Adam Mars-Jones
HEAVY WATER AND OTHER STORIES by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape)
Without the story State of England, this would be a dismaying volume to come from the champion British fiction writer of his generation. Unlike his tightly themed previous collection, Einstein’s Monsters, this one brings together early work (two stories from the Seventies, one from the Eighties) and more recent. One piece, The Janitor on Mars, in Amis’s science-fiction vein, appears here for the first time.
Amis published the title story in 1978, and rewrote it in 1997, though the changes he made then are puzzling. Despite some tweaks of style – he catches out his younger self in a moment of understatement and amends the sea’s “thousand eyes” to “million” – the fussy manner of the original remains (“slivers of crimson light slipped over the oil-stained water like mercurial rain off fat lilies”). Other changes are more substantial.
The problem for the reader of the early Amis was always that the atmosphere of corrosive disgust seemed to pre-exist and even overshadow the world conjured up to account for it. In his revisions, Amis seeks to mitigate this problem by devising further humiliations for Mother, who takes her subnormal adult son, John, on a cruise.
So she only thinks she wins at bingo. She is shamed when John lurches aggressively at some hectoring fellow-passengers. She is denied a tender memory, “a single teetering kiss” with her late husband, and, indeed, denied a late husband. In the original, her husband died when John was 18 months old; in the rewrite, he left when John was 14 years old, and “apparently a normal little boy”.
The new version has the merit of denying Mother the dignity of widowhood, but it also has a curdled sentimentality about it, as if present-day Amis were wildly overstating the importance of paternal presence in the lives of adolescent boys. It’s highly implausible, to boot, since normal 14-year-olds have the power of expressive speech, which John lacks.
If Amis removes a homophobic parenthesis from Heavy Water (“the Caller was a queer, by the way, and made no secret of the fact, to Mother’s disgust”), it isn’t from any feebly fashionable qualm, as he shows in the story Straight Fiction, published in 1995. The idea of transposing the relative prestige of homo- and heterosexuality isn’t new: Anthony Burgess used it as the basis of his early novel, The Wanting Seed, in which overpopulation results in the universal obligation to swish about in public, and public- information posters announce that “It’s Sapiens To Be Homo”.
Amis’s story of the rise of straight liberation in an alternative United States, with all the inversions that go with it, is much less ambitious. He seems so taken with his device as not to notice how little is changed by it, so that all the old sneers can be rehabilitated. The story is not so much offensive as lazy – or rather, its offence is laziness. Some of Amis’s best friends may be gay, but it’s a good bet they aren’t prissy bodybuilders.
The hero of the story finds himself drawn to the other persuasion, despite his recoil from the seeping biology of women and babies. The odd thing here is the chime with an earlier Amis moment, the reference in Money to gay men fleeing the lunar tempest.
Heterosexuality in Amis’s books has often seemed to be only dimly connected with a love for or liking of women, and homosexuality is not a perversion so much as a form of cowardice, a flinching from a hormonal cauldron agreed to be repellent, as if women were a dirty job – but somebody’s got to do them.
The final story in the collection – What Happened to Me on My Holiday – also boasts a gimmick, being written in a phonetic approximation of transatlantic English, so that “sarcastic” becomes “zargazdig”. This device is highly successful in itself, making the reader grope and stumble in the footsteps of the narrator, an 11-year-old boy trying to absorb the death of a friend only a few years older. But again, Amis seems unable to acknowledge its limitations. The 11-year-old is Amis’s son Louis, and Amis himself puts in an appearance, rescuing a non-swimming four-year-old from the water with tremendous cool, before resuming his poolside cigarette.
It’s as if Amis wants to move directly from real and attested incidents to the cosmic lessons to be learned from them, while declaring any intervening area of speculation off-limits. As mere readers, mute receivers of insight, we aren’t even entitled to know how Elias Fawcett, 1978-1996, died.
No amount of rhetoric can prevent the reader from asking irrelevant and distracting questions: how does Amis Jnr feel about his stepmother being “big with jiled”? Does the lad read Terry Pratchett when Dad’s not looking?
Luckily, Heavy Water and Other Stories contains State of England, to remind readers of what this writer can do, when eye and ear engage with brain and spleen. The story is cut from the same soiled and spangled cloth of Amis’s thrilling and frustrating London trilogy, but with none of the formal looseness or repetition. The device of superimposing sophisticated insights on to the mindset of a caricaturally unreflective character, awkward on its first appearance in Money – where the hero seemed to have two separate IQs simultaneously – is now infinitely more assured.
The narrative follows Big Mal as humiliation approaches him in the form of sports day at his son Jet’s school, and the fathers’ race. The story is full of dodgy politics ascribable to the character (whites as the new blacks, for instance, not a diktat from the fashion pages but a description of an underclass), and dodgy lyrical generalisations characteristic of the author – “Dads are always racing, racing against each other, against themselves. That’s what dads do.”
It’s still a triumph of compression and extravagance, in which there can even be felt that twinge within contempt which approximates, in these latitudes, to sympathy.