22 DECEMBER 1984, Page 42

Harold Acton

A kind friend has just sent me Money, by Martin Amis, which has fascinated and horrified me by fits and starts. Still reeling from the nightmare shock of this extraor- dinary novel, I visualise Martin Amis as a fine prose-poet of our modern Inferno. Money is something quite new in contem- porary fiction. Young Amis is a lord of language, a successor to James Joyce's Ulysses. His lack of faith is regrettable but, like certain Elizabethans, he is evidently inspired by the spectacle of decay. A conversion to Cardinal Newman might well produce a masterpiece. He approaches one in his surrealistic Money. Although it may not be my best book of the year, it has deeply impressed this octogenarian.