Night Train by Martin Amis Cape 149pp, £10.99 in UKMike Hoolihan is tough, real tough; speaks a staccato, defiant prize-fighter argot of broken glass, regrets and melodrama, offering information such as 'I don't know where my parents are. I'm five-ten and I go 180.' Mike Hoolihan is also a police. No, that's not a misprint. 'I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement - or an unusual construction. But it's a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also.'Right from the opening sentence Martin Amis leaves the reader wondering what strange impulse caused him to write Night Train. Mike Hoolihan belongs to the world of B Movie voiceover as parodied by comedians. 'What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. the worst case - for me, that is. When you're a police, 'worst' is an elastic concept. You can't really get a fix on worst'.' As early as the second paragraph, things may be looking bad for Mike Hoolihan, what with that serious dependence on repetition, but they're looking a lot worse for the reader. Not for a minute is the cliched, former abused child Hoolihan believable as a character, much less a woman. Imagine, if you will, a police (sic) who when about to recall her worst case decides first to describe her appearance. Of course, her voice has been "further deepened by three decades of nicotine abuse", while when standing in the bathroom, applying make-up, she reports "Like someone doing a chore. Wiping down a counter. With my mouth meanly clenched. I used to be something, I guess, but now I'm just another big blonde old broad." Heck, why not just utter the immortal line: "I used to be a contender"?
Hoolihan's worst case concerns the murder or suicide of the fantasy girl with everything. Jennifer Rockwell is an astrophysicist, also five-ten and "an embarrassment of perfection. Brilliant, beautiful. Yeah, I'm thinking: To-die-for brilliant. Drop-dead beautiful. And not intimidating - or only as intimidating as the brilliant-beautiful can't help being, no matter how accessible they seem . . . Guys? She combed them out of her hair." The late Jennifer's dad is also a cop, and the man who saved Hoolihan from herself, or at least her alcoholism.
Nothing rings true in this yarn. When Hoolihan goes to tell Jennifer's parents about her death she chants: "Colonel Tom, you know I love you and I'd never lie to you. But it seems your baby girl took her own life, sir. Yes she did. Yes she did." When not spitting out her lines like the street fighter she is, Hoolihan lapses into unconvincing quasi-philosophical meditations such as "sometimes I have the look of a grave child trying not to cry", which only serve to highlight the fact that Martin Amis can certainly mimic speech but he can neither transform nor conceal his voice. Nor can he prevent his intelligence and his increasing preoccupation with death from subverting Hoolihan's idioms, never mind her sketchy character. The story is further weakened by her voyeuristic attitude towards Jennifer, who never seems more than a body. Even when it is dissected for purposes of autopsy, Hoolihan is still lamenting the beauty of Jennifer's body. Forget about Hoolihan the cop, though. Night Train is really the story of Hoolihan the disappointed woman stuck with a slob boyfriend and no dreams - "I am one of the good guys, and I go out there and get the bad guys. I can get the bad guys. But I cannot get the good guys." Repetition does not confer profundity. Nor does knowing about America equal sounding American. Amis's language has American energy and invention - he hears its speech. Money (1984) is as much a celebration of American fiction as it is a tribute to Saul Bellow. But when he tries to write in an exclusively American genre, his language is D.O.A.
Amis began his career as a precocious and gifted social satirist. As early as his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1974), it was obvious he was far more than his father's son. On the publication of his burlesque morality play of a novel, Money, he was already famous, a comic writer of unusual linguistic energy - particularly in the context of contemporary English fiction. With the short-story collection, Einstein's Monsters (1987), he revealed a growing preoccupation with the nuclear threat and the possibility of apocalypse. This preoccupation has run through all his subsequent work. Times's Arrow, which was Booker shortlisted in 1991, is not only his finest, most complex work but serves to highlight Amis's dilemma. He is too clever, too confident, too ambitious and too famous for most critics to accept. Time's Arrow, a compact narrative of immense technical daring, seemed to irritate because it was felt Amis the satirist had no right to explore such an emotive subject as the Holocaust, particularly after his controversial handling of his female characters in London Fields (1989).
The Information (1996), a sharp comedy about a literary rivalry between two former friends, seemed more in keeping with the public perception of Amis's interests. As the theme of information as awareness of death runs through that book, so a similar refrain surfaces in this one. "And here comes the night train. First, the sound of knives being sharpened. Then its cry, harsh but symphonic, like a chord of car horns." Ultimately Hoolihan is neither the tough broad her creator thinks she is, nor the philosopher with street cred Amis believes himself to be. Still, very good writers are entitled to experiment. Pity Amis didn't buy himself a chemistry set instead. In terms of literary style and linguistic verve, few novelists can compete with him, but Night Train is a parodic psycho-thriller gone wrong. A turkey. Looks like even Martin Amis is capable of shooting himself in the foot. No. Make that both feet.
