Sherlock Vs Mike

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Sherlock vs Mike

Content

Introduction

Chapter I – The framing of the writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Martin Amis

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Martin Amis

Chapter II – About Sherlock Holmes and his stories

2.1. Early inspirations

2.2. Physical appearance

2.3. Holme’s background

Chapter III – About Mike Hoolihan and her story

3.1. A special class of fiction

3.2. A particular detective

3.3 Physical appearance

3.4 Mike’s background

Chapter IV – The differences and similarities between the two characters based on direct and indirect characterizations

Conclusions

References

Introduction

This paper aims to present a comparative study of two famous characters in the international literature, namely detective Sherlock Holmes and policeman Mike Hoolihan. The following pages will attempt to describe and classify the physical, intellectual and behavioral characteristics of the two characters.

One of the aims of this paper is to highlight the similarities and differences between the two characters. Another objective is to identify the construction of these personalities.

In order to achieve the proposed objectives, in the first chapter will be exposed information’s about authors of the two works and the literary framework in which they were designed.

In the second and third chapters, the two characters will be characterized directly and indirectly. In these two chapters will also appear citations and examples from the two works, so as to better highlight the traits of the two detectives.

Chapter four focuses similarities and differences between the two detectives, based on knowledge of previous chapters. As is normal, the paper ends with conclusions about the objectives achieved.

Chapter I

The framing of the writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Martin Amis, in the literary period

1.1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a British novelist, born in May 22, 1859. He is famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, which it was the first detective in a series of police novels. In addition, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the author of numerous science fiction stories, historical novels, theater plays, love novels, poetry and non-fiction-inspired text.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (sursa http://kaiserreich.wikia.com/)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in , from Irish parents who had immigrated to . He was sent to Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school, at the age of nine, though when he graduated in 1875, he had already abandoned Christianity to become an agnostic. Between 1876 and 1881 he studied medicine at the , including a practice period at Aston. In this period he meets his mentor, Professor Dr. Joseph Bell, whose keen powers of observation would later inspire Doyle to create his famed fictional detective character Sherlock Holmes. At the , Doyle also had the good fortune to meet classmates and future fellow authors James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. While a medical student, Doyle took him own first stab at writing, with a short story called “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley”. This was followed by a second story, “The American Tale”, which was published in London Society.

Professor Joseph Bell, inspiration for Sherlock Holmes (sursa http://kellygoshorn.com/)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s was twenty years old and his third year of medical studies when a chance for adventure knocked on his door. He was offered the post of ship’s surgeon on the Hope, a whaling boat, about to leave for the . The Hope first stopped near the shores of , where the crew preceded the hunt of seals. The young medical student was appalled by the brutality of the exercise. But apart from that, he greatly enjoyed the camaraderie on board the ship and the subsequent whole hunt fascinated him. The voyage awakened Doyle’s sense of adventure, a feeling that the incorporated into a story, “Captain of the Pole Star”.

Without much enthusiasm, Conan Doyle returned to his studies in the autumn of 1880. A year later he obtained his “Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degree”. On this occasion, he drew a humorous sketch of himself receiving his diploma, with the caption “Licensed to kill”.

After graduation he worked as doctor on a ship headed for the West African coast and in 1882 he opened a cabinet in . Between two consultations, he wrote stories, so in this way, the first story was published in Chambers’ Edinburg Journal. Only after he moved his cabinet in Southsea Doyle, he started seriously to be dedicated to literature. The first significant work was “A Study in Scarlet”, in which Sherlock Holmes is mentioned for the first time. Doyle would go on to write 60 stories.

After 1880 Doyle became increasingly invested in Spiritualism or “Psychic religion”, a belief system that he would later attempt to spread through a series of his written works. In 1887, Doyle submitted two letters about his conversion to Spiritualism to a weekly period called “Light”. Doyle continued to actively participate in the Spiritualist movement from 1887 to 1916 during which time he wrote three books that experts consider largely autobiographical. These include “Beyond the City” (1893), “The Stark Munro Letters” (1895) and “A Duet with an Occasional Chorus” (1899). In the same period he also produced a handful of historical novels including one about the Napoleonic Era called “The Great Shadow” (1892) and his most famous historical novel “Rodney Stone” (1896).

The prolific author also composed four of his most popular Sherlock Homes books during the 1890’s and early 1900’s: “The Sign of Four” (1890), “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), “The Memories of Sherlock Holmes” (1892) and “The Hound of Baskerville” in 1901.

Despite the success of the first series of Holmes tales, Conan quickly became bored with his creation and decided to kill Sherlock Holmes.

In 1893, he visited . It was while he was there that he visited the and decided that this was a place that would “make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock Holmes, even if I buried my banking account along with him”. So in the last story of the second collection “The Memories of Sherlock Holmes”, he consigned his hero to the watery depth of the , locked in the arms of the criminal master mind Professor Moriarty.

In 1893, to Doyle’s readers disdain, he had attempted to kill off his Sherlock Holmes character in order to focus more on writing about Spiritualism. In 1901, however, Doyle reintroduced Sherlock Holmes in the Hound of Baskerville.

Doyle also strove the spread his faith through a series of written works, consisting of “The new Revolution” (1918), “The Vital Message” (1919), “The Wanderings of a Spiritualist” (1921) and “History of Spiritualism” (1926). In 1928 Doyle’s final twelve stories about Sherlock Holmes were published in a compilation entitled The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.

Meanwhile, in 1885, Conan Doyle had married Louise Hawkins, the sister of one of his patients.

Louise Hawkins Doyle, first wife of Doyle (sursa http://www.arthurconandoyle.com/)

It was a union that was dogged by Louise’s constant ill health. In 1891 the couple moved from Southsea to in South Norwood, southeast , so Conan could be closer to the literary world. However after giving birth to two children, Mary (1889) and Kingsley (1892), Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis, her condition declined rapidly and she remained an invalid for the rest of her life.

, as Conan believed the air would be better for Louise’s health. Conan Doyle’s relationship with his wife Louise was a strong friendship rather than a passionate romance and it wasn’t until he met Jean Leckie that he experienced the full emotional force of romantic love. Louise died in 1906 and Conan married Jean a year later. Shortly after the wedding they moved to a new house, Little Windlesham in Crowborough, Sussex. It was a happy marriage and Jean bore him three more children: Denis (1909), (1910) and Lena Jean (1912).

Arthur and Jean (the second wife) wedding picture (sursa http://www.arthurconandoyle.com/)

Conan Doyle was actively engaged in the Boer War (1899-1902), offering medical assistance at the Longman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein in South Africa in appalling conditions and visiting the front. He later wrote up the history of the war and a pamphlet vindicating the actions of the British Army. Also Conan was involved in a personal fight to establish the innocence of a Parsee, George Edaliji, convicted of horse and latte maiming in Warwickshire. Using the methods of his detective hero, Conan was able to establish that Edaliji could not have performed the savage attacks on the animals because of his very poor eyesight. Similarly he protested the innocence of Oscar Slater, a German Jew accused of murder; thanks to Doyle efforts, Slater was finally released in 1927 after serving 18 years of a life sentence.

In 1929 Conan Doyle suffered severe pains in his chest and was diagnosed with angina. A few days before his death he wrote: “The reader will judge that I have had many adventures. The greatest and most glorious awaits me now”. He informed his family that he died not wish to pass away in bed, so they helped him to a chair where he could look through the window at the Sussex countryside beyond and he died there surrounded by his family on the morning of 7 July 1930.

1.2. Sir Martin Amis

Sir Martin Amis was born on August 25, 1949 in a British family. His father was a noted English novelist, Sir Kingsley Amis and his mother was Hilary Ann Bardwell. He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and USA. His first years of school were at Bishop Gore School and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys. After his father published his first novel “Lucky Jim” the family is moving to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured.

At the age of 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes “A High Wind in Jamaica”. He loved to read comic books, until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often names as his earliest influence.

Sir Martin Amis (sursa http://www.telegraph.co.uk/)

He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English, and after that he was employed on entry-level job at “The Times Literary Supplement”. At the age of 27 he became literary editor of the New Statesman, where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remained a close friend until Hitchens died, in 2011.

In 1973 he wrote and published his first novel “The Rachel Papers”, which is the most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager, which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical, and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 and was followed by “Dead Babies” in 1975. A number of Amis’s characteristics show up in “Dead Babies” for the first time as mordant black humor, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention and the character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations. His third novel was published in 1978, named “Success”. Success told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically "pairing" characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since as Martin Amis and Martina Twain in “Money”, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in “The Information”, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in “Night Train”.

Amis is called as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction. Between 1984 and 1995 he wrote the trilogy “Money”: A Suicide Note (1984), which is a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed; “London Fields” (1989) and “The Information” (1995). Other’s stories written by Amis were “Time’s Arrow (1991) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and Night Train (1997). The short novel Night Train is narrated by the mannish American Detective Mike Hoolihan. The story revolves around the suicide of her boss's young, beautiful and seemingly happy daughter. Like most of Amis's work, Night Train is dark, bleak, and foreboding, arguably a reflection of the author's views on America. After 2000 he published the “Experience” (2000) autobiography and “Koba the Dread” (2002) a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics in the West.

Amis is also the author of several essays, including “The Moronic Inferno” and “Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993) and “Heavy Water and other Stories” (1998). Between 2006 and 2008 he wrote “House of Meetings and The Second Plane”. Also he is a regular contributor to numerous newspaper, magazines and journals, including the Sunday Time, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. He was awarded an honorary LittD by the University of East Anglia in 2000 and was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.

Another books wrote by Amis were “The Pregnant Widow” (2010), “Lionel Asbo: State of England” (2012), “London Fields” (2014) and “The Zone of Interest” (2014).

In December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first, a collection of journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016, is due for publication in October 2017.The second project, a new untitled novel which Amis is currently working on, is an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens. In an interview with livemint.com, Amis said of the novel-in-progress, "I’m writing an autobiographical novel that I’ve been trying to write for 15 years. It’s not so much about me, it’s about three other writers—a poet, a novelist and an essayist—Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens, and since I started trying to write it, Larkin died in 1985, Bellow died in 2005, and Hitch died in 2011, and that gives me a theme, death, and it gives me a bit more freedom, and fiction is freedom. It’s hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things. I don’t have them looking over my shoulder anymore."

In private life Martin Amis was married twice. About the first wife not many details are known, but in September 2006 Amis returned to Britain after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008 when his daughter (by Lamorna Seale) Delilah gave birth to a son. He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.

Sir Martin Amis and his family(sursa www.independent.ie)

In this moment Martin Amis lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Chapter II

About Sherlock Holmes and his stories

A silhouette of a thin man with a prominent nose, wearing a durstalker hat with a curly pipe in his mouth is well known worldwide as belonging to Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. There have been more books, films, plays and television programmers involving this literary figure than any other.

But why Sherlock Holmes? What is the appeal of this charismatic detective and his loyal friend and biographer? The answer is not a simple one, but I hope through this work to find the answer to this question.

2.1. Early inspirations

When the American writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote about a proto-Holmes protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, in a series of stories that virtually forged the detective fiction format, he had his rather remote sleuth utilizing observation, logic and lateral thinking, the Holmes formula, in fact, in embryo.

Conan Doyle was a close reader of such Poe stories as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and he borrowed a variety of nations from Dupin and developed them. Influenced also by his charismatic tutor at Edinburgh University, Dr. Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle forged an imperishable canon work over some 40 years with his stories and novels about the Great Detective, each brimming with an atmosphere and invention.

Sherlock Holmes is the greatest fictional detective of all time. He is a man with exceptional powers of observation and reasoning, a master of disguise who is possessed of an uncanny ability to establish the truth. He is also an enigma.

Holmes appears to be almost two-dimensional a brilliant brain and human calculating machine with no personality or emotions. Even Conan Doyle said of him in an interview with the Bookman in 1892 that “Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect”. In “Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” (pp 52-53) Holmes himself declares “I am brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix”.

We do not know for sure if Doyle’s intention was to create a cold robotic character with no human feelings and the mind of a computer, but did not succeed and Holmes inspire affection and adoration.

Conan Doyle also hints that there is a complex and deeply feelings character beneath the cool exterior. The picture Doyle creates and the one that makes Holmes so endlessly compelling is the suggestion of hidden depths. He may be a person of extraordinary nobility who sacrifices his own feelings in order to serve the greater good by using his skills in detection. Or perhaps he is a man whose sense of inadequacy and interior pain lead him to bury his feelings and throw himself into his work. It is possible both to be true.

2.2. Physical appearance

The one unambiguous thing about Holmes is his physical appearance which was first brought to life by the Sidney Paget drawings in the Strand Magazine. In these, Holmes has sharp, angular features and is tall and thin; get wiry and athletic, with reserves of strength that enable him to cope remarkably well in any physical tussle. Holmes’s tweedy attire, cope and his now famous deerstalker hat, created by Paget in the drawings rather than by Doyle are as iconic as his trademark cane and pipe.

2.3. Holme’s background

Conan Doyle gives away few details of Holmes’s life, adding to the enigma.”His Last Bow”, set in 1914, implies that Holmes is 60, meaning he was born in about 1854. His ancestors are “country squires” and his grandmother the sister of the French artist Vernet, probably Charles Horace Vernet (1758-1836) as opposed to his father Claude Joseph (1714-1789). The only family member that the reader knows anything about is Holmes’s elder brother Mycroft.

Holmes claims that he developed his skills in deduction as an undergraduate. Commentators have therefore, speculated where he went to university, the writer Dorothy L. Sussex College, Cambridge, while he had one true friend, Victor Trevor, who precipitated his involvement in “The Gloria Scott” case. He does not seem to have made any other friends since, except Watson. In “The Five Orange Pips” Watson suggests, “Some friend of yours, perhaps?” and Holmes replies, “Except yourself I have none”. His solitariness is lifelong.

In the 1870s, after university, Holmes moved to London and took up residence in Montague Street, near the British Museum. He had connections at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which allowed him to conduct his experiments in the labs there, even though he was neither student nor staff.

He was already developing detective, but it was only after he met Watson in 1881 and moved into 221B with him as his co-lodger that the business became all-consuming.

2.4 Life with Watson

For eight years, Holmes and Watson were inseparable and Watson was the witness and recorder of most of Holmes’s brilliant exploits as a detective – although some were kept from Watson fell in love with Mary Morstan and moved away from 221B Baker Street to set up his own doctor’s practice in West London. The relationship between Watson and Holmes became more distant after Watson’s marriage and we hear less of his cases until the fateful one in “The Final Problem”, in which Holmes appeared to meet his death at Reichenbach Falls on 4 May 1891 in a struggle with the arch-villain Moriarty. Years later, to the total amazement of Watson (and the reading public), he reappeared in London in “The Adventure of the Empty House”.

His account of his missing three years, called the “Great Hiatus” by Holmesians, was scanty and involved hints of gripping adventures in Tibet, Persia and Khartoum before he settled in Montpellier in the south of France, where he conducted scientific experiments. The lack of information has led Holmesians to speculate that he spent at least some of that time doing undercover work for the British government, via Mycroft.

By the time Holmes returned, Watson had been widowed, and they resumed their relationship, until Watson again moved out of 221B and Holmes retired to a cottage on the south coast near Eastbourne to indulge in the joys of the quiet life and his passion for bee keeping. But he could not entirely resit the urge to do a little detective work on his new home territory, as depicted in “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane”, set in 1907 and later carried out vital work for the Foreign Office in the build up to World War I, in “His Last Bow”.After that, aged 60, Holmes finally vanished.

Chapter III

About Mike Hoolihan and her story

3.1. A special class of fiction

Detective fiction survived for a quite a while on the simple formula of a crime and its detection, and in the process reassuringly brought order to disorder, understanding to enigma, answers to questions. Realism and anti-detective fiction have disturbed the rational, teleological narrative, the inexorable causal movement towards a solution. Detective narratives have gone the way of other grand narratives: they have lost their way, they have lost the plot, and they have lost the answer. In keeping with and articulating, the spirit of the age, they have lost faith. We might say they have gone postmodern.

Martin Amis’s exploitation of the detective fiction genre in his novel, Night Train, is indeed a text of impeccable postmodern sensibility, but one which, in its appropriation of the styles, conventions, and intentions of different schools of detective fiction, reveals itself ultimately to be a thoroughly hybrid and restless creation, mixing detective and anti-detective fiction modes, drawing upon the hard-boiled American noir idiom and the decentred postmodern sensibility, blending ugly realism and metaphysical speculation and challenging throughout facile solutions to the question of identity, be it of genre, character or reality.

The novel’s postmodern credentials are displayed in its treatment of two of the quintessential concerns of detective fiction, namely identity and solution. The conventional and essentially comforting “whodunit” understanding of identity at the heart of detective fiction is subverted in Night Train, transformed into a “whydunit” into a question of the concept of identity, one initiating a shadowy existential dance between the identities of the female detective and the female victim.

What is it in Night Train that allows it to turn so fiercely on its traditions, to actually reverse detective fiction’s habitual movement from disorder to order? It is surely the nature of the crime, the change from homicide to suicide, but it is also the identity of the perpetrator of the particular crime in Night Train. For what does it mean that a woman who has everything kills herself? This is the task of the detection in Night Train, the imposing question that cannot be avoided, the source of the great unraveling. “Suicide is the night train, spending your way to darkness”.

3.2. A particular detective

The narrative takes the form of a first-person account by Detective Mike Hoolihan of what she calls “the worst case I have ever handled”. The main part of the narrative is retrospective, but, at the moment of its narration, the investigation has not yet reached its conclusion. What we read brings us up to date, before the events at the end of the book take place, when Mike herself will discover where the investigation finally leads. The narrative then is something of an attempt to achieve what it is given to narrative to achieve: to find links, to establish cause and effect, to produce coherence, to supply an answer. These matters to Mike because it’s the worst case she has ever handled “for me is”. And because “I am part of the story I am going to tell”. Life and literature are full of self-narrations, of the narrative construction of selves and identities. But if this is such a bad case for Mike, it’s because her police investigation has drawn her into an unwelcome personal examination and the identity she finds herself articulating and constructing in her narrative contains no comfort at all. It is this bifurcating investigation, initially of an act of suicide that is grotesquely the wrong conclusion to the valuable and valid life it terminates, which pitilessly confronts Mike with the value and validity of her own life.

That everything has become mixed up for Mike in the experience of the investigation is clear from the outset of her narration of the investigation. What is supposed to be the delineation of the facts of the case is deflected by and tinged with an existential anxiety about her identity and a metaphysical apprehension about where her story and investigation is leading her. Mike is a woman with a man’s name, a man’s physique, and a deep voice, “further deepened by three decades of nicotine abuse”.

What should go without saying — her fundamental, self-evident identity as a woman — has to be said, because it is not self-evident, not to others, and, somewhere — if for different though not unrelated reasons — not quite to herself either. The name, the build, and the voice have Mike frequently taken for a man and not just on the phone (“This is happening to me more and more often: The sir thing”,).

3.3 Physical appearance

Mike’s body is not as she would like it to be. She describes herself at one point as “a forty-four-year-old police with coarse blond hair, bruiser’s tits and broad shoulders”. This is the outside, the body that she and others see. What she alone sees, and feels, is inside her body, “[my] body, so ordinary and asymmetrical, the source of so little pleasure or pride, so neglected, so parched”. And this is not the only wound, the only obstacle to an enabling, stable sense of self. She was “raised by the state” from the age of ten, from the moment everything blew apart at home. And there was the alcohol, which nearly killed her. And then there is the business, the trauma, of being a “murder police,” of having seen too much human ugliness and horror: “I have seen the bodies of bludgeoned one-year-olds. I have seen the bodies of gang-raped nonagenarians. I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at a t.o.d. is to weigh the maggots”. The hardboiled tough talk here is as much a measure of the corrosive wear and tear on Mike’s sensibility as it is an appropriation of an idiom. She apologizes for “the bad language, the diseased sarcasm, and the bigotry” in her account, and will shudder later on at “how hardbarked” she has become. But there are limits, and after eight years in Homicide Mike reached hers: “I entered my own end-zone and couldn’t do it anymore”. Now she works in Asset Forfeiture. But one more dead body had to be looked at, the last, the worst: “Of all the bodies I have ever seen, none has stayed with me, in my gut, like the body of Jennifer Rockwell”.

All of this — what Mike is, why she has become so, what she thinks of herself — matters because of what this investigation does to her. The body of Jennifer Rockwell carries the force of an accusation against the body of Mike Hoolihan. The life of Jennifer Rockwell, as it emerges through the investigation, incriminates the life of Mike Hoolihan. This is why Mike becomes “part of the story” she is going to tell.

But what is it about Jennifer Rockwell that won’t leave Mike alone?

This will not leave her alone: when you are young, beautiful, intelligent, loved, admired, healthy, well balanced, financially secure, professionally successful to the point of having a reasonable opportunity of making a lasting contribution as an astrophysicist — when you are happy, this happy, when everything about you and your life is so scandalously right, you are not supposed to kill yourself. Mike had known Jennifer — the daughter of Mike’s former Squad Supervisor in Homicide, Colonel Tom, the man who had guided Mike and saved her from alcohol — for twenty years, since Jennifer was eight years old:

“She was a favorite of mine. But she was also a favorite of everybody else’s. And I watched her grow into a kind of embarrassment of perfection, brilliant and beautiful. Yeah, I’m thinking: To-die-for brilliant. Drop-dead beautiful and not intimidating — or only as intimidating as the brilliant-beautiful can’t help being, no matter how accessible they seem. She had it all and she had it all, and then she had some more”.

3.4 Mike’s background

And one Sunday evening she made love with her adored and adoring partner put a gun in her mouth and shot herself three times, still naked in the aftermath of love-making, and just moments after her partner, Trader Faulkner, had left their apartment. Everything at the scene says it was a suicide, but Colonel Tom wants a homicide, which is at least bearable, settling on Trader as the perpetrator: “Bring me something I can live with. Because I can’t live with this”, he says to Mike, asking her to investigate. Colonel Tom wants a homicide, because in the domain of violent, unnatural death, homicide is the intelligible option. It is brutal and shocking, but is, within its own macabre imperatives and primitive logic, wholly understandable, allowing simple answers to simple questions, as Mike reflects: “Police really are like foot soldiers in this respect at least, ours not to reason why. Give us the how, then give us the who, we say. But fuck the why”. Colonel Tom wants a who, but there is none — Trader didn’t do it. It was suicide, and it is Trader, in beating off Mike’s Colonel Tom-inspired attempts to pin the murder on him, who makes the metaphysical leap across the gulf separating the simple questions about homicide from the powerful and inscrutable questions about suicide:

“Mike, you’ve tied yourself up into all kinds of knots trying to make a mystery of

this thing. . . . Some little mystery, all neat and cute. But there’s a real mystery here. An enormous mystery. . . . A woman fell out of a clear blue sky. And you know something? I wish I had killed her. . . . Because that’s better than what I’m looking at”.

From homicide to suicide: from the intelligible to the unintelligible, from the investigation of the circumstances of a death to a confrontation with the enigmas of a life. In changing the nature of the crime, and in exploring the existential resonances of suicide, Martin Amis has hugely extended the scope of the inquiry of his novel, has opened it up to the vast philosophical interrogation that accompanies suicide. Amis reflects on his preoccupation with suicide in his recent memoir, and quotes G. K. Chesterton who observed that “suicide was a heavier undertaking than murder. The murderer kills just one person. The suicide kills everybody.” From homicide to suicide: from an isolated human act to the general human condition, from a judgment on one to a judgment on everyone, and, of course, from the whom to the why. “If it’s a suicide, I’m going to feel an awful big why”, muses Mike before the autopsy confirms that Jennifer has indeed killed herself. The move from a “whodunit” to a “whydunit” seems at first sight to shift the inquiry away from identity, as the goal of the investigation is no longer to determine the identity of an individual. But this latter, traditional preoccupation of detective fiction has more to do with identification than identity, with simple naming rather than with a radical inquiry into the philosophical and existential dimensions of the notions of personal identity and selfhood. Paradoxically, then, it is precisely in moving from a “whodunit” to a “whydunit,” with the subsequent shifting of focus from a death to a life, that the more profound implications of the concept of identity may be explored.

The why question, in fact, is simply another formulation of “the who” question, but this time with all the complexities and obscurities, enigmas and uncertainties, associated with personal identity. That this is the new question to be answered by Mike becomes clear on the day of Jennifer’s funeral, when she speaks to Miriam, Jennifer’s mother. Jennifer is dead, but her dead body has given up a secret about her life: “You didn’t see the toxicology report. Tom made it disappear. Mike, Jennifer was on lithium” . In other words, the shiny, happy life was contaminated by something that had no business there — a mood stabilizer. It is Miriam who draws the inevitable conclusion, who formulates the necessary question, the big identity question:

“See, Mike, we were looking for a why. And I guess we found one. But suddenly we don’t have a who. Who was she, Mike?”

We have arrived at the end of the first part of Night Train, by which time in the novel Amis has disconcerted and diverted the genre within which he is working, has both exploited and played with its idioms and conventions, has subverted the expectations it generates, and has substantially expanded the horizons — the thematic and philosophical possibilities — of its traditional inquiry. We have gone from who to why, then back to who again. But the difference between the initial and the revised who is profound: it’s the distance between the who of doing and the who of being, the disparity in metaphysical density between a single act and an entire existence. The former is the preoccupation of traditional detective fiction, while the latter represents the larger ambition of Night Train, its stab at the universal. Mike intuits as much when she agrees to seek an answer to Miriam’s question — she senses that “the death of Jennifer Rockwell was offering the planet a piece of new news: Something never seen before”. And she knew that it would lead to “something absolutely somber”.

Mike investigates the events preceding Jennifer’s death and finds out this: along with the lithium there was Arn Debs, a graceless, tasteless hulk from Texas, whom Jennifer had met in a bar and whom she had promised to meet the next time he was in town; there was Jennifer’s momentous professional error in her calculations about the age of the universe, made the week before her death, but which only came to light the day after she killed herself; there was the uncharacteristic buying of things, such as the paintings which began to arrive at her apartment after her death; there was the book on suicide she had been reading, Making Sense of Suicide; and there was the suicide note, explaining everything, telling Trader that “almost exactly a year ago I started getting the sense that I was losing control of my thoughts”, that she had been on stabilizers for months, and comforting him with the assurance that he “couldn’t have done anything any different”. What Mike found was an emerging, typical suicide pattern, a concatenation turned up by basic detective work, culminating in the suicide note that confirmed that here was a life which appeared to be lived in a clear blue sky but which was in fact blighted by an illness that became unbearable and uncontrollable. So Jennifer Rockwell killed herself. As Mike sifts through the evidence, considers the pattern that is beginning to emerge, and reflects on the past, the subsequent evolution and the possibilities of a woman’s life, she becomes deeply uneasy, almost inconsolable: so much has gone wrong, has been so wrong for so long — in her own life. Miriam asked Mike to investigate because she felt that a woman would see and understand things about a woman’s life that a man would not. But the investigation into Jennifer’s identity, into her life, into the love and tenderness and happiness and beauty assumed with the natural and easy grace of a birthright, sucks Mike into a confrontation with her own woman’s life, which, when set beside the radiance of Jennifer’s existence, seems sordid and vicious and mean. Slowly, but inexorably, the attempt to construct a narrative of a self has Mike as much as Jennifer as its existential subject.

Mike’s presentation of herself at the outset revealed a sensitivity, a nervous vulnerability, a deep anxiety, about herself and her self-image, disclosed in the almost self-reproachful details about herself and her life — the male features, her overall appearance, the frequent mistaking of her for a man, her under-loved body, the booze, the vileness. The narration of the investigation articulates the stages of this evolving self-narrative, consisting essentially of a disinterment of Mike’s past, going back to what began to happen when she was a little girl:

“My father messed with me when I was a child. . . . Yeah he used to fuck me, okay? It started when I was seven and it stopped when I was ten. I made up my mind that

after I hit double figures it just wasn’t going to happen. . . . On the morning after my birthday he came at me in my bedroom. And I almost ripped his fucking face off. . . . Then my mother woke up. We were never a model unit, the Hoolihans. By noon that same day we ceased to exist”.

Mike doesn’t construct a rigidly causal narrative, where what happens before explains, uniquely and inevitably, what happens after, but the detective in her sees a pattern, that of finding herself “hanging on the arms of woman-haters and woman-hitters”. She ends up with a succession of violent men: “These guys didn’t just slap me around: We had fistfights that lasted half an hour”. Here was a pattern that had hardened into a destiny: “Long ago I learnt that I cannot get the good guys”. Now she is with Tobe, and Tobe is a big improvement — Tobe doesn’t beat her. But here he is “watching a taped quiz show” and here he is off “attending a video-game tournament”. Tobe doesn’t beat Mike, but Mike has taken too many beatings already, and, more than anything, her sense of being a woman has taken a beating — the harsh judgment of herself as being “just another big blonde old broad” is one articulation of how her body is a reminder, is the experience, of her unfulfilled womanhood. Forty-four-year-old, Mike intimates that she is menopausal, producing particular physical sensations but also a time of- life — her expression — reflection about her “unused womb”, which culminates in another bitter self-assessment, a response to Trader’s explanation that Jennifer wanted to have children because “she was a woman” and “women want children”: “He looks at me, my town flesh, my eyes. And he’s thinking: Yeah, all women except this woman”. Mike will insist later that she “never wanted a kid”, but her reaction to Trader’s remark nonetheless displays a preoccupation about her sense of being a woman and an anxiety about her inability to fully assume a woman’s identity.

Mike’s father abused her, violent men abused her, and Mike abused her, with alcohol, and was saved only by Colonel Tom before one last, fatal binge. But she remains on this

threshold, functioning, almost expectantly, under the shadow of her self-induced, and willed, Sword of Damocles: “We keep booze in the apartment and somehow I like to know it’s there even though it will kill me if I touch it”. It’s as if the accumulated effects of violence and disappointment, abuse and neglect, have pushed Mike to this delicate hovering between stoic acceptance and self-destruction, and as if she has willingly assumed this condition, understood by her as at once a limit and a possibility, a place to make a last stand in the quiet determination that there can be no more excesses, and that there is no more tolerance for the abuse that life so casually metes out.

Mike’s investigation, then, becomes an interrogation of two lives — of a life upon which the ultimate judgment has already been passed, and of one which is, increasingly, and increasingly harshly, being judged. If the narrative that Mike is constructing of her life, and if the identity she is assuming as her story advances, are haunted by disappointment and caustic self-condemnation, it is because it is impossible for Mike not to compare the life still being lived by one woman with the life that had to be ended by another. From the moment Mike takes on the investigation, Jennifer becomes an ominous presence in her consciousness, insisting that her suicide will be relevant to whatever is to be discovered, that it has greater meanings that go beyond the ending of a single life, and that these meanings will have to be faced: “Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I don’t want to see”. About what? About whom? It may be that Mike herself, with this ambiguous formulation, does not yet know what category of knowledge Jennifer’s life and death have to offer, but it soon takes the form of a verdict, by way of a comparison of the two lives, upon the quality and value of Mike’s own experience and existence. Trader’s gushing love letters to Jennifer, “the words a woman wants to hear,” are contrasted with the billets-doux (“Get some toilet paper for Christ sake”) left in the kitchen for Mike; the effortless harmony represented by Trader and Jennifer, exemplified by the arrangement of their study (“The peer lover, ten feet away: Silence, endeavor, common cause. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want?,”), precedes, and surely generates, the withering conclusion by Mike on the couple formed by herself and Tobe (“half a ton of slob and slut,” ); and Jennifer’s body (“a thrilling embarrassment,”) is the measure for Mike in dealing with the pleasure less experience of her own. Mike becomes less and less capable of thinking about her life and of constructing her identity within the limitations and possibilities set by her own existence; the life of this other woman, like a distorting mirror image, stands as an accusation and a verdict: “It’s not too late. I’m going to change my name, to something feminine. Like Detective Jennifer Hoolihan”. As the investigation slides towards “something absolutely somber,” Mike’s darkening mood crystallizes into a self-flagellating direct comparison:

Astrophysics Asset Forfeiture

Trader Tobe

Colonel Tom Pop

Beautiful Not beautiful

How are we to read the meaning of this ominous, almost desolate blank space? At the symbolic level, as an absence revealing emptiness in Mike’s existence, or as signifying an unspeakable truth about it? Or at a more literal level, as a confusion in Mike about her identity, or as an importunate question that cannot yet be — but that ultimately will have to be — answered?

Mike’s investigation of Jennifer’s life has led her to the threshold of a conclusion about her own life and her own identity, a conclusion that is stalled as it awaits the word that cannot, or will not, be uttered.

Who is Mike Hoolihan, and what is the meaning of her life?

Early on in her investigation, this thought comes to Mike: “But she’s a cop’s daughter. This means something. This has to matter”. After Jennifer’s funeral, Mike draws up a list of Stressors and Precipitants, the division of Jennifer’s life and experience into sources of potential significant stress, from which may have come the irresistible propellant towards suicide: Money?, Job?, Physical Health?, Trauma?, Childhood? The list goes on. There are, of course, the accumulating clues — the lithium, Arn Debs, and the rest — and there is the clinching proof of the suicide note, but none of these answers quite match up to the questions: the clues and the note conform to suicide patterns, but they don’t conform to Jennifer’s suicide. As her investigation ends, Mike strike’s off the last, lingering, inadequate questions on her Stressors and Precipitants list: “Now there’s nothing”. Mike has asked the right questions, but Jennifer’s life has given up the wrong answers and then Mike reads the following sentence highlighted by Jennifer among the banalities and platitudes of Making Sense of Suicide: “Virtually all known studies reveal that the suicidal person will give warnings and clues as to his, or her, suicidal intentions”. Jennifer had certainly done that: “Clues. Jennifer left clues. She was the daughter of a police. That did matter”. Now Mike understands the wrong answers:

“She was the daughter of a police . . . . She knew that [her father] would follow her trail. And I believe she knew also that I would play a part in the search. . . . As she headed toward death she imprinted a pattern that she thought would solace the living. A pattern: Something often seen before. Jennifer left clues. But the clues were all blinds”.

Mike’s investigation had uncovered a solution to the unbearable mystery of Jennifer’s suicide. But her revisiting these clues now reveals it to be an elaborate and calculated faux solution, carefully concocted by Jennifer to leave the living with something they could live with: Jennifer knew her suicide would trigger the great anguished existential questioning, so she set about supplying an answer. But if this answer is not an answer, if the detection has led only to a false solution … then who was Jennifer Rockwell, and what is the meaning of her suicide?

Far from answering the questions about Jennifer’s identity and existence, Mike’s narrative has only deepened the enigma. And her account has even formulated another question about identity, this time concerning her own, but here too her narrative has stalled on a question, faltering in the face of the unnamable, or the ineffable.

Night Train’s short last section deals with this unfinished business, but it deals with it in a manner that is true to the epistemological condition of its telling. As far as Mike’s self interrogation’s concerned, it will not provide the missing, or unutterable, word; it will allow her to narrate herself to her own conclusion, and to act accordingly. But if this, in the unforeseen existential quest in the novel, does not assuage our anxieties or return us to order, neither does it withhold from us the evidence for well-founded apprehension.

But who was Jennifer Rockwell, and what is the meaning of her suicide? We might say that the detective set out to answer the first question, and the novel to investigate the second. Both fall silent at the moment of closure. The identity question, the detective’s quest, was, on reflection, an impossible one, because the a priori assumptions informing the quest — about temporal and self coherence, and about the unity, intention, and stability which ground and delimit the concept of personal identity — are so comprehensively sundered, so irrevocably negated, and are rendered so thoroughly irrelevant, by the finality, conviction, and sheer otherness of suicide. Intelligibility and coherence are precisely what Jennifer’s suicide mocks and destroys. Identity seems a puny, fragile impostor in the wake of suicide’s verdict. The two questions are, in fact, one, a way of saying that the detective’s quest to construct the victim’s identity and the novel’s teleological drive towards a solution are inseparable.

The latter subsumes the former: if we know why Jennifer Rockwell killed herself we have a solution, in so far as we can re-interpret and re-inscribe her life, and construct for her an identity, within the context of the reason for her suicide: we will have an explanation, we will understand, and the novel will have both returned us to a form of order and assumed the responsibilities of its own teleology. But Night Train does not do this — it does not offer us a solution, it does not tell us why Jennifer killed herself.

The detective and reader alike are left staring into the same metaphysical void, futilely sifting through the same inklings and intimations for something as concrete as a reason for the suicide. Jennifer’s decision to kill herself seems close to being a gratuitous act, although it is a decision whose metaphysical context is her work as an astrophysicist: we learn that her staring into the vastness of the universe was never reduced for her to velocities, algorithms and pixels, but that she retained, rather, a romantic, entirely human wonder at the grandeur of the cosmos and the puniness of human striving. We are allowed to consider that the world — the human condition, with the “rat-race, turf-war, dog-eat-dog stuff we do all day”, as Jennifer’s boss describes it — suddenly appeared impossibly vain and hollow to Jennifer, although this whispered speculation is not endorsed by the narrator. Suicide kills everybody — but does it also, in Jennifer’s final gesture, deliver a verdict on the planet, on the entire human endeavor?

Night Train leaves the reader with these somber metaphysical musings, an outcome that has not been appreciated by all its readers: the novelist Anita Brookner considers the narrative’s quest for the truth as “an assault on the reader’s good faith,” a serious, and wholly unfair, charge that smacks of a depressing conservatism and a failure, or an unwillingness, to appreciate the genre conventions within and against which Amis is writing. Amis has taken a genre whose tradition and — for a long time — practice epitomized and enacted rational inquiry, the discovery of truth, a return to order, and a faith in the value of solution and closure, and he has confronted it with the enigma and incoherence of suicide; he has, in other words, deliberately and disinterestedly challenged the archetypal discourse of order by means of the ultimate human act of disorder and chaos.

If Night Train, then, comes dressed up in these postmodern clothes, if it either refuses or fails to permit the detection to posit a solution in what appears to be a resolutely anti-detective mode, it is less that it consciously and ideologically wishes to do so than that it is obliged to remain true to the existential uncertainties and metaphysical anxieties that inhabit the act, and contemplation, of suicide.

Content and form in Night Train, in their resistance to solutions to questions about identity, are, indeed, in harmony. The novel’s impressive weave of styles and idioms, tradition and innovation, homage’s and subversions, thwart simple categorization, and, in its breezy borrowings and multiple poses, Night Train confronts the reflective reader with the elusive, mutating, and unstable nature of identity. Who was Jennifer Rockwell? Who is Mike Hoolihan? As always in literature, we learn more from troubling questions than from facile answers.

References

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/01/books/her-long-goodbye.html

1 Martin Amis, Night Train (London: Cape, 1997) 4. All further quotations from the novel

will be followed by a page-number reference in parentheses.

2 The darkness, the particular brand of noir, on display in Night Train has not everywhere

found a receptive audience. John Updike read Night Train as exemplifying what he sees as Amis’s “writ[ing] out of a sensibility on the edge of the post-human.” John Updike, More Matter:Essays and Criticism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999) 364-5.

3 “Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am apolice officer. We would just say I am a police” (1).

4 He speaks in the memoir of the “fundamental trinity of significant suicides” which have marked his life, including that of the mother of his eldest child. Experience (London: Cape, 2000)226.

5 Experience, 281.

6 Brookner’s comments appeared originally in her review of Night Train for The Spectator(27 September 1997), which is reproduced in The Fiction of Martin Amis, ed. by Nicolas Tredell (Cambridge: Icon, 2000) 175-76 (p. 175).