Spike Magazine

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I can’t help but detect a very conservative sensibility
here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of
the ‘Back To Basics’ government campaign: a return to
good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness,
elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious
cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly
appearing in the run up to the Booker Prize or a General
Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs’ reading
habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer,
which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative
reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of
course, who goes down for obvious political reasons
(though it begs the question: who is it that ‘rated’ him
in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt
and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like
a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated.
Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average
MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand.
Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics
hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it?
The importance of a name to plot structure is nowhere
more comically heightened than in Martin Amis’
Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a
financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shakers.
It is the character’s very name that is the source
of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs
if you haven’t read the book). “John: is, I think, the
perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the
BUY books online from and
giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms,
everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else.
(Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm
bells ringing in itself).
“Self” of course embodies the ultimate 80s Thatcherite
‘ideas’ of individualism and survival. But the apposite
brilliance of “John Self” is in making it the central
twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of
things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve
the greed of the players around him. It transpires that
Self has been signing company documents twice; once
under co-signatory, once under “Self”: “It was your
name.” This literary playfulness and close attention to
detail can be traced from Nabokov through the American
heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to
Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis.
The playfulness which employs hyperreal and
ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best exemplified
by Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Here the names
are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous
(viz. Pulp Fiction: “This is America: names don’t mean
shit”). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and
subversion in the name “Yossarian” (which is noted by
one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also
the double “Major Major” (which has recently been recycled
as the title of Terry Major-Ball’s autobiography)
and the sub-Dickensian “Chaplain Tapmann”. “Milo
Minderbinder” is a personal favourite, conjuring up
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