James Delingpole
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Deafened with caffeine, I was just a hot robot, a ticking grid of jet-lag, time-jump and hangover.
and
We came lancing in over the bay, just in time to see the stretched arcs of silver and slack loops of gold, the forms and patterns that streets don’t know they make.
And then he contrasted it with the kind of lines the same character — John Self, the book’s narrator and protagonist — is given in voiceover in the TV adaptation: ‘I didn’t feel as rubbish as I should ’ave.’
In other words, the TV version has managed to excise the very thing that makes the book distinctive and brilliant: the swaggering, flashy, overamplified prose that so perfectly suited the style-over-content Eighties zeitgeist.
But is that really such a disaster? The point, surely, about Amis’s prose is that it was designed to be read in books, not on a screen in voiceover. That’s probably why he only ever wrote one screenplay — the disastrous Saturn 3 with Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett, whose genesis probably inspired Money. He can’t do plot (or at least he can only do one plot, where it starts out well and then goes horribly wrong and there’s a twist at the end) and he can barely do character. What he can do better than anyone, though, is write Martin Amis novels.
I remember reading Money when it came out and being so full of reverence I couldn’t really enjoy it. Amis was running on pure genius when he wrote it, no question. Every other paragraph, you’d be going, ‘Gosh! That was a good sentence!’ But this made it more akin to reading a prose poem than a novel, and towards the middle I found myself wishing it would end rather sooner than it does.
Money is all ‘voice’ and once that voice has delighted you enough, there’s little other reason to read on. The TV version suffers from a similar problem. As far as John Self goes, no actor could have been better cast than Nick Frost (Spaced, Hot Fuzz, etc.). I’ve seen — at least I think I have — Mel Smith playing Self, but he just came across as corpulent and unpleasant. Of course, Self is corpulent and unpleasant, but on screen that isn’t enough. You need a fat actor so underlyingly lovable that, even if he were to drown kittens live on screen, you’d still be thinking, ‘Delightful bloke. He’s doing it because he cares.’
True to the book, the TV adaptation is all surface: the greasiness of Self’s fried breakfasts, the Pirelli calendar luridness of Selina, the leathery blackness of Self’s New York hotel suite, the mirror’s-eye-view lines of coke being snorted by one of Self’s ad agency colleagues, the tiny nostalgic details like the smoking on aeroplanes and the flight tickets where you tore off a strip for each leg of the journey rather than printed your own from your computer. But once you’ve got used to the ‘This IS the Eighties!’ theme, you’ve got the entire point. And, if anyone is to be blamed for that, it’s Amis, for writing a book so devoid of drama it’s essentially unfilmable.
The Stones in Exile: an Imagine Special (BBC1, Sunday) was about the recording in 1971 of Exile on Main St. in the sweaty basement of Keith Richards’s rented villa in the South of France. It confirmed something I’ve always suspected about the Rolling Stones: that their look, their vibe, their image and their legend are far more compelling than anything they achieved musically.
Quite the most shocking thing about the documentary wasn’t the revelation that they’d recruited an eight-year-old to roll their joints for them (the boy — now middle-aged — sounded remarkably well adjusted and was fully aware what a privilege it had been to observe the Stones up close in their pomp) but the reason for their exile. Tax rates in Britain at that time were running at 93 per cent, which meant — as Charlie Watts recalled — that you could earn a million on tour and still only take home £70,000. And there was I thinking Britain was an almost unendurably socialist hellhole now. How on earth did anyone survive back then?
Fortunately — as always — a fine snapper (Dominique Tarlé) was on hand to capture their French sojourn with beautiful footage of the band with their families, their chefs, their dealers, their musicians, everyone looking gorgeous and coolly wasted and wearing perfect Seventies clothes. You could watch this stuff for hours. Pity about the actual record, which hasn’t really lasted. It just sounds like an extended blues jam — which is pretty much what it was.
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