By HENRY SUTTON author of Get Me Out of Here

What was Martin Amis really thinking about when, way back in the early 1980s (the novel of course first being published in 1984) he set down to write Money?

The little post-modern pointer, about the novel being a ‘suicide note’ in place of the usually pretentious epigraph, and which is attributed to ‘M. A.’ and dated London, September 1981, on page one (or in fact page 6 of my Jonathan Cape hardback first edition) suggests that while we should read slowly and lookout for clues and giveaways by the end of the novel John Self will no longer exist.

Now it’s long been acknowledged that Amis’ sublime, seminal masterpiece was in many ways a great, whoppingly entertaining yet hugely nimble intellectual treaty on the death of the self – get it? Amis himself even appeared in the story – the author as the master of the universe, which of course all authors are, one way or another.

However, and as can so often happen with great works that don’t just stand the test of time but actually shape it (and Money did in spades – certainly in a literary context) original messages get lost, intentions and observations get somehow betrayed, and the characters don’t just live on but grow and grow and grow.

For what it’s worth, I have always felt that the subtext, the subplot, the prevailing undercurrent - whatever you want to call it – ghosting the novel, wasn’t so much the death of the self (John, or anyone else), let alone, and in a Roland Barthes’ way, the death of the author (as in the inherent redundancy of someone as talented and original as Mart – in such a culturally vacuous age), it was almost the exact opposite. It was about excess, exuberance, energy, in every sense – two fingers to Barthes and his like. It was about just what could be done with fiction, in a strikingly fiction-less world, or at least in a rather dumb, money-orientated world.

Now the BBC’s TV adaptation got some of this right and some of this wrong. Most notably – indeed the thing that hogged the screen from start to finish, wasn’t just Nick Frost as John Self, it was Nick Frost’s bulk. The director certainly took on board Amis’ concept of and intention to define excess – and some. It was almost as if the thinking went – so how do we make John Self even more larger than life? (Quite something for a literary construct hinting at an existential sense of not-existing.)

The answer seems to have, almost moronically simply, to make him fatter. Check out Page 35 on Money, and you’ll come across the line (yet another brilliant line), as John Self gears himself up for that game of tennis – ‘Me, I lolloped and leapt for my life at the other end, 200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food,’. There – 200 pounds. That’s nothing, not today, not in 2010. It’s only 14 stone – or 90 kilograms. A virtual featherweight.

So did the BBC cast the wrong yob? Because let’s face it Nick Frost has to weigh double that – quite possibly more. Or did the BBC curtail to the times and make Self correspondingly fat? Or was the BBC simply sticking with what I regard to be the central premise that what Money is really about is excess? Whichever way, Money will live on, challenging and expanding literary sensibility, while Nick Frost is a very fat actor indeed.

HENRY SUTTON author of
Get Me Out of Here