As part of its ‘Eighties Season’, the BBC commissioned a new adaptation of Martin Amis’ Money starring Nick Frost, Jerry Hall and Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser. Moneymen James Hamon and George Hoare take a look at whether or not this has been a success, or is in need of a major (rug) rethink.

When writing about anything Amis, the temptation is to pen a gasping love letter to intonation, allusion and punctuation, or something somehow less-successfully grounded in succinct and rational prose. With distinctive voice and vivid imagery, characterisation and description are the main tools with which Amis creates his version of the world; he presents the reader with immaculately drawn pictures, selected to keep the reader in full and precise thrall throughout. Although recent novels have seen Amis move away from this slightly, with varying success, Money is still lauded as one of the defining books of its time, as well as of its author.

So the possibility of a two-part, feature-length adaptation of Money was one that has left many in high anticipation. And each and every one will be sorely disappointed by it. It is an abject malapropism and a stultifying disaster; the words of the page have a meaning and purpose which is so far removed from those uttered by the cast that it appears that the directors had, instead of reading the book, decided to skip to the blurb on the back of the novel (likely penned by a hot-desking work experience girl at Penguin), using Wikiquote to fill in the gaps.

Money, as Amis self-noted, is a ‘voice’ not a ‘narrative’ piece. It is the voices the narrator, John Self, hears straining to be heard over his chronic tinnitus. First, the jabber of money, the incessantly moving ticker-tape of sums and percentages, and of greed. Second, the voice of pornography, like ‘the rap of a demented DJ’, lecherous and gurgled. Third, the voice of ageing (perhaps middle-aging for Amis) and weather, of the narrator’s perpetual jet lag, disorientation and boredom. The fourth voice is the one of paranoia, fuelled by the hysterical adverts on the television Self camps in front of in his hotel suite. These voices compete and speak over each other, with Money (every time it is used, it feels like it has a capital letter) underlying (and underwriting) everything Self does, and all he consumes.

Needless to say, these voices are absent throughout. Nick Frost’s John Self does not seem to be fighting within himself, instead looking forlornly at the world. Missing is the brash self worth and alcohol-soaked bravado, lost is the smorgasbord of pornography and priapic ambition. He is too self-consciously helpless: he should barrel through his mishaps, caught up in the speed and rhythm of money, a willing victim, constantly consuming (1). His dulled persona fails to broadcast Thatcherite optimism of financial panacea and constant opportunity.

In this adaptation, how could it? Kartheiser’s Fielding Goodney is without the necessary invincible air to inspire Self to daydream, without the perfect tan and flawless appearance of luck. He should be the Platonic form of Money, untouchable and infallible, able to cut through life without resistance. Instead, he has the presence of a final-year undergraduate trying too hard to act his way into a RADA bursary and saving his poor parents the awkward conversation about money and his future. Some of the minor characters do manage to capture the voice of the novel more successfully, but these are rare moments coming more through chance than choosing: the Hollywood types of Lorne Guyland (say it out loud), Butch Beausoleil and Spunk David are only soiled through their interaction with Frost’s Self, and Self’s former business partner Terry Linex is played to perfection in his brief scenes.

Most noticeably, and perhaps inevitably, the voice most strikingly quietened is that of Amis. Amis takes great pains to speak to the reader, often directly, and this connection has been lost in adaptation. Even allowing for the challenges of filming the unfilmable, there is no resemblance between the experience of reading the book and watching this production. Words such as gentle and even-handed are comfortably levelled at this production, terms that could never be used to describe the book. When staging any tale of unreliable narration, the production must make ambitious decisions when setting a scene—leaps of faith and confidence in the audience—but these are ducked here. Uncertainty needs to be placed in the thoughts of the audience as to the veracity of what they are seeing (something American Psycho did successfully, for example) in order to maintain an active relationship.

The result is that this adaptation fails to engage with the nature of the novel; where insight and dramatic irony are necessary, jokes and feelings are watered down by what must be a thorough misunderstanding of the entire project. This is readily apparent by the actual omission of Martin Amis. In the book, he, as a character, arrives from nowhere to put a hand on the narrative tiller, to allow the story to continue in the intended direction without having the compromise on the characters he has measured out. The production dismisses this (2), as well as many small moments that reinforce primacy of novel’s character over any of the people within (3). What is left is a weak coalition of the softest parts of the novel, strung together with familiar songs and the feeling that McG would have done a better job. Or Dawson from Dawson’s Creek.

Do not watch this adaptation. Spend the time with loved ones, in the bath or, if you’re really in the mood for something similar, with a bargain bucket of fried chicken, packet of fags, bottle of whisky and a stack of pornography (the lower grade the better) while someone threatening calls you intermittently. The only thing that the BBC’s Money achieves is being less than the sum of its parts. When the 80s season was conceived, it was surely destined to coincide with a new Conservative government’s early days and a wave of nostalgia for all things that rhyme with ‘sink-the-Belgrano’. As fate and failure have decided, the country was not convinced with taking the 80s revival beyond Ray Bans, the Tron sequel and Jedward singing Ghostbusters. This will not help to convince the remainder. Perhaps the budget was too low, perhaps there are some genuine glimpses of genius left on the cutting-room floor and perhaps, just perhaps, the novel truly is impossible to film. Unfortunately after this paltry effort, we are no closer to finding out.

1) Raymond Williams observes that seeing ourselves as consumers entails a slightly perverse and certainly one-sided view of how we use things: that we take them in, burn them up in our stomachs, and completely assimilate them. While this might apply to foodstuffs, Williams argues, when thinking about objects it elides the various ways in which we apply them usefully in and to our lives. Martin Amis’ Money is a book above all about consumption in this limited sense, a reflection on greed reaching its apotheosis under Thatcherism. It is a book about—paradoxically—lone gratification (even when done in the company of others, Money consistently refers back to the isolating and separating effects of consumption).
2) It’s a shame that Kinsley Amis died. This is partly because he’d be quite fun to run into in the pub and share a drink or four with, and partly because he’d be the only person glad to see the back of MA in Money.
3) Take the renaming of The Shakespeare as The Queen’s Head - lost is the small and inconsequential joke that all of the women in [The] Shakespeare are weak characters. The joke is implied, never stated and still, there was apparently a need to thrust Self’s mother into the centre of the story at the expense of something actually in the book.