After reading London Fields, I was eager to consume more of Martin Amis’s supercharged writing. I think I got more than I bargained for. While London Fields inhabited the sleazy underworld of small time theft, cheating, and sex, more suggestive than explicit, Money is filled with pornography, big time cheating, drunkenness, and more pornography. To be sure, the book isn’t pornographic itself. It’s more about the debauchery that can be accessed with money. Obviously, from the title, the book is about money, but mostly about money and sex, and, it could be said, about power in the sense that money is power to access sex.
Now, with that disdainful opening, let me hasten to give credit where credit is due: the writing is absolutely supercharged. A couple of illustrations. But first I should set the stage. John Self, the narrator, is a British director of commercials, an ad man who’s had some success, supposedly specializing in sexiness to sell stuff. He has connected with a New York producer, Fielding Goodney, who wants him to direct a feature film, a big step up for an ad man.
There’s a major con going on here and I won’t expose it in case anyone who reads this review decides to go for the book. In fact there are multiple cons at work. Not surprising, as the movie business lives in a world of belief, faith, hope, desperate hope, that a movie turns a profit. Investors, producers, directors, actors all invest money, time, their reputations, their fortunes in the hope that the movie doesn't bomb. Or get caught up in litigation, as London Fields has. Starring Billy Bob Thornton and selected for screening at the Toronto Film Festival back in 2015, it was pulled from the program when the film’s director filed suit against the producers. Multiple lawsuits later, now late 2017, it’s still stuck. A disaster for all involved. Making movies is a risky business, not always the mega-millions machines that get all the press. After all, no one knew that Star Wars would be an immediate and lasting smash hit leading to an unbelievable series of sequels and prequels and spinoffs and mind-boggling merchandise--until it did.
Back to Money. I don‘t recall who wrote the story on which the movie is to be based, maybe it was John Self, but John and Fielding go about the business of recruiting (conning?) the actors, screenplay writers, investors, extras, and other necessary participants. Actually Fielding takes care of the investors. He flashes a lot of money, which serves as irresistible bait. Success breeds success. Along the way John Self waterlogs himself with alcohol and pornographic sex (I’m telling you don't read the book for the sex. It’s about porn without actually being porn). Plus a boatload of jealousy, infatuation, childhood issues, resentment, violence, you-name-it. Enough of plot. It gets complicated and I’m sure I didn’t follow it all.
But the writing. Character naming is like Dickens, but more comedic. Female characters include Selena Street, Happy Jonson, Sunny Wand, Day Lightbrowne, and Butch Beausoleil. Suggestive, right? Evocative, almost pornographic. Here’s an excerpt when John meets Fielding in a bar, to be introduced to Butch Beausoleil. John is very drunk. “I took a bit of a toss on a stool-leg and sprinted face-first into a pillar, but stumbled on until I made out my friend Fielding down at the far end. Dressed in a white tux, he was whispering into the nimbus cast by a miraculously glamorous girl. She wore a low-cut silk dress in a razzy gray--it rippled like television. Her ferociously tanned hair hung in solid curves over the vulnerable valves of her throat and its buzzing body-tone.” Sizzling.
Here’s an irresistible description of London weather. “You get April, blossom blizzards and sudden sunshafts and swift bruised clouds. You get May and its chilly light, the sky still writhing with change. Then June, summer, rain as thin and sour as motorway wheel-squirt, and no sky at all, just no sky at all. In summer, London is an old man with bad breath. If you listen, you can hear the sob of weariness catching in his lungs.” Motorway wheel-squirt? Where does Amis get such a notion?
One more excerpt, one that dances around the fringes of pornography, but isn't porn itself. Certainly it isn’t something you’d want your preteen to read, but also not the kind of thing that John Self would find satisfying when trying to pleasure himself. The scene happens after John has set up a joint checking account with his girlfriend, Selina Street, who has insisted that having her own checkbook would give her dignity and self respect. “That morning she went to bed in black stockings, tasseled garter belt, satin thong, silk bolero, muslin gloves, belly necklace and gold choker. I made a real pig of myself, I have to admit. An hour and a half later she turned to me, with one leg still hooked over the headboard, and said, ‘Do it anywhere, anything.’ Things had unquestioningly improved, what with all this new dignity and self respect about the place.”
The writing is undeniably energetic, vibrant, creative, and often clever. It’s just so scumbaggy. The story makes an excellent point about the power of money and what people will do if they believe. But it’s so smarmy. Looking back now I don’t feel like the positive teachings of the book were worth the grime. Does that make me a prig? Maybe so, but there you have it.
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