. . .

Martin Amis was not content to be best. He wanted to be great, and greatness, he reckoned, meant seriousness. To that end he earnestly addressed his fears, which are legion. They include, principally and in no particular order, people who do not read books and the monstrous culture they inhabit, sexual failure, mistaken paternity, and violence: that of men against men, of men against women and children (and, more promisingly, of women and children against men), and so on up to the ultimate escalation of nuclear holocaust. All this was bundled into Money's successor, London Fields (1989), which played out his usual west London bourgeois angst against the apocalyptic climax of the Cold War, but looked a bit silly when it was published after the peaceful conclusion of that conflict.

Amis did the same sort of thing in The Information (1995), but less satisfactorily - a stalled and frustrated effort - and since then he has eschewed the big, knockabout comic novel for tricksy exercises in the detective story, the memoir and polemical history (Time's Arrow is surely best forgotten). In Yellow Dog, though, he is back on horribly familiar territory. The London milieu has shifted a few miles, from Notting Hill & Ladbroke Grove to Primrose Hillu & Camden Town, but the atmosphere is much the same: big stucco houses on mean streets full of menacing aliens with lip rings and tongue studs and "scrawny flares of winded denim" (I think he used that line the first time flares were in fashion).

In a big stucco house lives Xan Meo, an insubstantial actor ("he was famous, and therefore in himself there was something specious and inflationary, something bigged-up"), with "his American wife Russia" and their two daughters. One day at a local pub Xan is hit on the head ("Male violence did it"), and he is subsequently involved in three thematically related plots, concerning a masturbators' tabloid called the Morning Lark, the California pornography industry, and the Royal Family, the whole farrago bound together by some villains straight out of Sexy Beast. Meanwhile, a comet the size of Los Angeles is heading in the direction of Earth, a transatlantic jet is in serious trouble, and the weather is rhetorically threatening: "The thunder was escalatory: fusillade, canonade, heavy artillery, the fundamentally egregious cataract of tactical nuclear strike."

The characters have joke names, like crossword clues (Tilda Quant, Cora Susan, Ainsley Car), which both denote their place in the scheme of things and emphasise their unreality. The chief reporter at the Lark, for instance, is Clint Smoker, and his colleagues are Desmond Heaf, Jeff Strite and Andrew New. The porn players have names like Donna Strange and Sir Dork Bogarde. And the entourage of King Henry IX (who is essentially a parallel universe Charles III) includes characters called Boy, Chippy, Love, Bugger and He. The only straight name is that of the chief villain, Joseph Andrews: "It's just, uh, it's just a kind of joke," another character explains, helpfully. "Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: they're both novels by Henry Fielding..." Thanks for that.

If the names are dreadful, the dialogue is worse. "Gaw, hark at this" sounds comically 1940s, while the following exchange is irredeemably 1970s:

"Chicks like salad."

"What?"

"Chicks like salad. That's the real difference between the sexes... Chicks eat salad when they're stoned... That's how sick chicks are."

For 30 years Martin Amis has been pointing out that pornography is boring, and now, by examining it in close-up from every angle over the course of a full-length novel, he has conclusively demonstrated the truth of that proposition. But more worrying even than the lameness of the characters, dialogue and jokes is that this decorated warrior against cliche seems alarmingly close to embracing it. Sometimes he merely flirts with it ("despite opportunities best described as 'ample' "), but at others he is fully engaged, tongues and all ("only serious rival"). One is left with the uncomfortable feeling of having read a cliche "Martin Amis" novel, and as the author broods on greatness amid broken myths - Oedipus, Icarus, Midas, Faust - it is impossible not to pity him.

 

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