps most disturbingly, an autobiographical memoir in which Litt writes in harrowing detail of his girlfriend’s three miscarriages. One could surmise that these discontinuities are purposive, perhaps even an avantgarde form of mimesis with the reader’s undoubted experience of confusion and disquiet meant in some way to correspond with similar emotions attendant upon the characters. At the same time, however, one senses that Litt is deliberately attempting to curb the reader’s conventional inclination to interpret the text according to any rational notion of internal coherence or correspondence with the non-fictional world.
In Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005) Amber, a woman of thirty or so years and indeterminate origin, simply arrives without explanation and becomes the deus ex machina for an entire English family. They do not know how to respond to this uninvited guest – being decent middle-class sorts they can hardly just throw her out – and in a bizarre variety of ways she takes each of them over. Michael, for example, no longer seems in control of his seductive, learned sophistry – Amber has him babbling in Byronic octava rima. Again the narrative is both implausible and made horrifyingly believable by Smith’s neo-realistic manner. We recognize the figures but do not understand why they behave in such a bizarre way.
Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005) is resolutely conservative in style. Its two principal characters, Alison and Colette, are rendered with unforgiving clarity as are the dismal London landscapes, mostly the suburbs, in which they are obliged to exist. Alison has had a foul, battered childhood, her mother is a prostitute and she has to put up with being a size 22; Colette, her conniving leechlike companion, is an equally dispiriting figure. Alison’s profession? She’s a medium, a communicator with the spirit world, but before expectations of this as symptomatic of dim credulous desperation are realized, Mantel begins to populate the novel with dead people, or more specifically their non-physical yet vividly realized presences. Mantel’s visitors from the other side are in varying degrees as seedy, ugly, boring and downright uninteresting as their living counterparts; mostly they are thoroughly unpleasant, and possessed of a malicious animus that disclosed as a common element of the afterlife would be equally surprising to agnostics, atheists and believers.
One should not of course overlook Will Self, a self-confessed fan of Martin’s work, who announced his presence with a volume of short stories called The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), of which Doris Lessing wrote: ‘absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in – and wish we didn’t.’ Cunningly Lessing does not explain whether our unease is generated by the world created by Self or its reflection of the one we are in, because Self’s trademark is to constantly invite us into an act of recognition while almost simultaneously dispersing it. In Cock and Bull (1992) a submissive wife grows a penis and rapes her husband who, helpfully, has been provided with a vagina at the back of his knee. He, being a stereotypically macho individual, plays rugby and enjoys the aggressive male-orientated culture of the game. During a tour with his team he finds himself pregnant and is overcome with unforeseen emotion. It seems to be a novel designed for readers with a particular taste for the grotesque but like all of Self’s fiction it defies such straightforward categorization. At the beginning of the novel and before their anatomical transformations occur Dan and Carol are presented very effectively as normal individuals, average to the point of cliché. They are outstandingly credible and they, like the reader, are confounded by the intrusion of the unimaginable into their routine existences. The novel is addictive not because of its ghoulish characteristics but because Self visits upon people whom the reader recognizes events that are utterly incredible.
So to return to the question. What, if anything, do these writers, their works and their characters have in common? For one thing they are most certainly not heirs to modernism. It is true that Mitchell and Smith play games with chronology and narrative space that are self-consciously unusual but at the same time their style is elegantly conservative and the figures who drift between different periods and states of mind are comfortably familiar. Of the rest the repertoire of imposture appears limitless and unclassifi-able, except that all these works have opted out of any obligation to explain or justify their excursions from credulity and mimesis. These books are very readable but at the same time they are made up of scenarios that do not make sense and individuals that seem unaccountable to standard notions of the way we behave and think. Authenticity, in terms of the elementary devices of description and dialogue, is rigorously maintained yet by a variety of acts and means, disturbingly familiar characters defy a rational consensus on the nature of reality. And one other thing unites them. Without Martin Amis they would not exist.
The factor which, more than any other, divides advocates of modernisn from supporters of conventional fiction involves something other than writing; essentially it concerns the nature of the world outside the book, inhabited by us. Adherents of modernism argue that a narrative as a sequence of events possessed of a coherent logic is not only a literary fallacy but a reflection of a collective delusion: we deceive ourselves by pretending that the random, inexplicable, even unbearable features of our lives make sense, rather in the way that a traditional novel makes sense of the world. Even if there is no happy ending we have t
he (false) comfort of something close to an explanation. The realists contend that while the traditional novel should not be treated as a panacea for fear or doubt it does at least imitate the innumerable permutations of behaviour and understanding that make up what most of us accept as reality.
These two positions might seem irreconcilable, but consider the work of Martin Amis. He incessantly provokes the reader’s desire for familiarity and reassurance, for something or someone that seems to have walked into the novel from the world we know. Yet equally our sense of empathy, of entertainment by mimesis, is undermined: suddenly the invitation to suspend disbelief is withheld and we are confronted with the inexplicable, the fantastic, the abhorrent. But Martin is not simply playing games, indulging some pseudo-intellectual taste for the horribly incomprehensible (which, it must be said, is detectable in the work of those, above, whom he has influenced). Rather, he is reminding us that fiction, for writer and reader, is a unique, morally and intellectually challenging experience. He makes us think, by juxtaposing the routine and the familiar with challenges to both; some of the latter are grotesque, many unnerving and pitiable, a few unaccountably vile. Self, Unverdorben, Meo, Keith Nearing, the frightful Johnny; all are terrifyingly believable, sometimes addictively so. We might want to perceive them only as brilliant inventions – that would enable us to keep a distance from them – but Martin ensures that they carry into their fictional world something of what we know is part of ours, even though we might desperately attempt to blind ourselves to this knowledge. In short he lays down an intellectual challenge, but makes sure that our intellect is not a protection against what we would otherwise wish to avoid. And remarkably he remains very, very readable.
It would be simplistic and an insult to the literary integrity of all involved to apply the rule of direct ‘influence’ to any set of writers. A more accurate model is close to the theory popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, originally propounded in George S. Williams’s Adaptation and Animal Selection (1966). We are, argues Williams, blindly programmed to preserve those genetic features most likely to ensure our survival: Darwinism with a ruthless edge. Literary writers do not operate by blind instinct but nevertheless their choice of how and what to write is influenced, to some degree subconsciously, by an instinctive drive towards survival by being noticed. From the 1970s onwards the bipolar opposites of purist realism and modernism were respectable paths to eminence, but the former was well trodden and highly competitive and the latter by equal parts noble and financially unrewarding. Far more attractive, therefore, was territory largely unmapped by the literary establishment and academia, a form of writing that existed but which was unclassified. Its vague unspecified nature guaranteed a cache of originality and nonconformity, sometimes bought with a supplement of skill. Practitioners could not be treated as allied to a particular trend or sub-genre because their activity did not have a name. It did, however, exist – let us for the sake of convenience call it conservative postmodernism – and it had an originator, Martin Amis.
Martin’s novels of the 1970s were subtly groundbreaking, invoking Burgess and Ballard in treading a fine line between reflections of the non-fictional world of the time and exaggerations of its more perverse characteristics. But Dead Babies, Success and Other People went further than even Martin’s most unorthodox predecessors. They captured perfectly the idioms and behavioural undercurrents of the era – and in this respect the genetic imprint of Kingsley is detectable – while at the same time raising questions on motives and states of mind that could not be addressed in terms of orthodox perceptions of the human condition. In this respect they are the antecedents for Barker, Litt, Thorne, Smith, Self et al.
Money is as important a literary landmark as Ulysses. Joyce showed his contemporaries the world as they had never previously conceived it, at least in language, and as a moment of precipitation in literary history his achievement is immense. We should not, however, overlook the fact that Joyce’s rationale for the project, his objective, was misguided and came to nothing. He wanted to liberate the novel from its hidebound bourgeois conventions; assemble it from all of the different forms and registers that make up our encounters with language. He hoped to democratize fiction, to make it part of the lived experience of everyone, including the culturally bereft lower classes. He failed momentously. Were it not for the aesthetic elitism of the academy, Ulysses would long be out of print or at best turned out in limited editions by clubs dedicated to the memory of its creator. Purist modernism has since this original moment suffered a similar fate: jealously preserved on the margins of the real literary world by advocates of experiment for its own sake. John Self turned modernism on its head. Money is equal to anything written since 1922 in its ability to shock and confound the expectations of the reader. John Self is we know picked from our world, an urban landscape he vividly re-creates in his story, but he presents us with two problems. If we are sane we would not voluntarily seek his company but from the first page of the novel we cannot avoid it. He is an addictive, manically talented, superbly flawed storyteller. A man like this should not be able to command our attention, indeed our guilty amusement, in such a way. The entire novel should self-destruct as an exercise in glaring discontinuity and anomaly. But it does not, and Martin outranks Joyce in his achievement of bridging the gap between the ‘literary’ novel and the world that has nothing to do with high culture. Self opened a door for later novelists that had previously been both locked and concealed. Through it, later, would march numerous creations of Will Self, beginning with Ian Wharton in My Idea of Fun (1993), A. L. Kennedy’s Hannah Luckraft of Paradise (2004), Ali Smith’s Amber from The Accidental (2005), Matt Thorne’s Steve Ellis in Cherry (2004), David Mitchell’s Jason Taylor of Black Swan Green (2006) and many more. Self’s successors are not replicas of him. They differ from him and each other in myriad ways, yet they also preserve a key feature of Martin’s original. Each of them is let loose across a text that is painfully similar to the world we know and their presence – their acts, their speech – both preserves its familiarity and obliges us to look again at what we generally, complacently, take for granted.
London Fields and The Information could easily be mistaken for the other parts of a trilogy inaugurated by Money – there are some similarities – but such a classification would obscure their originality and importance as individual works. There are a considerable number of novels which attempt to capture the essence of the so-called ‘Thatcher Decade’ – some with the benefit of hindsight – and virtually all of them adopt a solidly realistic manner which seems appropriate to so traumatic a period. (See Justin Cartwright’s Look At It This Way, 1990; Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, 1987; Julian Rathbone’s Nasty, Very, 1984; Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, 1994, The Rotters’ Club, 2001 and The Closed Circle, 2004; David Caute’s Veronica, or The Two Nations, 1989; Tim Parks’s Goodness, 1991; Maggie Gee’s Grace, 1988). Martin’s two novels do not seize upon the most obvious tokens of the mood of avarice that allegedly transformed the entire UK, at least for those in the country who could afford to be greedy. All of this was in any event becoming the principal preoccupation of newspapers and other media; fiction was left to pray upon the leftovers, as indeed did most of the novels bracketed above. Instead in London Fields and The Information he incorporates something far more elemental yet difficult to describe: a sense of individuals no longer quite sure of who they are or even who they want to be; characters who are neither quite themselves nor satisfied with their projected image. Dislocation or fragmentation had of course been dealt with in literature before but never previously had they been accompanied by such a network of disconcerting, ultimately unanswerable questions as to their cause, nature and solution. What Martin calls the ‘background’, the circuitry of transactions, emotions, activities, even places that seem so familiar, is vividly realized yet often surreally distorted. Crucially we are never certain of whether this is supposed to be a model of a society in a mutable hyperventilat
ing condition or whether the principal characters act as prisms for this weird spectacle. Are Talent, Young, Nicola, Tull, Barry formed, often wrecked, by a society out of control or are they authors of a selfish individualist zeitgeist, their surroundings a projection of fears and fetishes? The dynamic between these two interpretations is incessant, with the books continually provoking us, obliging us to question our given assumptions about those years, yet never allowing us to reach an easy conclusion. If the novel as a genre can make a claim to uniqueness beyond a static record of its world then it is surely this: an ability to animate the essential features of lived experience, the dynamic of unknowing. In time Martin’s novels of the late 1980s and 1990s will be recognized as the most finely crafted, and disturbingly accurate, accounts of their era. Moreover, they will be acknowledged as the originators of an ongoing trend in which the token devices of modernism are remoulded as features of novels that people might actually wish to read. Ali Smith’s Hotel World springs to mind as does David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a novel celebrated in the broadsheets for its narrative daring yet discussed also by readers’ groups on Channel 4’s Richard and Judy after reaching 150,000 sales in paperback.
The question arises of what part, if any, Martin’s near contemporaries, and friends, played in the subtle alteration in the fabric of fiction writing since the close of the 1970s, the creation of a previously unenvisaged hinterland involving the best of conventionalism and the avant-garde. And here I have in mind primarily Barnes, McEwan and Rushdie. Compared with Martin their influence has been negligible.
McEwan is the best of the three. Open one of his works at random and encounter a narrative presence disclosing events with urbane transparency and effecting a choreography of dialogue that is compellingly authentic. At the same time we feel that something, often something macabre and inexplicable, is lying in wait to rip through this portrait of the ordinary. This is his signature, a sense of two strata or planes of existence coming together, perhaps through an accident, with consequences that are numinous, sometimes inexplicable. McEwan’s weak spot is his reliance upon this as an all-things-to-all-men framing device, equally adaptable to his stern treatment of Thatcherism (A Child in Time), the Cold War (The Innocent) and the Iraq conflict (Saturday). It is dependable but its durability weakens its effect. McEwan shocks us without causing an inordinate degree of confusion and he certainly does not provoke rage, which is why he has won the Booker and Martin has not.
Martin Amis Page 42
