The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis The Rachel Papers (1973)
It's a coming of age novel, according to someone or other, probably the late Simon Morris. Our teenager is Charles Highway, and the title refers to a folder full of notes he compiles in preparation for seducing someone called Rachel. I assume the compilation of said notes is therefore an immature enterprise from which Charles is liberated once he gets to knob the aforementioned Rachel; and it's a load of musings on paper, just like a book - so that's all a bit postmodern, I guess.

The thing is, nice idea though it may well be, it's difficult to say whether the correlation of Charles' presumably creepy notebook actually makes much difference to the subsequent penetration of Rachel, or even to anything at all. Whilst I violently reject the insipid notion that a novel should include sympathetic characters, it usually helps if you don't actively hate those featured, and Charles just seemed like your average over-moneyed Oxford-bound Hooray Henry, inhabitant of a world of braying wankers to which I have never been granted access. I found it not only difficult to care what happens to the twat, but even to be amused, or to find much of a point to this novel having been written in the first place. Everyone drifts through their slightly privileged existence, from cradle to grave without consequence, idly marvelling at their own progress from time to time as though lacking any idea as to why any of it is happening; all seasoned with descriptions of it going in and out, complete with smells, which I'm sure impressed the hell out of Simon but did bugger all for me.

It's not the worst book I've ever read. It's about fifty billion miles from being the best. It's just there, keeping you busy for a couple of hours with its underwhelming and ever so slightly smartarsed wisecracks.

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.

London Fields

Martin Amis London Fields (1989)
Now I remember why I was supposed to avoid this one. All the characters are horrible and therefore lack relatability, or some other quality which people who don't actually read books doubtless regard as essential; and apparently Amis could learn a thing or two from Agatha Christie when it comes to plotting a murder mystery; and there are all those long, long words to consider…

It's all bollocks. Even in the event of relatability being an actual thing, the notion of these characters being horrible only truly works if you were expecting the cast of The Wizard of Oz, and whilst there's an argument to be had that Guy Clinch and Keith Talent are grotesques, I've actually known Keith Talent a few times, and mostly I quite like him for all that he's a bit of a cunt.

To start at the beginning, the story is that Nicola Six, a massively self-involved posh bird, foresees and orchestrates her own murder at the hands of a lover for reasons explained in the novel, albeit without yielding anything which could be distilled into a single tidy sentence. She's playing the sexual field, as is everyone else here, so it's probably going to be some crime of passion, leaving us with the question of whether it will be Guy or Keith; except not, because it doesn't really matter that much, this simply being the Christmas tree from which everything else is hung.

One might wonder how Amis came by the anthropological balls to write someone so resolutely of barely-working class stratum as Keith Talent whose dropped aitches and dedication to pub sports patently comes from something more immersive than watching a few episodes of EastEnders; and, for sake of qualification, I personally found Irvine Welsh writing about life amongst the betting shop clientele unconvincing and even slightly insulting. Amis, however, gets it absolutely spot on, even acknowledging the discomfort of the cheap holiday in someone else's misery with Sam Young, the author who is writing the book we're reading, hanging out with Keith, and trying not to let too much of himself or his alien values get in the way. In other words, it's complicated. Much of the narrative is a comment on this sort of anthropological exercise, notably the awful Crossbone Waters, the book within our book.

Amongst the most severely retarded of the critics seem to have been those taking issue with all the digressions, all that unfamiliar talky stuff going on in between the stage directions of someone walking across a room and then taking an object from a shelf. Woss 'e on abat nah? they ask. Woss'at got t'do wiv anyfink? Amazingly, all that extraneous word stuff is there to communicate the subject of the novel which, believe it or not, isn't primarily a murder mystery in the spirit of The Mousetrap. It's about determinism and free will, so far as I'm able to tell, with everyone set on a track seemingly leading to a particular inescapable destiny, much like the environmental collapse occurring in the background; and more than being subject to fate, the characters form the substance of their respective destinies - which I assume to be the reason for all the allusions to D.H. Lawrence, an author preoccupied with class and environment as inherent qualities of the individual, which is certainly true of Keith Talent. We tend to have forgotten about the approach of the millennium in 2019, but it was a big deal at the time.

The biggest surprises for me were firstly, just how funny this book is, albeit darkly funny and without cracking jokes; and secondly, how much of it reads like a significant influence on Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go, which similarly explores the end of days by chasing three archetypes along their respective intertwined destinies.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 613

 

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 613 (2003)
I have new books, or at least books newly purchased which I'm yet to read, but somehow nothing is sticking. I read a few pages of London Fields, a few of a Kornbluth, part of a short story by A.E. van Vogt, but I'm not in the mood for any of them; so I'm really beginning to appreciate having accumulated unread back issues of the digests just in case, particularly those such as this one which has been mostly light without feeling either insubstantial or crappy.

This is my third back issue this year, bringing us up to 2003, and it's been the best one yet, seemingly representing a further refinement of what Fantasy & Science Fiction does. Back in April, I wrote:

Unfortunately I am no more able to read fantasy than I am able to attend renaissance fairs dressed as a fucking minstrel. As soon as I read a sentence suffixed with my Lord, my brain shuts itself down.

I guess it wasn't just me, because by 2003 the magazine is happily free of anyone with pointed ears wearing a green hat, and what we have sits loosely between speculative fiction and the modern ghost story - I'd say something in the Gothic tradition, but I'd be guessing. M. Shayne Bell's Anomalous Structures of My Dreams and Jeremy Minton's Halfway House are probably the stand-outs, but there's nothing bad here, and everything reads very much like the work of authors who care about their craft. I stumbled a little upon Mary Rickert's The Machine and Albert E. Cowdrey's Grey Star, but second run ups taken next morning paid off, particularly with The Machine, which is, on reflection, probably one of the more satisfyingly intense things I've read this year.

Heavy Water

Martin Amis Heavy Water (1998)
Never having paid much attention to literature, or at least what is generally held to be literature, I tend to discover authors more or less by accident, excepting those whose books have robots and spaceships on the cover. This is probably why Martin Amis has pretty much passed me by until now. I'm aware of his being the spawn of Kingsley, but then I only read New Maps of Hell relatively recently, and then because it discusses books which have robots and spaceships on the cover. I've heard of London Fields, although I'm not sure why, and have mostly encountered the name of Martin Amis in relation to Will Self, usually in dismissive terms suggesting that Self and Amis think they're all lush because they use long, fancy words but really they aren't lush because they're just stuck up and think they're clever and better than the rest of us. I think this means we're not supposed to read their works because only people who've spent at least five years working on the bins are allowed to write novels; which is bollocks because Will Self at least has patently produced some crackers.

Anyway, it seemed time I gave Martin Amis a shot and I found this one - short stories, which I always think is a good place to start.

Assuming there has, at some point, been fuss, then I can certainly see what it was - or possibly is - about. I assume Amis being so often paired off with Will Self is, aside from their both having gone to good schools, down to their respective fictions being, if not Swiftian, then something in that direction, and in this case so much so as to allow for The Janitor of Mars, which is science-fiction as much as anything and reads as though he's taking the piss out of Stephen Baxter. Despite frequent playdates within the same reviews, it would be difficult to mistake Amis for Self or vice versa. On the strength of the stories here, Amis is a lot more direct and it would probably be difficult to accuse him of self-indulgence with any conviction. Thematically, the two of them inhabit similar territory, but probably not to the point of it being worth discussing.

The last two in this collection of nine were a little underwhelming: What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a phonetic approximation of some regional dialect, and the story doesn't quite reward the effort of translation; and Straight Fiction inverts established gender preferences to comic effect - Hollywood stars exposed as secret heterosexuals etc. etc. - but doesn't quite live up to the promise of the gag. The rest, however, are fucking astonishing. Amis' writing grips the reader like hands physically emerging from the open pages to grasp you by the shoulders. He intrigues from the first sentence, presenting such peculiar combinations of people and the lives they've ended up living that you can't not want to find out where the fuck it's going to go, because there's nothing predictable, nothing promising specific conclusions, not even in the inversion narratives of the aforementioned Straight Fiction, or Career Move which swaps mumbling poetry circles for Hollywood glitz and bullshit without so much as a knowing smirk. Although the last two don't quite pay out in full, everything here does something fucking weird whilst communicating the same in terms so immediately accessible, even populist, as to be dizzying.

I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get here, but never mind.

Seaton Point

Robert Dellar, Ted Curtis, Rob Colson etc.
Seaton Point (1998)
This is a collaborative novel cooked up between seven different authors, each presumably contributing a passage here, a passage there, editing each other's work and so on. The process of its creation hasn't exactly made for a smooth narrative, but then that's the whole point, relating more to oral traditions of storytelling because it is forgotten that the modern novel of single authorship came into being only in the modern era, as we are told in the introduction.

I thought it might be stranger than it was to read this now. Robert Dellar, who instigated this enterprise, was a good friend who recently passed on at the age of fifty-two, someone I've known for decades. It was odd to realise that I'd never read this book while he was alive, and when we last spoke and the subject came up he was surprised that he'd never got around to slipping me a copy. I think it was simply that my attention had been elsewhere when the thing saw print. I knew of it mainly through the involvement of Rob Colson, with whom I travelled to Mexico in 2005, and I've known all but two of the other writers in a social context at various points of our respective lives. So I suppose there has always been the worry that I might hate the thing for whatever reason.

Roughly speaking, Seaton Point captures the psychological landscape in which a few of us were living for much of the eighties, nineties, and beyond. I was never quite part of a gang, but a lot of my friends seemed to be people who had fallen into the orbit of the Brougham Road squatting community in Hackney, London - loosely coalesced around bands such as the Apostles and the Assassins of Hope and numerous fanzines. They were, I suppose, my Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, my beat poets, my Bromley contingent - but hopefully without too many of the wankier associations summoned by any of those references - so, even in 2017 with me living on a different side of the planet, these are probably my people in so much as I ever had people. Andy of the Apostles would have called us the dispossessed, which seems as good a term as any; and so Seaton Point is inhabited by those left behind, the horrible fuckers who couldn't fit in if they tried, those rejected as lacking redeeming or interesting artistic qualities even by those making arts council funded punk documentaries, the working class as we were known in less aspirational times, the nutters, the weirdos, the alkies, the transexual vampires...

The narrative lurches in and out of reality, much in the same way as reality itself tends to do if you're paying attention, and so we have drugs, sex, violence, toilet humour, and psychogeography drafted in to tell of an ancient demon imprisoned in the basement of a tower block, a man trapped in an elevator in the same surviving on mystic yoghurt dispensed from a spigot, and their bid for freedom. With seven authors at the wheel, there are a lot of characters flying around, not all of them entirely likeable and it's easy to get lost, but I'm not sure it matters whether or not one is able to keep track of every last name, because the point still works despite the confusion.

Blokey sat in flat 67, his earplugs partly protecting him from the onslaught of industrial electronic bollocks about fascist barbarian armies rolling across the icy wastes of Northern Europe. As one million decibels of tripe by Coil vomited mercilessly from the speakers, the dice man stroked the sawn-off shotgun lying across his lap as if it were a furry animal.

That's my favourite paragraph, and I suspect it came from Dellar given his generally poor regard of industrial electronic bollocks. I've  read a few things by Ted Curtis, notably the exceptional Darkening Light, as well as Rob Colson's brilliant - at least from what I can remember - Descent of a Man, which he really needs to get into print one of these days; so I recognise occasional elements which remind me of specific contributors, but the focus remains, as ever, on the story which may be taken as an explanation as to why everything is shit, if you like, or if you don't like, then there are plenty of chuckles, albeit often unusually dark chuckles. My first thought was that this is Rachel Redhead rewriting Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go as a sequel to Trainspotting, which as a recommendation should probably be taken all three ways, assuming you can appreciate that as a recommendation. Martin Amis is invoked in the introduction, although not in particularly glowing terms. I haven't actually read any Martin Amis, but I've read plenty of Will Self and I'm told it's the same thing; so if you like, this is Will Self with less public school and more diarrhoea blah blah Rabelais blah blah Hogarth blah blah Reader's Wives - I'm sure it can't be too hard to work out what I'm saying here; and it has the greatest closing sentence of any novel I've ever read, which I won't give away for obvious reasons.

Seaton Point is both horrible and brilliant, and arguably a record of an era of human experience presently getting airbrushed from history as the nostalgia industry grows and grows, replacing more and more of what actually happened with Stewart Maconie chortling away over how they changed the name of Opal Fruits to Starburst. In this sense it's probably also an important book, but you wouldn't want to say it to its face.