Martin Amis's 'Money': An unfilmable book? There's no such thing Adapting Martin Amis's 'Money' is the latest challenge to the screenwriter's art, says Tim Martin.
Published: The Telegraph, 13 Nov 2009


'Money' by Martin Amis (pictured) has been considered unfilmable for its style Photo: Eleanor Bentall

Dense, witty and highly literary, Martin Amis's Money is one of the last novels one might expect to see in line for adaptation. But the word "unfilmable" is increasingly a red rag to a screenwriter, so the BBC's announcement that it has adapted the book as a two-part drama for BBC Two should perhaps come as no surprise. However, we can only guess, as yet, what the screenwriters have made of it.

Money is the story of John Self, a director of TV commercials who is "addicted to the 20th century" – booze, junk food, pornography, sex and wealth. When he's summoned to Hollywood to direct a film called "Big Money", featuring the past-it sex maniac Lorne Guyland (based on Kirk Douglas) and the meathead young Christian Spunk Davis, he is plunged into a frenzy of tragic consumption and excess that will eventually strip everything he owns away from him.
So far, so satirical, but Money has traditionally been considered unfilmable for a single reason, its style. It's vintage-period Martin Amis, written after the author had digested his most conspicuous stylistic influences, Nabokov and Bellow, but before his prose became engorged with its own importance or turned, as in his angry and divisive pieces after September 11, towards more naked social comment. It's a young man's book, bursting with zip and style, in love with its own backchat and the medley of slangy neologisms it presents.

Amis throws out coinages like a slot-machine paying out: John Self's dispirited, sagging apartment is "the Sock", a haircut is "a rug-rethink". There are sentences that pullulate with excess, descriptions that hum with mad vitality. Self moans: "By now I am a crackling sorcerer of grub and booze." Amis effortlessly summons up a limousine as "a six-door Autocrat, half a block long, complete with zooty chauffeur and black bodyguard riding shotgun".

But there are other problems. Money is also, somewhat mawkishly, a work of postmodern fiction, a novel about writing a novel and constructing a plot. As such, it introduces to the text a character called Martin Amis, who pops up frequently to deliver knowing homilies on the nature of fiction before evaporating as though he'd never existed. Quite how this gets into a BBC drama is hard to see, though perhaps the omission will go down better in some quarters than in others. Amis has said that his appearance in his own narrative was the point at which his father Kingsley "stopped and sent Money twirling through the air".
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