Ninety Double Martinis may be the best J. G. Ballard book that Ballard never wrote. It’s full of wonderfully Ballardian details: the regular noise and lights of airline flights taking off and landing nearby; a motorway jammed with commute traffic at all hours, drivers staring ahead with deadened expressions, as if in trances; a brightly-lit shopping center where cashiers wait but shoppers who aren’t there; anonymous men of violent intent lurking in shadows. The road accident on the motorway that never seems to be cleared away could come from Crash. The block of flats in High Rise could be just a little past the shopping center. A sense of nightmarish, random threats pervades its pages.
Thomas Hinde is likely the least known well-regarded novelist of the Amis/Sillitoe/Murdoch generation. He wrote 15 novels, most of them critically praised, but somehow never managed to get the same level of recognition as his contemporaries. Valancourt Books brought two of Hinde’s novels — Mr Nicholas, his first, from 1952, and The Day the Call Came from 1964 — back to print in recent years, but most of his books never saw second printings, let alone reissues. In terms of academic attention, his work at best gets “honorable mention”-type consideration, which usually indicates that the researcher thought it was worth mention but not actually worth reading. Even for myself, though I’ve owned a copy of Hinde’s “British academic in America” novel, High (1969) since the late 1970s, I haven’t yet read it. Though I could probably rattle off a half-dozen of Hinde’s titles, it was a genuine surprise when I saw the title of Ninety Double Martinis on the spine of a red-backed book next to the seven or eight Hinde titles in the UEA library recently. For the title alone I felt I had to read the book.
For the first twenty or so pages, Ninety Double Martinis seems to be about Mullin, a miserable teacher in a dreary New Town school who rents a room from a nasty landlady and has a crush on the cute young school secretary. Aircraft headed for exotic destinations pass over every few minutes, rattling the dishes — “another ninety double martinis,” Mullin thinks when he hears them. Mullin is one of what Isabel Quigley called Hinde’s usual antiheroes: “limp, lost, but basically sympathetic, tormented by loneliness, jealousy, and a feeling of pointlessness….”
Then, in the middle of a rainy Saturday night, Jill, the secretary, knocks on Mullin’s door. “You must come,” she tells him. Throwing on a coat, he follows, and from then on, we follow the pair through an increasingly irrational and violent landscape. They drink coffees in a brightly-lit cafe and watch as seven or eight attack dogs, “with long Alsatian jaws” trot by, followed by “uniformed figures, with low caps and dark faces.” They run to evade these men, but then the explosion comes — or, not so much an explosion as “a bright, hot breath.” They take a pram from a department store display and load it up with food and other supplies, as if they were going to hole up somewhere for weeks. Then they’re running through an enormous office, empty in the afterhours:
He imagined how strange it would seem to the men who came here in the day time. Their papers deranged, blood on their swivel chairs. They’d talk about it all day. They’d go home and tell their wives. They’d look forward all day to telling them, and their wives, watching television, would wish they’d do it more quickly so that they could concentrate on what was real and moving in the eye of the boy. And they’d notice the way their wives weren’t really listening…
On they flee, into a bowling alley where a loudspeaker blares, “Ticket number six seven three report to the control room,” and the apparently casual bowlers suddenly rally, as if by command, and begin pursuing Jill and Mullin. They escape by crawling through the machinery at the end of a lane and find themselves in a vast multi-story machine room overseen by a man in a white coat who watches one particular dial with rapt attention. More strange rooms and unaccountable threats follow until they are thrown into a pitch-black cell. There, lying on her mackintosh laid out on a cold stone floor, they make love — which is probably the most unbelievable incident in the whole book but which I will forever cherish for what is easily the most English line of dialogue ever written: “‘I’ve loved you for months,’ he said. ‘Ever since mark reading last Michaelmas half term.'”
Reviewing the book for The Listener, Jocelyn Brooke described Ninety Double Martinis as “by Kafka out of Sapper,” and that’s a pretty accurate way to describe the book’s strange mix of absurdist malevolence and slam-bam action. I was reminded a bit of G. W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost, which I wrote about back in October: both books clearly take place in an alternate, slightly hallunicinatory parallel universe, where things appear normal yet nothing makes sense. Unlike Stonier’s nightmare, however, Hinde’s never gives the reader a chance to stop and take stock: violence and death are always pressing in, forcing things forward. I got the sense that had Hinde set his mind to write a James Bond-like thriller, it would have been a crackerjack one.
And in some ways, he might have been better off to write a more conventional thriller, because I got the feeling that having tossed him characters into an absurdist nightmare, he was at something of a loss for how to bring their story to a close. The easiest answer, of course, is to kill everyone off. The second easiest is to pull a Bobby Ewing and have Mullins wake up muttering something about a terrible nightmare. Hinde did a little of both and not enough of either: the last 5-10 pages are the weakest when they needed to be the strongest to bring off the tour de force effect successfully. But for the first 120-plus pages, it’s the next best thing to a good J. G. Ballard book. I’m pretty sure that I was the first person to crack open the UEA’s copy of Ninety Double Martinis since whoever inserted the magnetic anti-theft strip back in the 1980s and probably the first person to actually read the book, which is a sad statement. Ninety Double Martinis might be a bit imperfect, but it sure was fast and furious.
Consider the source?
Hinde/Chitty’s wife was the daughter of Antonia White, who going by her diaries – hated them both.
Yes, he abandoned fiction and spent his last couple of decades writing much more mundane nonfiction books. I’m not sure anyone has ever done a respectful study of all his fiction, which might not all be at the same level of quality but certainly deserves a serious look every bit as much as some of the throw-away things that Kingsley Amis wrote.
I see that Norfolk public library has several of his novels, and I will try one. I see that Thomas Hinde is a nom de plume, his name was actually Sir Thomas Willes Chitty. (The third baronet.) Also, he wrote several non fiction books, most on the topic of garden and landscaping history etc.
Great. Let us know what you think.
I’ve kept two Hinde novels–Mr Nicholas (1952) because it was his first and Ninety Double Martinis because it looked like it might be intriguing. Will certainly read it now.