12 The Sense of Place

In LA, you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do

anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it
really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your
seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz
autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you
feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights,
and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the
Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a
smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you
are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink,
this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You
can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed,
twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a
sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF - BOOZE - NO
STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across
the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DONT
WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the
content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk.
Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies
are all Satumians who aren't even sure whether this is a right
planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip,
is teach them how to drive.
MARTIN AMIS Money (1984)

As WILL BE EVIDENT to the reader by now, my division of the art of

fiction into various "aspects" is somewhat artificial. Effects in
fiction are plural and interconnected, each drawing on and contrib-
uting to all the others. The passage I have selected from Martin
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Amis's Money as an example of the description of place could have
served equally well to illustrate Skaz or Defamiliarization, as well
as several topics not yet broached. Which is another way of saying
that description in a good novel is never just description.
The sense of place was a fairly late development in the history
of prose fiction. As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, the cities of classical
romance are interchangeable backcloths for the plot: Ephesus
might as well be Corinth or Syracuse, for all we are told about
them. The early English novelists were scarcely more specific
about place. London in Defoe's or Fielding's novels, for instance,
lacks the vivid visual detail of Dickens's London. When Tom Jones
arrives at the capital in search of his beloved Sophia, the narrator
tells us that he

was an entire stranger in London; and as he happened to arrive

first in a quarter of the town, the inhabitants of which have very
little intercourse with the householders of Hanover or Grosvenor
Square (for he entered through Gray's Inn Lane) so he rambled
about for some time, before he could even find his way to those
happy mansions, where Fortune segregates from the vulgar those
. . . whose ancestors being born in better days, by sundry kinds
of merit, have entailed riches and honour on their posterity.

London is described entirely in terms of the variations of class and

status in its inhabitants, as interpreted by the author's ironical
vision. There is no attempt to make the reader "see" the city, or to
describe its sensory impact on a young man up from the country
for the first time. Compare Dickens's description of Jacob's Island
in Oliver Twist:

To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze

of close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest
and poorest of the waterside people . . . The cheapest and least
delicate provisions are heaped in the shops; the coarsest and
commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at the salesman's
door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows . . . he
walks beneath tottering housefronts projecting over the pave-
ment, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys
half-crushed, half-hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty
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THE SENSE OF PLACE

iron bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every
imaginable sign of desolation and neglect.

Tom Jones was published in 1749; Oliver Twist in 1838. What

intervened was the Romantic movement, which pondered the effect
of milieu on man, opened people's eyes to the sublime beauty of
landscape and, in due course, to the grim symbolism of cityscapes
in the Industrial Age.
Martin Amis is a late exponent of the Dickensian tradition of
urban Gothic. His fascinated and appalled gaze at the post-
industrial city mediates an apocalyptic vision of culture and society
in a terminal state of decay. As with Dickens, his settings often
seem more animated than his characters, as if the life has been
drained out of people to re-emerge in a demonic, destructive form
in things: streets, machines, gadgets.
The narrator of Money, John Self (Amis also cultivates a
Dickensian playfulness with names) is not exactly a complex or
sympathetic character. A scrofulous yuppie, addicted to fast food
and fast cars, junk food and pornography, he commutes between
England and America in his efforts to tie up a film deal that will
make him rich. London and New York are the chief locations of
the action, with the latter having the edge in physical and moral
squalor, but the nature of his business inevitably takes Self to Los
Angeles, the capital of the movie industry.
The challenge of the novel's chosen form is to make the style
both eloquently descriptive of the urban wasteland and expressive
of the narrator's slobbish, tunnel-visioned, philistine character.
Amis manages this difficult trick by disguising his literary skills
behind a barrage of streetwise slang, profanity, obscenities and
jokes. The narrator speaks in a mid-Atlantic lingo that is partly
derived from popular culture and the mass media and partly Amis's
plausible invention. To decipher the first paragraph of this passage,
for instance, you have to know that Alcatraz is a famous Californian
prison, that "pig" is a term of abuse for policeman, that "drawing a
bead" means taking aim, that "rug" is American slang for toupee
(though Self uses it to refer to real hair), and guess that "coptered"
is a participle derived from "helicopter". The metaphor for the
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city's polluted sky, "a smear of God's green snot", suggesting the
deity of the Old Testament glowering over this latterday Sodom, is
as startling as T. S. Eliot's evening "spread out against the sky/
Like a patient etherized upon a table" in "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock", and owes something to Stephen Dedalus's
description of the sea as "snot-green", in the first episode of
Ulysses. But whereas Prufrock has high-cultural pretensions and
Stephen is consciously travestying Homer's favourite epithet for
the sea, "wine-dark", John Self seems to be merely indulging in
schoolboy nastiness, and this distracts us from the literary sophis-
tication of the image.
The key trope of this description of Los Angeles is hyperbole,
or overstatement. In that respect it resembles another skaz narrative
we looked at earlier, The Catcher in the Rye. But Amis's passage is
much more of a rhetorical set-piece than anything to be found in
Salinger's novel. It performs a series of comically exaggerated
variations on the commonplace theme that Los Angeles is a city
dedicated to and dominated by the motor car ("The only way to
get across the road is to be born there"); and on the slightly less
commonplace observations that America favours highly specialized
retail outlets, and that American taxi-drivers are often recent
immigrants who don't know the way to anywhere.
On arriving in Boston recently, I took a cab whose driver had to
make three attempts, assisted by radio-telephone consultation in
Russian with his control, before he could find his way out of the
airport. It's difficult to exaggerate that kind of incompetence, but
Amis found a way: "The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren't even
sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing
you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive." An echo of
the homely seat-belt safety slogan, "Clunk Click, every trip",
follows fast on the flip allusion to science fiction - Amis's prose
delights in such juxtapositions, culled from the dreck of contempor-
ary urban consciousness. The echo also contributes to the jaunty,
finger-snapping rhythm of the whole passage, which threatens at
one particularly cherishable moment to break into rhyming coup-
lets ("You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick
tattooed").
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The danger of most set-piece descriptions of place (the novels

of Sir Walter Scott provide plenty of examples) is that a succession
of well-formed declarative sentences, combined with the suspen-
sion of narrative interest, will send the reader to sleep. No risk of
that here. The present tense describes both the place and the
narrator's movement through it. The shifts in verbal mood - from
indicative ("You come out of the hotel") to interrogative ("but can
you get lunch?") to imperative ("Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk.
Run!") and the generalizing second-person pronoun ("You walk
left, you walk right") - involve the reader in the process. After
many pages of this sort of thing you might fall asleep from
exhaustion, but not from boredom.

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