The
Sunday Times dumps on the dog
[an excerpt from "A burnt-out case,"
by Peter Kemp, The London Sunday Times,
31 August 2003, posted on the Martin Amis
Discussion Web by
a-little-touch-of-Orson (chubbalishis@yahoo.com),
2 September 2003]
. . .
Martin Amis always sets the media a-buzz. Each book he publishes reactivates
hubbub about his personal life and personality. What makes this persisting
newsworthiness peculiarly remarkable is that it's now almost 20 years since he
wrote anything really worth getting excited about.
. . .
YELLOW DOG, his return to fiction, marks a further plummeting in his literary
trajectory. Ambitiously, it begins by reeling out a variety of story-lines: Xan
Meo, a middle-aged actor, is brutally coshed in Camden Town, suffering memory
loss and drastic personality change; Henry IX, king of England, is horrified to
receive sexually compromising pictures of his 15-year-old daughter from a
mysterious blackmailer; Clint Smoker, a journalist on a sleazy tabloid, becomes
entangled with an enigmatic e-mailer; in California, a geriatric gangster called
Joseph Andrews (just one of many roguish literary allusions pressed into the
text) brags his memoirs into a tape recorder; and on turbulence-tossed flight
101 a corpse stored in the hold gets jolted into dangerous motion. Interweaving
all this into a compelling or indeed coherent novel, however, proves beyond
Amis's capabilities.
Although he declared in EXPERIENCE, "I know what makes a good narrative", he
gives little sign of doing so here.
Wonkily put together, his book is also copiously second-hand. Most of the
material in it has been used by Amis before. This isn't just a matter of his
continuing engrossment with the fetid and feculent. There's a far more extensive
sense of deja vu. As often with him, the main plot is motored by male hatred and
female treachery; as in MONEY, its climactic revelation involves a character's
paternity.
Amnesia, which served Amis's purposes in OTHER PEOPLE (1981), MONEY and THE
INFORMATION, is to the fore again. Impotence, a concern in SUCCESS (1978),
MONEY, TIME'S ARROW and THE INFORMATION, gets another outing. Child abuse, dwelt
on in LONDON FIELDS, is prominent. Another synthetic vamp swells the line-up of
Amis's plastic temptresses. And as in LONDON FIELDS, a yobbo in grubby Y-fronts
is addicted to porn videos. Urban scumminess is once more silhouetted against
cosmic menace: in LONDON FIELDS the sun goes into total eclipse on November 5;
here a comet sweeps close to earth on Valentine's Day.
Staleness of content stupefyingly combines with torpidity of treatment. Amis's
longtime habit of fitting out his characters with bizarre names now lapses into
puerile chortling. Henry IX has a Chinese mistress, He Zizhen, so that Amis can
come up with facetiousnesses such as "He touched him. He touched He" (or, by way
of variant when Henry is using the royal plural, "we will enter He"). There is
also a character called And, which opens the way for such hilarities as "And And
said".
Merriment manufactured from quaint names proves endlessly entertaining to Amis.
Xan has "an American wife Russia" which, besides the incongruous juxtaposition,
facilitates such witticisms as "at night...he invaded Russia". A character
called Snort causes heavily jocose confusion between "Doing Snort" and "Doing
snort".
Along with an equerry nicknamed Bugger, Henry has a butler called Love, which
allows Amis frequently seized opportunities for sitcom-like felicities such as
"If you would, Love".
This limp stuff isn't alleviated by much verve elsewhere. Scenes in the office
of the cheesy tabloid, the Morning Lark, ill-calculatedly assume that the
witless accumulation of over-the-top grossnesses constitutes trenchant satire.
Clint, the rancidly misogynist creep at the core of these episodes, is a feeble
recast of more vividly repellent lowlife gargoyles in earlier Amis books.
Efforts to convey the novel's main theme (the pervasiveness of pornography,
which has brought about "the way the world is now: the end of normalcy") push
Amis's prose, always generously hospitable to repetition, into wearisomely
mechanical reiteration: "Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno
pal...they were out on the porno patio...around the porno pool...Dork lolled on
a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the
porno wine..." Back in London, there's "a porno sunset" that "resembled a
titanic firefighting operation...the firemen about their massive work of
hell-containment, hell-control". This lurid jumble (what is pornographic about
firefighting?) typifies Amis's often garishly slovenly handling of metaphor.
. . .
Along with the narrative sprawl and slack writing (the prose can read as though
it has been ineptly translated: "This is going to be a storm in all the oceans
of the thing which is called world", "the essential wrongness of the air...as if
all the sequiturs had been vaccumed out of it") goes baggy theorising about the
pollution of contemporary life and the redeeming potentiality of parenthood. A
former porn queen (whose "famous breasts...were above all binocular") could,
it's suggested, be rehabilitated by following the advice, "Have a baby...That's
what your breasts are looking for...they're looking for your children." In
keeping with this dotingly domestic vein, the novel ends with a baby getting
triumphantly up on to its feet. But the impression it leaves is of a talent on
its last legs.
