Night Train

Rating:
Summary: Excellent thriller
Review: "My wife is American. Our infant son is half-American. I feel fractionally American myself." So Martin Amis, the English novelist, son of the late Kingsley Amis, introduces himself in his 1986 book of essays on American subjects, The Moronic Inferno. Twelve years later, though no longer married to an American, he is still very conscious of his quasi-American identity, still writes about America in both his journalism and fiction, and rumors have been circulating in the press that he is considering a permanent move to New York.

Author of nine novels, including his splendid Money (1984), which was partly set in New York, his new novel Night Train brings us back into the heart of the American metropolis - a large, unnamed city with a conspicuously high murder rate - as seen through the eyes of a tough-talking but philosophical female police officer, Mike Hoolihan.

Amis once wrote that "conversation about murder in America is as stoical and routine as talk about the weather." The conversation in Night Train revolves around murder quite a bit, and Hoolihan's attitude is indeed stoical and crisply matter-of-fact. Her language is direct and demotic, a rich argot of the street, riddled with slang and NYPD Blue-style streetwise bons mots. But she is also by turns speculative about human nature and its foibles, psychologically acute, compassionate, and tender to those she is close to.

Of the many surprising things about the novel, one of the most surprising is the decision to have a female narrator at all, which is a new departure for Amis. On the whole, he manages to pull it off. Hoolihan is vivid, lively, and intelligent, full of amiability, candor and self-awareness. Husky-voiced and hard as nails, she is a reformed alcoholic who is proud of her new sobriety, though under no illusions about her own weaknesses. She has had a successful career in the PD Homicide department, has investigated over a hundred murders, and has seen it all - or thought she had:

"What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. The worst case--for me, that is. When you're a police, 'worst' is an elastic concept. You can't really get a fix on 'worst.' The boundaries are pushed out every other day. 'Worst?' we'll ask. 'There's no such thing as worst.' But for Detective Mike Hoolihan this was the worst case."

Hoolihan is investigating the death of Jennifer Rockwell, beautiful and talented daughter of her boss, Colonel Tom Rockwell. Since Mike was nursed back to a sober recovery by the Rockwells she is a friend of the family and is deeply shaken by Jennifer's untimely death, which appears to be a suicide case (though this is scarcely believable by all concerned, so optimistic and contented the deceased always seemed). The main complication in the case is the fact that the deceased has three bullets in her skull, which raises suspicions that she was murdered. This points the finger at her live-in lover, Trader Faulkner. Hoolihan is put on the case, and is told to treat Faulkner as the prime suspect.

Amis's characterization is unerringly superb, and the mystery of this murder, or suicide, comes to haunt the reader as it does the narrator. It is not his most ambitious novel, lacking the scope and range of London Fields (1989), say, but it has the tightly-knit intensity of Amis's best writing, and is as profound a meditation on the nature and effects of suicide as you'll find. In this regard, he is returning to one of his major themes: the enormous resources in people for self-destruction by their own hand or by the weaponry they create, and after all, the first words of Money were "This is a suicide note." If the novel has a fault, it lies in the tendency of Mike Hoolihan to sound - in her theoretical brilliancy, in the virtuoso magic of her crackling monologues - a bit too much like Martin Amis. But this is not such a bad thing.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent thriller
Review: "My wife is American. Our infant son is half-American. I feel fractionally American myself." So Martin Amis, the English novelist, son of the late Kingsley Amis, introduces himself in his 1986 book of essays on American subjects, The Moronic Inferno. Twelve years later, though no longer married to an American, he is still very conscious of his quasi-American identity, still writes about America in both his journalism and fiction, and rumors have been circulating in the press that he is considering a permanent move to New York.

Author of nine novels, including his splendid Money (1984), which was partly set in New York, his new novel Night Train brings us back into the heart of the American metropolis - a large, unnamed city with a conspicuously high murder rate - as seen through the eyes of a tough-talking but philosophical female police officer, Mike Hoolihan.

Amis once wrote that "conversation about murder in America is as stoical and routine as talk about the weather." The conversation in Night Train revolves around murder quite a bit, and Hoolihan's attitude is indeed stoical and crisply matter-of-fact. Her language is direct and demotic, a rich argot of the street, riddled with slang and NYPD Blue-style streetwise bons mots. But she is also by turns speculative about human nature and its foibles, psychologically acute, compassionate, and tender to those she is close to.

Of the many surprising things about the novel, one of the most surprising is the decision to have a female narrator at all, which is a new departure for Amis. On the whole, he manages to pull it off. Hoolihan is vivid, lively, and intelligent, full of amiability, candor and self-awareness. Husky-voiced and hard as nails, she is a reformed alcoholic who is proud of her new sobriety, though under no illusions about her own weaknesses. She has had a successful career in the PD Homicide department, has investigated over a hundred murders, and has seen it all - or thought she had:

"What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. The worst case--for me, that is. When you're a police, 'worst' is an elastic concept. You can't really get a fix on 'worst.' The boundaries are pushed out every other day. 'Worst?' we'll ask. 'There's no such thing as worst.' But for Detective Mike Hoolihan this was the worst case."

Hoolihan is investigating the death of Jennifer Rockwell, beautiful and talented daughter of her boss, Colonel Tom Rockwell. Since Mike was nursed back to a sober recovery by the Rockwells she is a friend of the family and is deeply shaken by Jennifer's untimely death, which appears to be a suicide case (though this is scarcely believable by all concerned, so optimistic and contented the deceased always seemed). The main complication in the case is the fact that the deceased has three bullets in her skull, which raises suspicions that she was murdered. This points the finger at her live-in lover, Trader Faulkner. Hoolihan is put on the case, and is told to treat Faulkner as the prime suspect.

Amis's characterization is unerringly superb, and the mystery of this murder, or suicide, comes to haunt the reader as it does the narrator. It is not his most ambitious novel, lacking the scope and range of London Fields (1989), say, but it has the tightly-knit intensity of Amis's best writing, and is as profound a meditation on the nature and effects of suicide as you'll find. In this regard, he is returning to one of his major themes: the enormous resources in people for self-destruction by their own hand or by the weaponry they create, and after all, the first words of Money were "This is a suicide note." If the novel has a fault, it lies in the tendency of Mike Hoolihan to sound - in her theoretical brilliancy, in the virtuoso magic of her crackling monologues - a bit too much like Martin Amis. But this is not such a bad thing.

Rating:
Summary: More than just a murder mystery
Review: A gripping read about a tough cop and her problems, her life, her doubt that this brilliant young woman could willingly take her own life. Not an exciting page-turner, not a shoot-'em-up, no car chases, no deeeeep, dark secrets.
But there's an undercurrent, and if you get the What and Why of the very end, you'll understand that this is not just another murder/suspense novel - it's a psychological classic. It's so good, it should be labeled "literature". It should be made into a black & white film. It should win a prize (has it?).
I want to go back and read it again, four or five times. But first I have to catch my breath.

Rating:
Summary: More than its modernist seams
Review: A novel that becomes more than its modernist seams, about the mystery of a successful woman's suicide (the night train), a suicide that, despite the woman's planning, turns out to be not a very compelling mystery after all. What is compelling are Martin Amis' sentences, which are guaranteed to make your eyes hear:

"Falling silent. His head vibrated, his head actually trembled to terrible imaginings. Imaginings he wanted and needed to be true. Because any outcome, yes, any at all, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, marathon tortures of Chinese ingenuity, of Afghan lavishness, any outcome was better than the other thing. ...

Rating:
Summary: Strange Death of a Beautiful Cosmologist!...
Review: A rough,hard as nails,mannish policewoman investigates a bizarre 3-shot murder(?),suicide(?). I found this to be among the starkest of the many novels I've read in the HARD BOILED genre,and among the most unique in it's questioning of the motives of suicide, as a part of the riddles of the universe. This is a brilliant university-employed astro-physicist who seems to live to explore the outer realms of the universe, thru it's telescope. Amis explores, thru the first person in the words of this cynical/lovable female bull of a detective, the recent life of this seeming Botticelli-like creation,who has devoted her life to creation itself, and it's underpinnings. A pretty large subject to write about in only 175 pages. This tortured ride thru outer/inner space, and the gritty streets of a large US city, was so outrageous I read it three times. Amis goes right for the throat,gut,and heart of the matter,and largely succeeds,though at times the gruesomeness of this journey may make you want to take a rest. The world of cadavers, burnt-out urban police, astronomy, and a lot more will make this a rough and tumble ride. The final resolution may be weak, but crazier things have happened.

Rating:
Summary: I'm Now a Martin Amis Fan
Review: After a very long spell of reading all non-fiction, I picked up my friend's copy of "Night Train" and couldn't put it down until the end. Amis manages to get inside the head of his amazingly interesting, real and vulnerable main character, Detective Mike Hoolihan. The only problems I had were Amis' sometimes off-the-mark American lingo, Hoolihan being a bit too intellectual for an ordinary cop, and the end was a bit underwhelming. Amis creates exciting, slim prose. Very good and entertaining read. I am now an official fan of Martin Amis.

Rating:
Summary: Amis takes you into the night, and leaves you there
Review: An incredibly weak effort from a stylist and humorist of genius, 'Night Train' simply rejigs themes and ideas found in earlier books (the musings about the relative importance of motive in police investigations are directly lifted from 'The Information') and attatches them to a cliched, uninteresting narrative. The prose is somehow both crude and over-stylized - it seems like the work of a pop-song lyricist rather than a crime novelist (or a literary novelist) - and the extraordinarily bleak resolution really is very hard to swallow.

Rating:
Summary: Lotsa problems here . . .
Review: By and large, I like Martin Amis's work. He's inventive and witty and a master of the English sentence. But his actual novels don't always work, and this one is less successful than most. Homicide detective Mike Hoolihan is a world-weary female city cop somewhere in (I think) the American Midwest. She's a recovering alcoholic, she was abused by her father, and she has lousy taste in men. She would also do anything for Colonel Tom Rockwell, her mentor and ex-boss, now high brass in the department. And when Colonel Tom's daughter, the beautiful and brainy Jennifer Rockwell, apparently shoots herself in the head (three times), she has to carry the news to the unbelieving father. And then she has to investigate the incident at his behest to make sure it really was a suicide. Mike talks like a parody of the streets but she's an intelligent and experienced, though somewhat bigoted cop (as they all are, she says), and her inquiries lead her only to the reasons Jennifer might have killed herself. Except Amis never quite makes this clear, and the last couple pages rather baffled me. Maybe I missed something here -- but I really don't thing so. But there's one other major problem with this book, a very jarring problem, something that keeps me from enjoying it as much as I believe I would have. How can someone with Amis's gift for language, someone whose father was an expert in English usage, be so totally unaware of American idiom? The very opening line is "I am a police," which he seems to think is a common construction in this country. This continues throughout the book and it throws me every time I see it. Then there's the use of purely Brit terms like "semi-detached house," which few Yanks comprehend, even those who read British mysteries. And there's that whole thing of referring to the police department as the "CID." Isn't that also a British thing? I've never heard the usage in this country. And Mike mentions a city cop who "took a bullet for the State." No, he didn't, because the U.S., unlike the UK, does not have a unitary governmental system. He took a bullet "for the city" -- except I can't imagine any cop would think like that. And there are lines like "The science crew come and go." Does he really not know that in American English collective nouns are considered singular? (I assume "science crew" refers to the forensics team, and I've never heard that term either, but who knows?) I've read that he was somehow running a riff on American society, but if so, he's awfully vague about it. My puzzlement about the resolution (or not) of the plot aside, this short novel would have been far better had the author set it in London or Manchester.

Rating:
Summary: Linda Hamilton's voice brings Mike Hoolihan to life
Review: Crime novels are my "thing". I devour them. Once I pick a good one up, I simply CANNOT put it down. So, in the best interest of my cluttered house, I decided to pick up the adio version of Night Train and "listen" to a good book while actually getting some work done. From the first words of spoken text - "I am a police" - I was hooked. And it only got better! The story is the first person account of "the worst" case ever encountered by Detective Mike Hoolihan. She's an imposing woman ( "I'm 5'10", I go 180.") with a deep voice "further deepened by three decades of nicotine abuse," "rural features" and dyed-blonde hair. She's anything but demure and craves justice, heavy-handed justice, at her own strong hands! When the perfect daughter of her mentor and father figure turns up dead in what seems an open and shut suicide, Mike is ready to "put the case down." But Colonel T! om, the young woman's father, refuses to believe his daughter wanted to die and asks Mike to investigate. Hamilton's voice, rich and smooth like fresh honey, urges us through not only every step of the investigation, but into the soul of Mike Hoolihan. The mental picture created by the words of Martin Amis of this most brash and menacing character, with all her imperfections and vices, slowly becomes a fragile soul, wounded and taunted by the evils in her world with the skilled touch of Linda Hamilton. The narrator, with the perfect deep, throaty voice for the character, brings a realism to the character that I feel would have certainly been lost on me had I chosen to read the book myself. Through the twists and turns of her investigation, Mike learns that her friend's daughter had everything she could possibly want. What she could not bring herself to understand, in her highly intelligent mind, was the confusion and chaos of the rest of the world around her. ! I enjoyed the audibook for its realism. The characters! , mainly Mike Hoolihan, were complex and not always logical; none of their lives were perfect; the victim's suicide seemed completely senseless; and we never get a clear answer as to why it happened. At first I was disappointed that I was not given closure to the situation. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we rarely ever do get closure to something like this. A recent accidental death in my own family made me realize that we can never truly understand the world we live in or anyone else that occupies it. So Amis left me with the reality that Mike Hoolihan did her best. She ran a thorough investigation, learned what she could, and eventually had to come to terms with the fact that there was no solution or logic that prevailed. And in the process she was able to confront her own demons and edge a little closer to coming to terms with her own existence. But for me, the most captivating aspect of the tape was the voice of Linda Hamilton. Not on! ly was she the perfect choice for the voice of Mike Hoolihan, but her considerable talents as an actress came across as clearly on tape as if she were visible to the eye. I swear I could see facial expressions and gestures through her voice alone! Congratulations to Mr. Amis on a fine piece of work, and an extraordinary choice of a narrator!

Rating:
Summary: Noir style playing at serious metaphysical substance.
Review: Dark, tragic overtones signal the writing of a mystery writer with a mission. Psychological analysis, police argot and the props of a standard detective fiction swirl together in a readable hodgepodge of narration. What the author misses is the point of all this millenium-era angst.