Money Book

Yes, you are right. Money is about 'Money'. But not the everyday money one needs to go on with the daily business of living. It is 'The Money'. The sort people go bonkers to attain to overcome their fears. To suppress the 'thinking monster' who is ready to rear its head at a moment's notice, when the guards are low, those fleeting moments when lust or power hang on to relax, freeing the mind from their rein temporarily. But that freedom is ephemeral, for there is no escape from Money.

John Self is a rogue. One, who is impatient to make money, more and more money in life to spend in excess. One who remains drunk all day long. Night too. For days at stretch. Indulges in sex. Want to make porn movies. To make more money. You get the picture, right? And what with the abysmal language Amis writes this work in? What can one expect to find? Why should it be rated five stars?

Well, why shouldn't it be? This isn't a work to be disregarded. The writing may be despicable, the characters detestable, but it unveils the ugliness of a society doomed in the mire of lust and money. To render the effect of Money, when it becomes the only driving force of an individual or a society, how it blinds the senses, influences the mind and compels to stifle the conscience, seems the chief concern of the writer. And what better way to illustrate that other than writing it in an appalling language; making the ugliness still more evident. But the work isn't only that. It is a struggle; a longing to find a meaning, a restlessness to make sense of the living amidst the chaos, while understanding too well that there is no solution to being born. Despair abounds.

Morning came, and I got up ... That doesn't sound particularly interesting or difficult, now does it? I bet you do it all the time. Listen, though ' I had a problem here. For instance, I was lying face-down under a hedge or bush or some blighted shrub in a soaked allotment full of nettles, crushed cigarette packs, used condoms and empty beercans. It was quite an appropriate place for me to be born again, which is what it felt like. Obviously it hurts, being born: that's why you scream and weep.

John Self is deplorable, but he tries hard to think. But the hard he tries to think, the harder he tries to suppress it; getting drunk and fornicating.

Number four is the real intruder. I don't want any of these voices but I especially don't want this one. It is the most recent. It has to do with quitting work and needing to think about things I never used to think about. It has the unwelcome lilt of paranoia, of rage and weepiness made articulate in spasms of vividness; drunk talk played back sober.

He suppress it because he doesn't know what to do with the thinking, how to answer the question when they keep popping. Frank, on the phone, the one who stalks him, seems to be his doppelganger, trying to make John think. Perhaps he is made up by John, so that he can still hear his own voice although trying hard to smother it. Martina too makes him think, although she makes him panicky.

The thing about Martina is ' the thing about Martina is that I can't find a voice to summon her with. The voices of money, weather and pornography (all that uncontrollable stuff), they just aren't up to the job when it comes to Martina. I think of her and there is speechless upheaval in me ' I feel this way when I'm in Zurich, Frankfurt or Paris and the locals can't speak the lingo. My tongue moves in search of patterns and grids that simply are not there. Then I shout ...

He tries reading books in order to be able to talk to Martina. Though he isn't very smart, but he knows he is missing something in life which can be grasped by reading books.

The bookish, the contemplative life. Martina, she's even cured my tinnitus. Not a squeak for over three hours. The big thing about reading and all that is'you have to be in a fit state for it. Calm. Not picked on. You have to be able to hear your own thoughts, without interference.


But there is no escape from Money, its claws fastening more as one tries to escape. John cannot help it. He cannot hide from Money. And it is his greed, his inability to take control which brings his doom. When he sits there defeated, a part of me can sympathize with him, for the ruin he is faced with, is brought about by a being a part of the society where money is supreme and where 'thinking' spirals downwards as debauchery, greed and lust rise to unleash their power.

This book is a masterpiece. Highly recommended.