Night Train by Martin Amis is a noir detective novel told from the perspective of Detective Mike Hoolihan, a female detective who is charged with the task of finding the motivation for Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide.

Structurally, it continually sabotages its own mechanics and constructs. While a traditional detective novel usually puts the pieces together until every motive and movement is accounted for, Amis instead creates a space where each new piece of information breaks things open until we get to a point where it seems everything is up for debate other than the basic facts that someone has died.

The thing that stood out to me was the continual battle for meaning and understanding. With this in mind, I was left thinking about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of re-territorialisation vs. deterritorialisation. With this in mind, the detective is the agent of re-territorialisation. They take the chaotic “lines of flight” (the murder, the missing clues) and pull them back into a rigid structure revolving around the case, the motive, and the conviction. In Night Train, Hoolihan attempts this. However, Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide acts as a pure deterritorialisation. Jennifer had “everything”- beauty, intelligence, love, and professional success. By removing the “why,” her death refuses to be captured by the detective’s logic. The more Mike investigates, the more the structures break down.

The investigation of a death also reminded me of Gayatri Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, in which she discusses the suicide of Bhuvaneswari, who waited to be menstruating before killing herself to prove her act was not motivated by an illicit pregnancy. Despite this, her motive was still lost to history, displaced by the dominant narratives of the time.

In a some way, Jennifer Rockwell performs a similar, act. Although she is the “elite” rather than the subaltern, she chooses a death that is particularly silent. Hoolihan acts as the “intellectual” in Spivak’s framework, attempting to represent or explain Jennifer’s “why.” By trying to find a motive (a “reterritorialisation”), Hoolihan is essentially trying to force the silent to speak.

Another way in which meaning breaks down is with the metaphor of the “Night Train” that reappears throughout the book. Each recurrence provides a different twist, from background noise, to cheap-blues soundtrack, to a cosmological-suicidal vehicle, then finally to Mike’s own, half-chosen ride into the dark. In the end, it becomes something of a dead metaphor, capturing everything and nothing at the same time.

I vaguely remember studying Martin Amis’ Night Train at university. In the middle of my honours thesis, I felt I did not really give it the time of day so want to return to it. It definitely leaves you seeing things in a new light, something I touched on after watching The Beekeeper. It was also interesting to think about it alongside Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, another novel that seemingly subverts its own structure and meaning. As well as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and the way in which meaning is continually made while also seemingly being deconstructed.

I listened to a reading by Linda Hamilton’s via Spotify.

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