Night Train
Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape hbk, 149 pgs, £10.99
since reissued as a £5.99 Vintage paperback
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

"I am a police."

Time and again you wonder if words go missing from Night Train. AWOL Not there. "We would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer." Martin Amis writes this as hard boiled soup, filtering over-heated genre vernacular through personal language filters. The blowback is a stew of codified dialogue, punctuatal bursts. You can make do with language without real characters they say, but only if that language has buttresses enough to hang the bridge. Night Train lives inside the head of its narrator, so maybe Marty's given us both. Compassion, and hang The Lads.

"I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman also." Her name is Mike Hoolihan (Smarty after all), but notice she pulls rank. She's in Asset Forfeiture now but gets called "n.o.d." on a suicide because the corpse was one Jennifer Rockwell, golden daughter of Force patriarch Colonel Tom: "When somebody close to the murder police starts crafting overtime for the murder police, then special rules apply. This is racial. This is an attack on every last one of us."

"Murders are men's work. Men commit them, men clean up after them." But Jennifer Rockwell doesn't play to murder. She got naked and sucked on a revolver. Three times. Headshots, unusual but more on file. Four even. No, it was suicide: "Here's what happened. A woman fell out of a clear blue sky." So Colonel Tom asks more (and slave to the bottle-demons, Mike Hoolihan owes), asks to know why. That's it. Why his precious miss, his classically beautiful miss, a gifted astro-physicist (cue voguish plaything of the literati: New Science), in love - and loved - squeezed the trigger of the handgun daddy trained her to abuse.

Big and small. Night Train plays to The Information like Time's Arrow to London Fields. Publicity about agents and divorce and teeth did for Amis' last. Yes, too much of it, yes wrapped (rapt) in its own importance, but equally it was engaged and funny and written with more than just an eye to box-office. This new book is a quick read. The language is difficult but not as difficult; plot is almost non-existent. Some will mistake its dialogue for cliché, dismiss its dismissal of childhood abuse as undeveloped. This is a book about looking - at evidence, for clues - it uses cliché, is not used by it. We are about finding out why Jennifer Rockwell did, but don't be expecting the detective to tell us why she's gathered us all here.

Night Train is a bleak book, decorated in Se7en polluted colours. Crime scenes, interrogation rooms, those apartments people pass through, and rumble of the night train itself. "Slow entropy" even as the cops arrive to bring sense to the senseless. "My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out."

And she does. There are answers of a kind, but answers that satisfy few between its covers. This is Martin Amis' most substantial and humane book in a long time.