"John Self" responds to a proof copy of Yellow Dog for Palimpsest.org.uk ("The Web Community for lovers of Books, Film and Music").

The response by "John Self" is printed below; clitk hyperlink below for the full page, which includes an ongoing discussion about the novel--and some of Amis's other fiction.

 

An excerpt (posted: 18 July, 2003 8:45 pm):

A generous benefactor, who knows I worship the ground that Little Mart's size sevens walk on, has provided me with an advance proof of his new novel, Yellow Dog. It's not out until September and another proof copy went on eBay this week for £50, but I shall be holding on to mine...

It's hard for me to review Yellow Dog adequately since I have to bear in mind that it took me three or four cracks each at his last two novels, The Information (1995) and Night Train (1997), to really come to love them. So there is a sense, I fear, in which Amis's books comply with the dictum of his part-time hero Nabokov (who job-shares with Saul Bellow), in that they cannot be read, only re-read. At least that's my excuse for feeling the familiar sense of dislocation at the end (what happened at the end of London Fields again? Or Money?), and irritation with the tricksy, sub-Tale of Two Cities attention-seeking opening paragraph:

But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find...

And then again I am reminded that I felt the same about Night Train's determinedly innovative opening ("I am a police..."), but that it later came to seem like sweet music to me - and even now, as I type out the start of Yellow Dog, it's beginning to veer into resonant familiarity. It's a paradox of linguistic stylists, like Amis or Winterson, that we need to make their books familiar by re-reading to counter the effect of their formal invention, because what we really want is some impossible ideal between something new and something well-known. (Is this how writers do posterity?)

And as for the confusion at the end, Yellow Dog sins less by actually having a pretty followable plot. In fact there are four main strands: Xan Meo, actor-turned-writer, gets bopped by goons and suffers a change in personality; the excellently-named Clint Smoker, sub-tabloid hack, pursues his own low ends, romantic and journalistic; King Henry IX ("Hal Nine") of England, suffers agonies wondering who is trying to blackmail him by sending him screencaps of his fifteen-year-old daughter Princess Victoria, in the nude; and a plane suffers a bizarre series of misfortunes brought about by the corpse of the spouse of one of its passengers...

In interviews during the writing of Yellow Dog, Amis said it was "so me, it feels like I'm going through my hoops." (As though to fend off criticism, he adds: "You can say of Graham Greene that he wrote about the same things but he just got older as he did them. The perspective is like a shadow moving across a lawn.") And sure enough, all the old Amis worries are here: pornography, ageing and "the only end of age", male violence, low-lifes, human insignificance in the face of astronomic happenings, and so on. To this he adds protracted riffs on marriage and one of the ends of marriage, which suggests he has not yet got his own divorce quite off his chest:

After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship - marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.

His divorce had been so vicious that even the lawyers had panicked.

He had reached the polar opposite of love - a condition far more intense than mere hatred. You want the loved one dead; you want her plane to come down, and never mind about the others on board - those four hundred saps and losers...

By and large, Yellow Dog does not seem heavily populated with the twizzly phrasemaking we can so easily extract from any page of any other Amis novel (particularly the masterful Night Train). (Although I liked his to-the-nth-degree intensification and satire of email or text-speak: per4m, gr&iosity, pre10ce, 40issimo, verbo10, asi9...) And it will certainly not win Amis any new admirers - novitiates, start elsewhere. But it's luminously peopled, authentically Amis-ly unpleasant, and occasionally laugh-aloud funny. And, I hope and trust, best after another couple of runs through.