Dead Babies

 

Martin Amis Dead Babies (1975)
I'm still trying to work out who or what the title refers to. So far I have the possibility that these babies are all, like, dead inside, man; or it's Keith Whitehead who, being a chubby dwarf, may be seen to have the appearance of a baby; or it's the emotional neoteny of everybody concerned; or it's something to do with the spunk flying in all directions, not many of which are conducive to procreation - shorthand, I suppose, for wank, inadvertently suggesting that the book reviews itself; or it's all of these. Nobody fucking knows. I seem to recall a couple of actual dead babies and the term is used as a slightly bewildering expletive by a couple of the characters, but that seems too obvious a correlation given these being of no greater consequence than any of the other routinely transgressive occurrences passing along on Brucie's literary conveyor belt without anybody really caring one way or the other.

Dead Babies describes a house full of Hooray Henries and prototype Sloane Rangers, mostly over-moneyed sixties burnouts, getting shitfaced and screwing each other in a variety of increasingly baroque configurations with no clear separation as to how much of it is hallucinatory. They're all irredeemably horrible, with the possible exception of the aforementioned Keith, and much of the novel reminds me of dismal eighties parties where I spent most of the evening trying to avoid the attentions of some speeding fucknugget determined to lecture anyone who would listen about either Jim Morrison or William sodding Blake. Also, there's gratuitous animal abuse for some reason or other.

Of course, it's beautifully written and is as such sort of compelling, but I still have no idea as to what end or what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I can see why the late Simon Morris was a fan to the point that I found myself unconsciously awaiting narrative punctuation from a list of Dr. Hook's ten greatest albums, but it left me as cold as almost all J.G. Ballard I've ever tried to read, and I get the impression ol' Jimmy may have been an influence to some extent. The aforementioned Simon Morris described Amis' London Fields as a pointless narrative that's like a joke without a punchline, while London Fields strikes me as the much better book, like Dead Babies done right, written by someone who wanted to write a book rather than just wave his dobber in your face for a couple of hundred pages. I expect Kenneth Clark would have described Dead Babies as absolutely ghastly - due to that doubtless being Marty's intention - and I'm inclined to share that view. In televisual terms it's Abigail's Party repopulated with the cast of Lindsay Anderson's If… without the nuance of either, the written equivalent of those bloody awful Allen Jones paintings of boobs squozen forth between rubber straps.

The tragedy is that I can't even bring myself to hate it. I've read much, much worse, and Dead Babies is just kind of dull but for the poetry of its composition. I suppose it would be a very boring world if we all liked the same thing.