I know this is going to get me into an awful lot of trouble, but I really don’t think the TV adaptation of Martin Amis’s Money (BBC2, Sunday, Wednesday) was that bad.
I know this is going to get me into an awful lot of trouble, but I really don’t think the TV adaptation of Martin Amis’s Money (BBC2, Sunday, Wednesday) was that bad. Of course, though, I do see the main problem — which was neatly described in the Telegraph by Michael Deacon.
Deacon quoted two of the paragraphs that made the book the defining English novel of the Eighties:
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.
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