Product Description

This is the story of John Self, consumer extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly and does reckless movie-world business, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4398 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Guardian
'Terribly, terminally funny: laughter in the dark, if ever I heard it'

Guardian
'Terribly, terminally funny: laughter in the dark, if ever I heard it'

About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. Koba the Dread, the successor to his celebrated memoir, Experience, was published by Cape in 2002.

Customer Reviews

Smart-ass brilliance
Amis gets a bad press, and you can see why. Why is a middle class novelist from London writing in this smart-ass cool American jargon? Why is he so clearly in love with this disposable cynical money grabbing pornographic transatlantic culture that this book is rubbishing? I started the book in this mode of thought, ready to hate it. But the language and the rhythm and the wit are so brilliant, and so energetic, that I was completely won over after 50 pages or so. This is a Hogarthian world of exploitation and indulgence. John Self tries to get on the gravy train but ends up being shafted himself.

The book is also very, very funny. The scenes when John explains to the young Hollywood brat pack movie actor Spunk Davis that it might be helpful for the British market if he changed his first name, and when a prostitute asks him if he is very excited at the impending Diana and Charles wedding had me laughing out loud.

I even forgive his having John meet a dull British novelist, one Martin Amis, in a café and signing him up as screenwriter.

Sure it is self consciously clever. But I would rather have the brilliance that is here than not at all. And it is good to read a serious book that is actually dealing directly with our times rather than some time in the past (like most of the contemporary novels I read).

Very exuberant language
I chose to read this book as it was included in the recent Guardian list as one of the books best evoking the 1980s. And it had been sitting unread on a bookshelf for ages....
It's the story of John Self as he weaves his way through life, revelling in money, sex, alcohol and pornography. From a background in advertising he is caught up in plans to make a film in US but gradually falls foul of a financial scam and his world gradually falls apart. Very exuberant language - including some very evocative invented names for actors, fast food etc. Martin Amis appears as a character - this is done in a clever and intriguing way and not as an ego trip.
There are lots of literary references eg Otello the opera (Self get the plot wrong!) and a car called Iago. Reference to Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 also very funny. Most characters are venal and untrustworthy and the whole book is a mixture of darkness and hilarity.

Grubby stuff
Amis's punchy narrative, infused with colloquial wordplay and urban street talk, complements his hero's (the intriguingly named John Self) socially schizophrenic lifestyle. Self is launched into the money rich pseudo reality of the film industry bumping backwards and forwards between the pub based childhood memories of his London origins and a New York fantasy world of strip joints and intoxication. I found the author's style highly engaging, packed with comic material (fruit machine rage, junk food diets, Martin Amis) and themes of a dark cynical nature. I enjoyed the historical backdrop: allusions to the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in contrast to news of serious rioting in London. The characters inhabiting both urban settings are hilarious, scheming, self-indulgent egotists and caricatures of attention seeking celebrity, society's misfits and money obsessed grifters. And how I laughed! I had to put the book down on several occasions due to passages such as the one describing Self's driving paranoia. This was the first Amis I had read and it took me a few pages to get on the right `wavelength' and enjoy the rhythm of Amis's literary style. For Self the status and prestige bought by money and the blinkered desire to have money are shown to be a destructive cycle of self inflicted physical and mental abuse, sexploitation and violence. I don't think Self is a nice person but his story is deeply funny.