Other People

 Shelley once wrote (in his "Peter Bell the Third") that "Hell is a city much like London." (Bertolt Brecht replied that, with all respect, Hell must be even more like Los Angeles.)

It has also been said—most quotably of all—that Hell is other people. 

Martin Amis wrote a novel called Other People, set in the city of London. And its conclusion appears to be that Hell is not only a city like London, and other people, but also is life itself. 

"Life is hell, life is murder," as a character puts it. 

This 1981 novel—Amis's fourth—was recently re-released in a new paperback edition. But it is not generally as well known as such recognized Amis masterpieces as Money or London Fields. 

This is a great pity; since I found it just as emotionally impactful and verbally stimulating as these others. It belongs in the canon of the upper echelon of his work. 

Read no further if you don't want any spoilers. 

Because it turns out that the mystery at the center of the book—to the extent it is ever resolved—is a metaphysical and otherworldly one. 

The forces tampering with the main character's memory and forcing her to reboot her life multiple times over are demonic. The cop who follows her around—and who is seemingly the only person to know her secrets and true identity—is named "Prince," after all—no doubt short for the "Prince of Darkness." 

But what actually works about this premise—what is convincingly hellish about life as Amis depicts it—is not so much the Satanic imagery and its tip-offs to the mythology of the inferno. It's that he shows us persuasively that innocence is impossible even in this world, i.e. the real, mundane, non-mythological world we already know—"the world of power, boredom and desire, the burning world"—as Amis calls it. 

The main character of Other People starts the novel—after all—as innocent as it is possible for anyone to be. She wakes up in a hospital oblivious of who she is or how she got there. She doesn't even know what shoes or clouds are. She has to piece together the entire fabric of reality bit by bit. She gives herself the innocent-sounding name of "Mary Lamb," because it's the only words that come to mind. 

To do this, she relies on other people—who universally seem to want to take advantage of her innocence. 

Mary trusts them implicitly. So many of them, after all, purport to want to help her. They seem like they mean well. They want to teach her things and introduce them to their social life. 

But "not so fast"—they were "out for their own ends/ not just pleasing their friends," to borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin. Most of these people have an agenda. They want something out of Mary in return. Sharon—the first person she encounters, who takes her under her wing, wants to pimp her out to men in return for booze and attention. Meanwhile, the men Mary encounters mostly want to exploit her sexually—to manhandle her body or spy on her in the commode.  

This alone is hellish enough. If Amis confined his novel to showing how innocence is invariably abused and betrayed in this world, he would already have made his point. A world in which Mary Lamb is taken advantage of at every turn, merely because she tries to trust people, would already seem like Hell. 

But Amis goes further. His point is not just that life is hell for the innocent—but that innocence itself is impossible in this world—and that's what makes this world truly hellish. 

As the Prince character tells Mary at one point: "Beware your own power. No one is powerless." 

Yet, Mary certainly seems powerless, at the start of the novel. She is homeless and shoeless in a great city—the same city Shelley likened to hell two centuries ago—wearing nothing but a hospital gown. She is at the mercy of people who want to rape and traffic her. 

But, as she gradually creates a life for herself—she finds that she keeps hurting people in spite of herself. 

Even the small number of people who genuinely want to help her are ultimately worse off from knowing her. The family that offers her shelter ends up with the father in the hospital and the family home ransacked. 

A young man losing his hair who falls in love with Mary ends up dangling from a noose. 

And this too, alas, is convincing. Amis wins his argument. Anyone who has lived in this world long enough eventually realizes that it is impossible to go through it without hurting other people. 

Even when you set yourself the goal of doing as little harm as possible—of absolutely refusing to ever cause another person pain—even if that is—like Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, you possess the iron-clad "determination [...] to add nothing, not so much as a transient sigh, to the great total of men’s unhappiness, in [your] way through the world"—in the end, you do it anyway. 

You do it inadvertently, in spite of yourself, but you do it nonetheless. 

You do it in the way Mary does it: you do things for people because it's what you think they want. This then creates desires and sets expectations in their minds that you can't fulfill. You make promises you can't keep. 

You are then responsible for their disappointment and their sadness. You end up hurting or destroying them even when you were trying to do the opposite. 

Mary, then, eventually realizes that even when she tries to help and be sweet to people, she just ends up having the contrary effect. She realizes that she has a "power to make feel bad" that cannot be contained. 

And so eventually—as she starts to desire things for herself—she realizes that she might as well use this "power to make feel bad" to get the things she wants. She learns how to manipulate others. She learns how to exploit people in turn. 

And that's the moment when the mask of Mary Lamb falls—she suddenly recovers her memory and her former identity. She becomes herself again—she has woken up to adulthood. She will never be innocent. She has returned to being Amy Hide (her not-so-subtly named wicked doppelgänger). 

That's when Prince comes for her. And so the cycle is set to repeat, at the book's close. Mary Lamb/Amy Hide is dead already; she's in hell. And that's why she is condemned to go on living. Because hell is life; and life is hell. 

Of course, this is not the whole story of life. Life may be hell. But life is heaven too. Life is everything we have; there's nothing we know that isn't part of life; there's nothing bad nor good that isn't part of it. We've never had anything other than life by which to compare it; so all the comparisons we are making—all the value judgments we have of life; are drawn from life itself. 

But I couldn't help but grasp, for all that, the element of truth in Amis's tragic vision of life. 

Yes, tragic—despite Amis's reputation for superficial linguistic razzle-dazzle and mordant comedy. Seldom have I read a novel that is admittedly so funny, page by page—so enjoyable at the level of verbal technique and comic one-liners—yet so unspeakably sad, as soon as one closes the book and regards it as a whole. 

Any given passage of this book would convince you it's a dark comedy. You have to read the novel as a whole to see it as a grim tragedy. But this doesn't mean you can't appreciate the humor. As a character says in the book—you should laugh when things are funny, not because you "feel well." And this is certainly a book that is funny without in any way making you feel well. 

Of course, we all manage to find a way to go on living even after we've lost our innocence; even after realizing it's impossible to go through life without hurting people inadvertently. 

Plus, we recognize that there can still be scales of innocence, even if the item in its pure form is unattainable. We can see evil for what it is and say—well, if I am not innocent, at least I am not that. 

But it is still an unspeakable loss to realize that merely by living, we still add our contribution in spite of ourselves to "the great total of men's unhappiness"—that "sum of human wretchedness," as Byron once called it. That's the aspect of life that makes it hell; that makes it murder. It's how life with other people manages to make "even paradise / into hell; into prison" (Heine).