Vile Bodies

Early in the novel, Adam wins a bet over an inconsequential shell game played in a hotel parlor, winning the substantial sum of a thousand pounds (close to 37 thousand in 2022). This is enough money to start his life anew with Nina Blount, his fiancée. However, the money was won drunkenly, and disappears quickly into the hands of the Major, who bets it on a long-odds horse in a coming race. Adam’s search for his thousand-pound note, and later for his winnings on the race, structures the novel as the money disappears around every corner and swells to amazing proportions. When Colonel Blount signs a check for a thousand pounds, Adam celebrates all night until he realizes the check was signed “Charlie Chaplin.” As with the cheap sources of happiness and regret found throughout the novel, money flits at the edge of perception without ever manifesting. It is a goal Adam never reaches.

“I thought we were all driving round and round in a motor race and none of us could stop,” says Agatha Runcible after she has been admitted into a psychiatric hospital, “[a]nd car after car kept crashing until I was left all alone driving and driving” (241).