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Dec. 1st, 2010 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bagheera_sanI'm glad that for once, England lives up to my clichéd expectations: it doesn't rain all the time, and the food is not at all terrible, but English people have the snow-coping mechanisms of headless chickens. Durham Uni daily bombards me with emails about these ADVERSE weather conditions, and news like "fresh snow fell over the night!!" and "we cannot guarantee anything in this weather". Also, Britain must be the world's biggest market for rubber boots.
I finished a novel yesterday by reading until 2am, "Money" by Martin Amis, which I found first pretty entertaining, and then really great, and then crushingly depressing. But mostly it's good. Martin Amis makes me a bit green with writerly envy, because, you see, he has this main character and first person narrator, who is just... disgusting, capitalist, sexist, filthy rich, racist, brutal, greedy, egoistic, drunk, ugly, drugged, completely uneducated pig of a man. He's a nightmare of a twentieth century man. His main concerns in life are pornography, junk food, making money and more pornography. There's a sequence in the middle where he tries to rape his girlfriend, fails, sulks for about half a page, and then tries again. And you know what Amis does? He makes you like this guy, this guy who's basically everything we hate about our civilisation, simply by giving him one of the best, most powerful voices I've seen. He makes you laugh out loud and suffer with this guy. He almost, almost redeems this guy, and then pulls the rug out under him and completely destroys him, and THEN he tops that with an ending that crushes me, as a reader, because you see, the book is titled "Money: A suicide note" and it's made clear right from the first page that John Self is going to kill himself in the end, and he does, and he survives the attempt, and then he has such a depressing, drunk, dole-money receiving afterlife that you realize that his suicide would have been the escapist happy ending to this novel. In a lecture today it was said that Martin Amis is considered by many critics "too clever for his own good", and you think so, wouldn't you, with an author who has the climax of the book be a chess game (I kid you not) between the protagonist and a figure called "Martin Amis". But it's not too clever for its own good. It's riveting.
Except for that one bit where John Self tells you that [the villain of the book] has lots and computers and is probably a hacker who did all this (I mean the plot) with his hacker skills, because obviously computers = magic. That is just hilariously Eighties.
I finished a novel yesterday by reading until 2am, "Money" by Martin Amis, which I found first pretty entertaining, and then really great, and then crushingly depressing. But mostly it's good. Martin Amis makes me a bit green with writerly envy, because, you see, he has this main character and first person narrator, who is just... disgusting, capitalist, sexist, filthy rich, racist, brutal, greedy, egoistic, drunk, ugly, drugged, completely uneducated pig of a man. He's a nightmare of a twentieth century man. His main concerns in life are pornography, junk food, making money and more pornography. There's a sequence in the middle where he tries to rape his girlfriend, fails, sulks for about half a page, and then tries again. And you know what Amis does? He makes you like this guy, this guy who's basically everything we hate about our civilisation, simply by giving him one of the best, most powerful voices I've seen. He makes you laugh out loud and suffer with this guy. He almost, almost redeems this guy, and then pulls the rug out under him and completely destroys him, and THEN he tops that with an ending that crushes me, as a reader, because you see, the book is titled "Money: A suicide note" and it's made clear right from the first page that John Self is going to kill himself in the end, and he does, and he survives the attempt, and then he has such a depressing, drunk, dole-money receiving afterlife that you realize that his suicide would have been the escapist happy ending to this novel. In a lecture today it was said that Martin Amis is considered by many critics "too clever for his own good", and you think so, wouldn't you, with an author who has the climax of the book be a chess game (I kid you not) between the protagonist and a figure called "Martin Amis". But it's not too clever for its own good. It's riveting.
Except for that one bit where John Self tells you that [the villain of the book] has lots and computers and is probably a hacker who did all this (I mean the plot) with his hacker skills, because obviously computers = magic. That is just hilariously Eighties.
