Money (1984)

I feel conflicted about how to rate this book. I didn't actually like it, so I don't want to give it three stars, but it interested me more than it simply being okay. I'm really not a fan of post-modernism in general -- I dislike being constantly pulled out of the story and reminded that it is a story, and I don't get on well with the whole "look how clever I am" sentiment. Still, it is undeniably quite clever. The narrator has a very distinctive voice, and it's deliberately a needy one, always asking questions of the reader, directly addressing the reader. You get pretty uncomfortably close to the narrator at times. John Self is an unreliable narrator to the extreme, although extremely candid about it, so you know all along things are not as they seem.

I'm actually thinking of writing my essay on this book, now I've finished reading it, which is odd since last week I was swearing I'd never write on a post-modernist text. Either way, I'm glad I finally finished the whole book -- it was worth reading, and a little challenging, which is a good thing. I like being pulled out of my happy world of speculative fiction and fantasy sometimes. ( )

This was an audiobook. I'm going to come back to this one day and savor it in printed form. Amis has a lot of the comic wordplay and rhythm of P.G. Wodehouse, but uses his gifts in darker and more serious ways. ( )

Money, the 365 page suicide note of a wannabe film maker from old London town, is ablaze with dazzling sentences. Though the three clause invective probably wasn't invented by Martin (or his pop) it is as though it were created just for him to exploit. His diatribes against everything will crease you up; unless, of course, you are one of the countless millions who despise every word he writes.

This book is full of inventive language, but it doesn't have a plot. Oh, there's a story line about a geezer who has made one advert which he thinks qualifies him to become a bigshot director stateside. But the story hangs on the man's name, John Self, and how he signs himself up into financial and sexual knots. If he got his true comeuppance, perhaps there would be some justification reading through to the end - other than the superb writing, that is. The shitty little roach deserves to be crushed. ( )

ebook version

John Self: an alcoholic, misogynistic, violent director of commercials in the mid-1980s. To him everything is porn: food, drink, any female. There hasn't been a more hateful protagonist in a novel that I have read in a long, long while. But . . . Oh my god, Martin Amis is a brilliant writer and so freakishly funny that I could not put it down or turn away. And I'm glad. ( )