Brit Noir
Martin Amis has long evinced
his fascination with American culture, so it should come as no surprise that he
has brought out an American novel. Or, anyway, a simulacrum of an American
novel. The work is, of course, an hommage to the police-procedural genre
for which Americans are principally known overseas. This is true of most
entries in the fiction wing of the body of American-culture simulacra produced
by aliens. Like most items in the music department of the same phenomenon, it
is a riff.
Some
might glance at the book and decide that it is meant to be Amis' Elmore Leonard
moment, recalling his praise for that master of fibrous plots and low-key
sociology. But Night Train is light on plot and nearly Martian in its
sociology, so it might better be seen as Amis' Mark Knopfler moment. Like the
lead guitarist of the erstwhile Dire Straits, Amis is a stolid, middle-class
New Briton blessed with considerable chops, torn between worldly cynicism and a
certain nostalgie de la boue , whose wish to get down and dirty is
undertaken professionally but stops a bit short of conviction. They are both
smart enough to notice you noticing this, and their answers are identical: more
sixteenth notes! In Amis' case, what this entails is cascades and arabesques of
language.
Night Train is a monologue, delivered by one Detective Mike
Hoolihan, a physically intimidating, seen-it-all, tough-but-tender veteran of
every rotten assignment in the police precincts of Anytown, USA. Hoolihan is
also a woman, as she reminds the reader no more than once per paragraph. Police
salaries being what they are, she lives in a comically tilted slum flat down by
the railroad tracks, where deep in the night the titular conveyance roars by
and sets the coffee cups a-rattling. She shares the dump with her latest in a
series of hulking morons, or so she alleges. She only alludes to Tobe, failing
to introduce him to the reader, who is tempted to conclude that Tobe belongs to
the race of 6-foot-tall rabbits.
On this
day, Mike has got her worst job yet. She has to notify next of kin in a
suicide, and not just any suicide. The corpus delicti was once Jennifer
Rockwell, who was both bodacious gorgeousness personified and the essence of
braininess, an astrophysicist, in her day job. Mike has known Jennifer since
the latter was a tyke. Jennifer was a sprout of the local cop dynasty, the only
one not to wear the blue herself. All her brothers are cops, and her dad is
such an overwhelming cop of a cop they made him a colonel. "Colonel Tom," as he
is called throughout, has taken Mike under his capacious wing and seen her
through detox and depression and all the rest of it, as if she were another
daughter of his.
So Mike's heart is heavy, but she is still a
police, as she likes to put it. She takes a quick look at the situation and her
analytical mind snaps to. In addition to beauty and brains, the deceased had
charm, wealth, and a fulfilling love-machine relationship with a fellow double
dome, Professor Trader Faulkner, a roguish but loyal wearer of tweed jackets
with leather patches on the elbows. Does that sound like a recipe for
self-offing? Not to our Mike, who starts investigating pronto, although the
field of potential murderers is as thin as the motive directory. At length her
researches lead her into terrain that is nearly spiritual or something. Could
Jennifer--who apparently managed to put three bullets into her lovely
brain--have killed herself because of the absurdity of the simultaneously
expanding and contracting universe?
Don't
count on finding out. Amis' game is sixteenth notes or, in this case, a run
through the candy store of American slang. Like the blues as played by suburban
virtuosos, the story itself is little more than a structural excuse for a show
of wizard dexterousness. Mike is the only character. Background noise is
supplied by other members of her department, but they are cut and pasted from a
vague memory of Barney Miller . After Faulkner's cameo, he presumably
returned to the Folgers Crystals commercial from which he was borrowed. Most
others, like Tobe and Col. Tom, are flickering wraiths. The MacGuffin, Jennifer
Rockwell, might occupy center stage as a corpse, but the reader doesn't believe
in her previous existence for a minute. She joins the parade of other scarily
perfect, not remotely credible woman-objects in Amis' fiction, such as Nicola
Six, who plots her own murder in London Fields .
Is Night Train intended to be the record of Mike
Hoolihan's dt-induced hallucinations? You tell me. What is certain is that it
represents Amis' tabulation of his own verbal pink elephants. He would
experience them in this form anyway, since here, as elsewhere in his
oeuvre , he appears curiously absent of any visual sense. He wallows in
Americaness, especially cop talk. He likes the idea of hollow cant being
delivered in clipped cadences by a broad, especially one under emotional
strain. Sometimes you don't know whether he did his research by letting himself
be washed by television for endless stretches, or whether he went so deep he
knows expressions you've never heard (or haven't heard since fifth grade: Do
cops ever refer to a perp as a "hoody"?).
He savors verbal dandruff
("state-of-the-art," "parameters") and jargon (the verbs "to badge" and "to be
rigored"), but mostly he likes the rhythm, the tattoo, of fuck s and
shit s and excuse me s. This doesn't prevent him from dishing out
the fine writing, though; he has Mike get pretty fancy, to the point of
spouting Latin. Anyway, the language business is the only conceivable motive
for this book. Perhaps foreigners will thrill to the exotica, as a sort of
high-lit gloss on Jerry Springer territory. Otherwise, it goes nowhere, for no
reason, has no friction and no ending. A pint of the "fortified wine" that
shares the book's name would make a better investment.
