Book review by Roy of 'Night Train' by Martin Amis
Martin Amis’s ‘Night Train’
Here's
a late hour choice I have.
A
night spent tossing or a night spent in an extraordinary world of reading
Martin Amis', NIGHT TRAIN?
Fucking
some choice.
You
are going to spend all that time, absorbing, questioning, accepting a world
written by someone you don’t know or don’t have to care about, and a world
you’ll never be in and in fact, one that doesn’t exist; there’s something that
keeps it burning. When you read.
NIGHT
TRAIN - you'll know about suicide, you'll know about cops, you'll know about
wrecks. And the havoc all this wreaks. You'll know motives, and you'll know
human nature. And, then you'll know a lot more.
What
makes a good read?
Characters
Language
Story
/ plot
And
that unknown factor
Isn't
that the sauce for a novel?
These
can't be pre-had, they come together somehow when the efforts are right.
Reading
NIGHT TRAIN, the language takes you over, the empathy with the characters – you
are right with the characters in every scene, in every wandering of their
thoughts. When they question, you question. At times you want to let them have
their own thoughts, cos’ there’s a point of departure – you can only empathise
but you can’t belong in their world. But you go right along.
I
stayed up all night last night, slept only when I finished reading the last
page. At 7am. I started reading this book only on 29th July - two days ago.
You
dance a dance macabre in your head over the last page. You are excited about
something that’s pure words. Only words, nothing more. You are right there to
the last step, breath and when the word gets empty, you are fucked. You needed
more. Even though you paced yourself towards the end. You even wanted the end.
I
was awake at 4am and next I know there’s birds chirping, and standing idiots
honking their way through the spacious world. There’s light coming in and
you’re still reading, unaware.
And,
Martin Amis is the son of a literary luminary; Kingsley Amis (His writing,
'beautiful humor').
I
had read MONEY by Martin Amis a year ago. It knocks you right out of the river.
Then, you read NIGHT TRAIN, and your lungs heave, you’re getting dragged right
in.
What
starts with language, style and pace that is dictated by the narrator – and,
what a narrator she turns out to be – you accept it all. Then when you are
getting rolled right in those hands – and, you’ll never know when you’ve
slipped into those hands – you get taken in by the character’s world, and
what’s afflicting the character. You think you know something, wait till that
belief and those lies are out in the harsh lights.
JUST
to match up: I read the NY Times and The Guardian reviews:
"This
book a haunting, unsettling quality that Amis has never achieved before."
"Unlike
his other works, it asks you not to keep your distance, but to come close and
suffer with the narrator."
"Anthony
Burgess said there are two kinds of writers: A-writers and B-writers,"
Amis said in his 1998 Paris Review interview. "A-writers are storytellers.
B-writers are users of language. And I tend to be grouped in the Bs."
Prose is foremost, and "if the prose isn't there, then you're reduced to
what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation,
psychological insight and form". Masters of the B-writer type to whom Amis
is more or less indebted are Nabokov, Joyce and Dickens. You'd struggle to see
them as hobbled.
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