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Evening
Standard review of Yellow Dog
[posted on the Martin Amis
Discussion Web, 3 September 2003]
The Evening Standard (London),
September 1, 2003, A.36
Martin Amis versus the modern world, by ROBERT MACFARLANE
MARTIN Amis has always styled himself as among the most "street" of
contemporary novelists. For 20 years he has been our man in the gutter,
slumming it with the poor and the nasty. Down into the dark cantonments of
London he has gone, and in book after book he has returned bearing detailed
reports of the underclass. His novels identify him as a connoisseur of the
unfortunate, an expert in their "alien moralities", in their walks - "the
pimp roll" of the young men in London Fields - and in the texture of their
skin: its "cheese-and-onion crisp" consistency (The War Against Clich), its
"rubbery look of cold pasta" (Yellow Dog).
Seediness, squalor, turpitude - for two decades these have been Amis's soap,
loofah and shower gel as he has bathed in the sewage of civilisation.
And yet Amis, it is important to understand, has also always styled himself
as among the most moral of contemporary novelists. He believes himself to be
a writer who will not fall for the warm and easy seductions of the
historical novel, but will always, in his own words, "attempt a reading of
the present".
His hatred of received ideas, his belief in the ethically detergent
qualities of laughter, and his conviction - derived from his acknowledged
master, Vladimir Nabokov - that moral choice by writers occurs not at the
level of the chapter but at the level of the word: these have been as much
part of Amis's self-presentation as his street savvy.
According to Amis, his new novel, Yellow Dog, continues this project. He
wrote the book, he has said in interview, as a protest against the
"diminishing" of "innocence in the modern world". It is hard, at first
glance, to see how a novel which stars a tabloid hack with a penis
inferiority complex, a make-believe King of England who calls his personal
assistant "Bugger" and "wishes he were the prettiest, pretty boy in an
Alabaman prison", and an ex-East End thug turned liberal humanist who
fiddles with his own daughter, could be considered anything other than a
furtherance of this diminishment.
But Yellow Dog is, at bottom, a comedy, and for Amis comedy is a deadly
serious business. Like Nabokov, Amis sees humour as a powerful salutary
force: if you make something or someone risible, you achieve a victory over
the values which they represent. You defeat the "anti-morality" that they
perpetuate.
The novel's hero is Xan Meo, who was born and raised in an East End family
dedicated to thuggery, before "escaping or evolving" out of his past to
become a Hollywood actor, married to a beautiful academic historian. Early
in the novel, Xan suffers a serious head injury in an apparently unprovoked
attack.
His injury causes a shift in his mental health. "Daddy's different now,"
cries Xan's young daughter, and indeed he is.
Post-assault, Xan becomes Nineties laddism made flesh - all bullish
sex-drive, GQ-IQ, and bipolar worldview of "chicks" and "blokes".
The book's other principal character is Clint Smoker, a heavily pierced
"identikit modern uggy" who "subscribes to the look-like-shit look" and
works for the Morning Lark, a paper that runs stories on "adulterous
golfers, satyromanic jockeys and rapist boxers".
During the course of the novel, the lives of Clint, Xan, and a shadowy
gangland boss known as Joseph Andrews, become intertwined, until everything
issues into a messy, meaty finale.
The familiar themes of Amis's earlier work are all blurrily present in
Yellow Dog - masculinity, conflict, comedy, sex, money. Present, too, though
in a restricted form, are Amis's extraordinary skills: the rocket-propelled
metaphors, the armour-piercing one-liners ("After a while, marriage is a
sibling relationship, marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes
of incest"), the zinging essaylets and riffs. And Amis remains a masterful
evoker of microclimates: the antiseptic atmosphere of a doctor's surgery,
for instance, or the grungy editorial room of the Morning Lark.
HOWEVER, all these special effects are local, and where the novel fails -
and it fails spectacularly - is at the larger level of organisation.
Scenes do not fit together, characters become confused, and the jerky,
jump-cut narrative fractures any attempt to read across the novel. True,
this is a book principally concerned with failures of meaningful modes of
human communication, and with the surrogate forms of connection - violent,
libidinal - which have proliferated to take their place.
But the idea, which we might call the "mimetic heresy", that the best way to
write about disintegration is in a disintegrated way, is one that has
sanctioned far too many bad novels over the past few decades.
Yellow Dog is, despite the streak of cowardice implicit in its title, a
brave book. It grapples with the loss of innocence within a familial
context, and with the loss of shame within a societal context. The theme of
incest - Xan's sexual attraction to his own daughter - that runs through the
book is, curiously, its most bracing aspect.
Like Nabokov in Lolita, Amis squares up to a taboo and tries to acknowledge
and analyse its existence without ever condoning it. Despite its courage,
however, and despite its stylistic panache, Yellow Dog does not in the end
work.
It proves that Amis can still construct fine sentences, but no longer a fine
book. |
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