Acquiring a large sum of money is, at the outset of the novel, presented as a good thing, and when Roger Yount doesn’t acquire that money, his million pound bonus, he and his family begin to slide just a little faster towards the red. Where for Roger that sum amounts to more or less “maintenance money” for the Younts, when similar sums encroach upon the narratives of Freddy, Zbigniew, and Mary, they are sums that stilt or potentially reverse, rather than maintain, the flow of their individual economic narratives.

Freddy’s payout is reliant upon the agreement and the belief that he will never play again, Mary’s inheritance of her mother’s house ends up taking a large chunk out of her savings to pay for the inheritance tax and preparing the house for sale (Mary and Alan however refuse to take a loan out to cover these expenses for the sheer ridiculousness of the situation), and the case of money much worried over by Zbigniew is, once revealed to Mary, deemed useless not only for the legal trouble it would bring, but for its inability to function as legal tender and the likelihood of its depreciation or taxation.

Receiving a large amount of money, it seems, goes hand in hand with either losing a large amount of money concurrently, or forfeiting a larger influx of money that may be obtained over a longer amount of time – see Freddy’s situation and Albert’s refusal to invest his suitcase full of tenners.

I’d love to hear other thoughts on the uselessness of money, or of legal tender in Capital, as there were so many variations on the theme throughout the novel that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around a coherent way of framing it!

One of the first things that stood out to me when I started reading Money was the immediacy with which transportation was established as a setting in and off itself. Throughout the course, the modes, means, and practices of transportation have been present, if not emphasized so heavily as in Money, and have influenced both the flow and the shape of the texts thus far. In Roxana, her frequent travel is a manifestation of her fluidity, both as an individual and as lady capital. In Emma, it is the means by which Emma identifies and secures social affluence in first her critique of Mr. Knightley for his lack of a carriage, and second through the relative lack of it which allows Highbury to function in a semi-insular social sphere. In Howards End, it is the backdrop for the single-minded purposes of Mrs. Munt and the means by which country and urban, Howards End and Wickham Place intersect.

In Money however, transportation is no longer a means to an end in such a way, but begins to function as an end in itself. Like Roxana, John Self’s continuous movement between nations, New York and London to her England, France, and Holland, facilitates the constantly fluctuating fortunes of the protagonist and results in the ultimate demise of whatever notion of an original self either character initially embodied. Crucially, I believe, it is in one of these sites of transportation, the airplane, when the fiction of Self’s film, Good Money/Bad Money is conceived. This moment ties together the theme of transportation with the quasi-titular subject of the novel – the film and, I would argue, creates an avenue in which the movement of the novel’s various vehicles and their passengers can be paralleled with the movement of money in the novel, the way in which loans and debts are transferred, cancelled, and reconstituted in a new form, much like the protagonist John Self.