'Money' - Martin Amis

One of the great post-war novels, Callum. Changed my reading habits big time when I was in my late teens. Love him or loathe him, Martin Amis is one of the finest English writers of the twentieth century. Discuss!

I don't dispute Amis as a great English writer, I'm just perturbed by Money, mainly by the motivation/lack of motivation for the Fielding Goodney character. Maybe that's the point though, that in the crazy world of money, who needs motivation any more? Not sure though cheers

Spot on! According to Amis, motivation is 'a shagged-out force in modern society!' Or at least, that's how it was in 1984 when the novel was written. Not sure if it still applies in 2002; it probably does.

I liked "Money" until I read "London Fields", after that, the idea of re-reading Money was a bit like preferring to watch a gymnast put that white dust on their hands and then stopping before getting onto the parallel bars.

Yes, Keith Talent was a classic creation, Andrew. Do you remember that South Bank Show with Amis when he was talking about 'London Fields'? I THINK Talent was being played by Harry Enfield in little scenes from the novel. It was great stuff! I always felt the problem with 'London Fields' was that the joke was on the narrator ... again. Post modern territory etc. etc. I bought the novel with my dole money when I was living in Brighton - rendering me skint for weeks on end - and I remember feeling really disappointed when I got to chapter 2 and it began 'The black cab will move away ...' and I thought, hello, I know what's going on here! Great set pieces though.

I agree that the plot would have been better without the narrator being involved, but Keith is a wonderful character. "He wanted to watch pornography all the time. He wanted it on when he was asleep. He wanted it on when he wasn't there. " I prefer Paul Auster's New York Trilogy to either, but then that is even more post-modern. I guess I don't mind a little po-mo from time to time, as long as it has some invention to it.

New York Trilogy - excellent. Auster is a great writer. 'The Invention of Solitude' is a very moving book. I see 'The Music of Chance' was on again last night. Terrific.

I adore both London Fields and the New york trilogy - but London Fields is a massive metaphor for life, love and greed in Thatcherite and post Thatcherite Britain. It's about so much more than it seems. this was Amis's finest hour (or year or however long it took him to write it) and should be treasured, read and re-read and finally loathed because what it exposes is the maggots in our souls. Oo-er.

OK OK, but *why* is Martin Amis himself, in the book? Why is he a character? Seems a bit self-indulgent to me. On the other hand, there seems to be a bit of the 'father-son' relationship being dealt with in 'Money', and by placing himself in the novel, is Amis himself exorcising his own relationship with his father? Hmm. Callum

On a sentence level, I don't think there's a finer writer than Amis in the UK at present. He's marvellously gifted phrase-maker. On a paragraph level, he's still very good, if a little self-congratulatory. But as a novelist he's a failure ultimately, the body of his work striking me being as curiously empty and meretricious. He has nothing that original to say and he knows it, using every rhetorical trick he can think of to obscure his lack of political and idealogical conviction. He confuses contempt for his fellow human beings with cleverness. He is without empathy and warmth. He tries to pass off snobbery as insightfulness, a small middle-class boy who both fears and sneakily admires his fantasy idea of the working-class man. Like a lot of middle-class writers he sees the substance and prejudices of his own upbringing as rational, as the norm, a norm under threat from popular culture. This is a tired form of Wasteland Modernism, both simplistic and out of date.