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1 Money Talk

      John Self, the central character of Martin Amis’ novel Money, lives in a world of money, having it or not having it, having a great deal of it but trying to get more, thinking about it and talking about it. Money almost constitutes his world, it seeps into its interstices, it flows, it surrounds in its liquidity. As John Self says: ‘In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out. You can’t drop out any more. Money has seen to that. There’s nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money’ (Amis, 2005: 153). But, at the same time, a moneyed world of this kind is unreal. It presents a surface appearance of ease, of luxury, of plenitude. John Self is able fully to indulge his gargantuan appetites for food, sex and alcohol. But underneath this surface, there is both deception and corruption. Self is systematically and intentionally deceived by almost every person he comes across, to the point that he loses all his money. At the same time, the pursuit of his excesses, particularly alcohol, destroys him as a person. There is redemption at the end of the book but that requires the loss of his money together with the realization that money will not buy a life that is morally or spiritually satisfying. Self muses: ‘Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now … You can’t get the money monkey off your back’ (Amis, 2005: 384).

Amis’ novel was originally published in 1984, in a period characterized by a strong – and negative – public interest in money. In a single year, 1987, the play Serious Money by Caryl Churchill, the film Wall Street and Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities all appeared. But that interest has hardly abated since, especially following the financial crisis of 2008. Not a day passes when there is not a story about money and its misuse in newspapers, on television, in blogs or in social media. There has been a positive deluge of books on various features of the crisis, its causes and consequences (for example, Kaletsky, 2010; Lanchester, 2010; Tett, 2010; Lewis, 2011). Meanwhile, fictional representations of money in novels, plays and films continue to reinforce the sensation that there is a cultural problem in our societies that affects individuals and institutions and that is something to do with money.

      I want to refer to all this discussion of money in newspapers, radio, television, film, novels, poetry and popular music as ‘Money Talk’. However, the appearance of Money Talk is not just restricted to these media. It also saturates everyday life. We talk about how much things cost or how much – or little – money we have. We compare our financial circumstances or spending habits with those of friends or neighbours. We speculate on the ways of the rich or the poor. We discuss the use of money by persons and institutions in the public eye. Metaphors, images and sayings involving money abound. We say that ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, ‘money for old rope’ or ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. Somebody else has ‘money to burn’ but, on the other hand, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’ but ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’. The very word for money comes in so many different forms in English – dosh, dough, sovs, scratch, mazuma, gravy, spondulicks, bread, wad, moolah, folding green – and these synonyms themselves imply so much behind the simple metaphor, especially in the association of money with food. Much of this Money Talk effectively involves, implicitly or explicitly, moral judgements about human greed, the way that money is used as a yardstick of behaviour or that everything can apparently be bought and sold. These moral judgements are typically hostile; it is the

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