Taking the whip to language
Gabriele Annan
HEAVY WATER AND OTHER STORIES by Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 114.99, pp.256 The nine short stories collected in Heavy Water were first published between 1976 and 1998, most of them in magazines — the New Yorker, Granta, the New States- man, Esquire, Encounter (which is the odd one out?). They are bravura pieces, demonstrating that there is nothing Amis can't do with language. The New Oxford Dictionary of English contains 2,000 new words, and he must have used at least three quarters of them, mostly with disdain and ridicule. He treats language like an animal trainer treats animals: a dominator showing off, with a touch of sadism. On his most genial form he can be Dickensian: the bald- ing man, for instance, 'with a single strand pasted across his dome, as if one sideburn had thrown a line to the other'. That's about as kind as he gets. The comparison comes in 'State of England', a hilarious, Runyonesque (except that the criminal slang is English) account of sports day at a fee-paying school where most of the par- ents are either bent or Asian. The fathers' track race symbolises their social aspira- tions: they have to compete, however close to the pain barrier the unaccustomed exer- cise may bring them.
In spite of its pretentious punning title, my favourite story is the earliest and short- est: 'Denton's Death'. It was published when Amis was 27, and it's not a bit like Biichner's play: more like Poe or Kafka (and if you're going in for cultural showing off, it's not a good idea to let howlers like Gewurtztraumeiner or ruse du guerre get by). 'Denton's Death' is a depressive's recurring nightmare. Unwashed and alone, he sits in his grungy room, waiting for three execu- tioners to arrive.
He knew that they would be courtly, deferen- tial, urbane. He never seriously doubted that he would warm to, and admire, all three immediately, and wish only that he could have been their friend. He knew that they used a machine.
The imminent, unspecified machine is one of the most threatening literary inventions imaginable, all the more so for being gentle and welcome. 'Denton's Death' is a master- piece of macabre sadness.
Another story that stands out for being more human and humane than the rest is the title story 'Heavy Water', about a work- ing-class mother and her 43-year-old idiot son. She is not badly off, because her estranged husband sends cheques (`she never said he didn't send cheques'), so she takes her poor John on a Mediterranean cruise — a downmarket affair: the boat has lots of Fun Alleys leading 'from the Para- keet Lounge to the Cockatoo Rooms, from the Cockatoo Rooms to the Kingfisher Bar. . . to the Robin's Nest' — a floating Butlin's. The holidaymakers are mostly drunk from mid-morning onwards, and John is mostly in tears. 'Does he always cry then?' asks a fellow passenger. `Or's he just having a good blub?' Has Amis ever been on one of these cruises, then? Or is he just making it up? His description is so utterly convincing in its horror that one feels he must have given it a trial. It's surprising it didn't drive him to suicide, which is what it does to poor John; but John is frustrated by being unable to co-ordinate his hands and feet, so he doesn't manage to get him- self over the ship's railings before his moth- er tracks him down.
`The Conscience of the Arts' belongs to the genre of upper-class Englishmen sponging it in New York. 'The Janitor on Mars' is a funny, clever space fantasy slot- ted, for extra measure, into a frame of pae- dophilia in an orphanage situated on the Welsh border. You can't get more topical than that — or couldn't in 1997. 'Career Move' is a jeu d'esprit: an English poet gets flown club class to LA. The movie people entertain him in the priciest, trendiest venues while they rewrite his sonnet "Tis he whose yester-evening's high disdain' (known as Tis in the studio). First they try it as a villanelle, then in all sorts of other metres, before reverting to the sonnet form; they are also at work on a sequel and prequel for it. Eventually it opens in 437 theatres and 'does 17 million in its first weekend'. Amis doesn't bother to make the performance of a sonnet on the screen seem feasible or imaginable. However, back in England, meanwhile, a scriptwriter called Alistair fruitlessly sends his scripts to little magazines, while he gets his bread by selling advertising space for an agricultural newsletter. It's a vice versa joke, and so is `Straight Fiction'. This one postulates that the normal thing in New York and San Francisco is to be gay, while heterosexuali- ty is generally deplored as being abnormal. A love story develops across the barrier, but it's not very riveting, or even amusing — unlike the send-up of Hollywood in `Career Move'.
All the stories conceal or exhibit an undertow of disgust with life — or at any rate with what is modern about modern life. So the danger is they'll date pretty quickly. This doesn't apply, though, to 'Denton's Death' or 'Heavy Water', there the disgust modulates to weltschmerz, a more durable form of grief.
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