The Columbia History of the British Novel

Money is subtitled 'A Suicide Note,' and the idea, it seems, is that our narrator, the boisterous, violent, drunken, unlovable John Self, will be dead by the time we get to the end of the text. 'You can never tell, though, with suicide notes, can you?' Amis writes in a preface, and sure enough John Self seems to survive, a beneficiary of life's kindness to bastards. But then within his rambling, pushy, often very funny tale, a tribute to Amis's ability to find an English that is not midAtlantic but transatlantic, an amazing mixture of American slang and British snot, there is this writer, a fellow called… Martin Amis. Does he survive along with Self? What would Self have made of Flaubert's parrot?

Money is probably the strongest of all Amis's very clever novels, because the sheer nastiness of the central character fuels a seemingly inexhaustible wit. John Self on the tennis court, John Self trying (in vain) to rape his girlfriend, John Self exploring pornography, John Self throwing up in various choice locations-these are all set pieces that argue a kind of dark love for the horrors of the contemporary world, as if its very tackiness made it a candidate for affection. And the prose has fine, fulsome metaphors: 'I am still a high-risk zone. I am still inner city.'

My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and- bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it's Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. -979-

There are cities and cities, though. Glasgow is described in Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981) as 'the sort of industrial city where most people live nowadays but nobody imagines living.' It would be hard to imagine. The gloom and drabness of Gray's Glasgow is paralleled only by that of the same city seen by his grimly amused compatriot James Kelman. Both Glasgows make Amis's sleazy London and New York seem perfectly pastoral places by comparison. Yet, gloomy as the scene is, it provokes some of the most stylish and imaginative writing to have appeared in Britain recently. Gray and Kelman, like Rushdie and Amis, are writers for whom literature exists; they don't hide their reading as a previous generation was wont to do. Indeed they flaunt their allusions with a carelessness that is the reverse of the pretention British writers have always so feared. 'To be alone and without gods is death says Hölderlin,' we read in Kelman's Disaffection (1989), 'but Hölderlin was wrong and is a poor bastard… Fuck Hölderlin he's deid and buried.' Lanark has a long mock note of its own 'plagiarisms,' running from Anon and Borges to Xenophon and Zoroaster. Hamlet is an influence, we learn, because it is a play 'in which heavy-handed paternalism forces a weak-minded youth into dread of existence, hallucinations and crime.' The story of Lanark, no less.

Apart from their Glasgow and their wit and their literary resources Gray and Kelman are quite different; Gray an experimentalist, juggling time and tones, starting his book at a late stage of his story, placing his prologue in the middle, Kelman a sort of dour, demotic Kafka, dryly observing the follies of terminally bewildered people. Patrick Doyle, in A Disaffection, is a Latin teacher in a bleak school, worrying a little about his age, and Kelman's language catches Patrick's complicated awareness of his own comic status, the self-mockery amid the gloom: 'He did not wish to dwell continually on the passing years. Here he was turning thirty years of age. Thirty years of age is regarded as a landmark, a watershed, a stage of departure. At that age Jesus Christ entered the teaching profession and Joseph K worked out his guilt.'

Fiction in these novels is not an alternative to history, it is a reading of history's failures, a mode of irony. From Rushdie's teeming India through Amis's hustling England and America to Gray and Kelman's northern dampnesses, the imagination asks us to think about what is missing from these worlds, what strange losses have occurred of what ought to be human. In a lighter though not less brilliant vein the early novels of Peter Ackroyd (and indeed Ackroyd's biographies of Eliot and -980- Dickens) explore a similar question through travels to the past, whether in the impeccable Wildean pastiche of The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), the historical crime- world of Hawksmoor (1985), or the intricate literary fakeries of Chatterton (1987). It's not that the past is another country, as L. P. Hartley memorably said in The Go-Between. The past is our country, scarcely disguised; the angled mirror of our diffuse and distressed present.

The Sexual Circus

Angela Carter is mistress of a complicated and quirky register of tones and voices-as if a disrespect for stylistic decorum was itself a style and a liberation. Her fiction and her prose are full of re-angled fables and fairy tales, and more broadly, all her work resists the subservience of fiction to gloomy fact. Her most substantial and rewarding novel, Nights at the Circus (1984), although set in the last months of the nineteenth century, refuses all allegiance to what Carter mockingly calls 'authentic history.' It charts another, livelier but no less human, narrative, a story of hubris, imagination, and desire. Yet what is most disconcerting about the book, perhaps, is not its lovingly assembled collection of freaks or its capacious plot, always ready to welcome a stray tale to its ample bosom, but its very odd diction. 'Lor' love you, sir,' it opens in stage cockney, introducing us to Fevvers, the famous winged lady trapeze artist, toast of Europe, friend of Toulouse-Lautrec, a woman who has 'deformed the dreams' of an entire generation in Vienna. She is a sort of Zuleika Dobson of the music halls, a large, coarse, kindly person, constantly downing eel pies and bacon sandwiches and champagne, but she does also fly.

What made her remarkable as an aerialiste… was the speed-or rather the lack of it-with which she performed even the climactic triple somersault… The music went much faster than she did; she dawdled. Indeed, she did defy the laws of projectiles, because a projectile cannot mooch along its trajectory.

Are her wings real or fake, fact or fiction? Fevvers laughs at the very idea of the question. She was brought up in an East End brothel run by a one-eyed Madame whimsically known as Nelson; puts in a spell at the dreaded Madame Schreck's museum of women monsters; escapes from the clutches of a wealthy necromancer who is intent on having her as a human sacrifice; signs up with a circus touring Russia, where she runs -981- into bandits, shamans, revolutionaries. 'Nobility of spirit hand in hand with absence of analysis,' she thinks, 'that's what's always buggered up the working class.' She doesn't always speak like an extra from My Fair Lady. 'Like any young girl,' she says early in her tale, 'I was much possessed with the marvellous blooming of my until then reticent and undemanding flesh.' And later: 'The clock was, you might say, the sign, or signifier of Ma Nelson's little private realm.' You might say: we are clearly in a zone of parody here, but parody of what? 'This is some kind of heretical possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself.' The parody, I suggest, attacks all dialects, high or low, that think they are better than others; and furthermore, attacks the very idea of a single narrative voice, even when it comes from one person. More subtly, the parody subverts notions of taste and writerly control.

The books ends in glee, that of Fevvers and everyone else in her world: 'The spiralling tornado of Fevvers' laughter began to twist and shudder across the entire globe, as if in a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived and breathed, everywhere, was laughing.' Fevvers has understood the joke of life, and also the freedom that lives in jokes, including the freedom from taking her own symbolism too seriously. She is the New Woman, as Ma Nelson says, 'the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no woman will be bound down to the ground.' It's hard to be sure whether 'waiting in the wings' is a gag about flight or just one metaphor stepping on the toes of another. The conflation of being bound and bowing down is similarly ambiguous. But then this uncertainty is the secret of Carter's later prose, and this is how Fevvers talks, a sort of Mrs. Malaprop who has read Kate Millett: 'And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I.' Fevvers is a revision, an inversion of the myth of Leda and the Swan, prominently mentioned in the text. The knockabout prose, the intellectual burlesque, help us to see that urgent causes can work through cliché and come out the other side.

And the same causes can work around clichés as well as through them. What Carter does in this novel with tigers, to take one instance among many, says a great deal about what she thinks is possible and desirable for women and men. The tigers in the circus wonder, every time they go into their act, why they are so pleased to do as they are -982- told: 'For just one unprotected minute, they pondered the mystery of their obedience and were astonished by it.' In a later, haunting image, tigers disappear into mirrors when the circus train crashes: broken tigers into broken glass. 'On one fragment of mirror, a paw with the claws out; on another, a snarl. When I picked up a section of flank, the glass burned my fingers.' Later still, a group of tigers, entranced by music, lie on the roof of a house in the middle of the Siberian nowhere, 'stretched across the tiles like abandoned greatcoats.' It would be easy to maul these scenes with interpretation; hard to miss their magical air of violence not tamed but transposed,