Martin Amis Dresses in Drag

A Review of Night Train
© 1997 by James Diedrick

Dateline: 11/16/97, Volume 1, Issue 2

    I can already hear the howls of incredulity, the screams of protest. The bard of butch gone feminine? The mythographer of misogyny transmogrified? The policeman of the gender divide off duty? Yes, reeling reader. In his latest work of fiction, Martin Amis imaginatively inhabits a female first-person narrator, a tough but tender police detective by the name of Mike Hoolihan, whose investigation of a mysterious suicide stirs her to depths of imaginative sympathy reminiscent of a George Eliot novel. What's more, she resembles her author in far more ways than one: she's hip, street-smart, and disciplined; she speaks with a transatlantic accent; she is struggling with her grief over the death of someone who seemed a part of her. She is also one of the most haunting narrators in all of Amis’s fiction.

    We should have seen it coming. For all the press about Amis's testosterone-poisoned prose, his novels have always come to anatomize masculinity, not to praise it. In his very first sentence of published fiction, Amis gave voice to a callow youth whose words pair braggadocio with insecurity: "My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn't think it to look at me. It's such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name, and, to look at, I'm none of these" (The Rachel Papers, 1973). Insecurity often turns to terror for Terry Service, the lower-middle class orphan who narrates one half of Success, and who helps give frenzied voice to the most emotionally naked of Amis's novels: "I want to scream, much of the time, or quiver like a damaged animal. I sit about the place fizzing with rabies" (1978). Even John Self, who strides through Amis's masterpiece Money (1984) like a grotesque colossus of male appetite, undergoes a momentary gender-bending transformation under the influence of Martina Twain, who makes him feel, fleetingly, "like a flower; a little parched, perhaps, a little gone in the neck, and with no real life to come, perhaps, only sham life, bowl life, easing its petals and lifting its head to start feeding on the day."

    As even these brief excerpts demonstrate, Martin Amis is a great literary ventriloquist. For nearly a quarter century, he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to throw his voice into the tunnel-like interiors of his self-absorbed, self-obsessed, acutely self-conscious first-person narrators. And to make us care about them. One of the most touching moments in all Amis's fiction occurs early in Money, when John Self confides to the reader "I long to burst out of the world of money and into--into what? Into the world of thought and fascination. How do I get there? Tell me, please. I'll never make it there myself. I don't know the way." As Adam Phillips wrote in the October 16 issue of The London Review of Books, "self-consciousness, as a threat and a promise (the furtive logic, the demonic secrecy people live by) has been his great preoccupation." And self-consciousness is no respecter of gender. Which brings us to back to Night Train.

    For most of Night Train's first paragraph, this "police" is defined solely by the peculiar argot of a bureaucratic order: "it's a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police." Absent a name, absent the accents of gender and race, this voice seems to speak of and for a system, a mode of seeing and operating, rather than an individual (Night Train is preoccupied with the ways in which conventions–of thought, language, imagery--shield us from the pain of what the novel calls "naked-eye seeing"). A name comes next, but even here the syntax emphasizes a role: "I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan." Then, almost as an afterthought, the paragraph ends by supplying the noun that seemed to be missing from the fragmentary first sentence, and again thwarting the reader's expectations: "I am a police, and a woman, also."

    Like bookends, the words "police" and "woman" frame this paragraph--and Hoolihan's identity. These terms, and the discordant structure of their presentation, also encompass the novel's central concerns--with the mystery of other people, with the conditional nature of identity, with the manifold implications of "policing."

    But before these ideas crowd our thoughts, we are brought under the spell of Hoolihan’s voice. This requires, first, that we believe in her idiomatic American speech. If God is in the details, he is watching over Amis’s prose here. Not only is Hoolihan’s language appropriately chopped and elliptical, she slums her vocabulary in a convincingly American way, as in "I was fostered some, but basically I’m state-raised," or "too, I’d washed my hair the night before." The following paragraph offers many more examples like these (note the sublimely redundant–and distinctively American--adverb "totally" in the fifth sentence), but it also reveals the tones of need, affection, vulnerability and pathos that leak through the shell of her hard-boiled prose:

    What with AA, golf, the Discuss Group on Mondays, and the nightclass on Thursdays at Pete (together with countless and endless correspondence courses), plus the Tuesday nightshift, and Saturdays, when I tend to hang with my bunkies in the Forty-Four–what with all this, my boyfriend says I don’t have time for a boyfriend and maybe my boyfriend is right. But I do have a boyfriend: Tobe. He’s a dear guy and I value him and I need him. One thing about Tobe–he sure knows how to make a woman feel slender. Tobe’s totally enormous. He fills the room. When he comes in late, he’s worse than the night train: Every beam in the building wakes up and moans. I find love difficult. Love finds me difficult. I learned that with Deniss, the hard way. And Deniss learned it too. It’s this simple: Love destabilizes me, and I can’t afford to be destabilized. So Tobe here suits me right down to the ground. His strategy, I suspect, is to stick around and grow on me. And it’s working. But so slowly that I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see if it all panned out.

    Amis’s literary accents can be heard here as well; Hoolihan loves repetition with variation, as does her author (as does Samuel Beckett, whose spirit haunts Night Train right along with those of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler). Tobe has made a tape for her containing eight versions of the blues standard "Night Train"; her favorite is Oscar Peterson's reading, full of "passion and muscle." In his own Night Train, Amis is striving to marry the angular muscularity of his prose to a wider emotional range–and to do so within a genre dedicated to muffling the sounds of feeling. In representing Hoolihan’s deepening identification with Jennifer (the two characters are doubled in manifold subtle ways), he succeeds.

    Hoolihan lives on the edge of a kind of domestic and personal entropy, which is one reason she is stunned by Jennifer's death. A scientist at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems, Jennifer is "an embarrassment of perfection. Brilliant, beautiful." If she takes her own life, what does that imply about Hoolihan’s? The case is personal, too; Jennifer was the daughter of Colonel Tom Rockwell, who was Hoolihan's squad supervisor when her life spiraled out of control at the end of eight years in homicide. He took her into his home, where Jennifer read to her at night. "I never felt judged by her," Hoolihan writes. "As gifted as she was, she never glassed herself off from you. If you ran into her, at a party, say, or downtown, she wouldn’t say hi and move on. She’d always be particular with you. She’d always leave you with something."

    Jennifer leaves Hoolihan a part of herself when she dies, the part that willingly turned down human happiness."Jennifer is inside me, trying to reveal what I don’t want to see," Hoolihan says. I never expected to write this sentence about Amis, but Night Train is in many ways a religious novel (In the Blakean sense, not the orthodox one). For one thing, it is haunted by the dead and the desire to commune with their spirits. When the coroner begins his autopsy of Jennifer, Hoolihan records his first words: "This is the body, he is saying, echoing the sacrament: Hoc es corpus." The morning after the autopsy, at the beginning of Part 3 of the novel, (titled "The Seeing"), Jennifer is resurrected. "The morning after she died Jennifer was in my room. Standing at the foot of the bed till I opened my eyes. Then of course she disappeared. She returned the next day: Fainter. And again, and always fainter. But this morning she was back with all her original power. Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power?"

    Readers needn't be familiar with the postmodern theorizing of D.A. Miller to appreciate the ways in which Night Train is concerned with the connections between novelists and police–with policing beyond the precinct room. Hoolihan, like Amis, is a shrewd reader of clues and character; she is vexed in her investigation of Jennifer’s death by questions of cause and effect, and their increasingly problematic relationship; she distrusts conventional motive explanations (unlike homicide, suicide raises questions about what actually counts as a motive). In this sense, Night Train is part of a long tradition. The genre of the novel emerged in part to satisfy the social needs of the emergent middle class. The former gave the latter a collective voice, a distinctive literary form, but also a guide to manners. The novel, in other words, contributed to the self-policing of an entire social body. In its social function, the novel is like a police, to adopt Hoolihan’s (and Amis’s) parlance.

    Charles Dickens literalized this connection in his 1851 novel Bleak House by virtually giving over the end of his novel to police inspector Bucket, simultaneously creating what is arguably the first detective novel in English literature and locating one solution to his society’s increasing fragmentation in the regulatory procedures and rules of the emergent state bureaucracy. In Night Train, Amis slyly winks at Dickens by giving the name Hi Tulkinghorn to Jennifer’s physician (in Bleak House, Mr. Tulkinghorn is the urbane and sinister lawyer who prides himself on knowing more secrets than anyone else). Amis’s novels, for all their vile and violent energies, are informed by a lordly intelligence that invades the privacy of their characters, subjects them to chastening forms of discipline and punishment. Like Hoolihan, Amis may be deeply suspicious of motive, may value tolerance as the highest human virtue ("I don’t judge," Hoolihan repeats like a mantra), but his novels arrest us with the spectacle of human misdoing, invoke our own tendencies to judge, to sentence, to correct. They invite us to become police. The implications of this metaphor multiply in light of the critical policing Amis’s own fiction has been subject to; as Adam Phillips has written, Night Train is not just a spoof of a detective novel, not just a metaphysical thriller, but also Amis’s "Answer to My Critics."

    From the beginning of her self-description, it is clear that Hoolihan is policing herself as much as the "second-echelon" American city she works in. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse, Hoolihan became a ward of the state at age ten. "And as a child I always tried to love the state the way you’d love a parent, and I gave it a hundred per cent." After working homicide for eight years, she fell into an alcoholic spiral, and after her recovery she was assigned to "Asset Forfeiture," a subdivision of Organized Crime. Taking psychic comfort in all the internal and external regulations of her job, she has maintained her equilibrium through work discipline, a rigid adherence to procedural rules, and a will to believe. "A police works a suspicion into a conviction: that's the external process. But it's the internal process also. It is for me. It's the only way I can do it. I have to work suspicion into conviction." Night Train reverses this trajectory; Jennifer’s suicide is a case whose solution "only points toward further complexity. I have taken a good firm knot and reduced it to a mess of loose ends," Hoolihan despairs.

    Meanwhile, her author keeps himself under close surveillance. By adopting the conventions of the noir detective novel (in part to demonstrate that conventions alone can never adequately encompass experience), Amis forfeits many of his own artistic assets: his rhetorical exuberance, his verbal inventiveness, his flair for digressions (which, like the digressions of George Eliot, amplify the themes of his other novels while displaying a massive incidental intelligence). At 149 pages, Night Train is Amis’s shortest novel (Time’s Arrow, with which Night Train has much in common, came in at 165 pages), one that often seems to be eerily gesturing toward a much longer, denser, richer novel lurking just around the corner of  its genre boundaries. The brilliantly conceived names of its minor characters intimate this: Jennifer’s lover Trader Faulkner (a philosopher of language whose specialty is "conditionals"); Hoolihan’s colleagues Tony Silvera, Oltan O’Boye, Keith Booker, and Henrik Overmars (this last name evokes Eddie Mars, the criminal in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep); Phyllida Trounce, Jennifer’s one-time roommate; Paulie No, the Indonesian-born coroner ("state cutter") who performs the autopsy on Jennifer; Bax Denziger, the "TV-famous" head of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems.

    To borrow the terms E.M. Forster uses in Aspects of the Novel, all these characters seem to want to "modulate" from flat to round, to break free of their one-dimensionality. But Amis keeps them closely confined. For whatever complex set of reasons, Amis has entered a minimalist phase. First came his July 21 1997 New Yorker short story "What Happened to Me on Summer Holiday," whose twelve-year-old narrator (a version of Amis’s son Louis), purposely chooses to write in what he calls "zargazdig Ameriganese" (sarcastic Americanese) because grief over the death of a close family friend has created a "zdrange resizdanze" (strange resistance) to clarity. Now comes Night Train. When I met him in Ann Arbor in April 1996, during an American reading tour, he responded to my question about The Information by referring to the novel itself–not its subject–as "a mid-life crisis." It is true that compared to Success and Time’s Arrow, marvels of artistic symmetry, The Information is something of a loose, baggy monster. In his latest two fictions, Amis has put his prose on a near-starvation diet. The effects are often just as arresting, just as memorable, as in the longer novels (both recent narratives contain stunning flashes of piercing illumination), but the reader still feels the effects of artistic contraction.

    The narrative conceit of Night Train requires that Hoolihan conclude the case, even if her conclusion is that she will never understand why Jennifer took her own life ("One minute it’s a clear blue sky. Then you look again and there’s thunderheads all around"). Once this requirement is met, the narrative must end–even though Hoolihan’s internal struggle with radical contingency is just beginning. Indeed, her "solution" of the case both engenders and marks the beginning of the narrative itself.

    Night Train holds many surprises and satisfactions for Amis’s readers; it also leaves them with the tantalizing sense that his own artistic quest is nowhere near its end.

©1997 by James Diedrick

This site is featured in

BBC Education Web Guide

Site maintained by James Diedrick, author of Understanding Martin Amis, 2nd edition (2004).
 All contents © 2004.
Last updated 10 December, 2004. Please read the Disclaimer

Home | Discussion Board  | Disclaimer |  Understanding Martin Amis  | James Diedrick  | Albion College