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Martin Bites Back
[an excerpt from a TIME Europe Magazine review by Donald
Morrison, September 8, 2003 (Vol. 162
No. 9 )]
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. . .
So how is the book? The reassuring news is that Yellow Dog's bark
is far better than the back-biting. Yes, this dog can hunt. The book is
classic Amis, energetically written, peopled with colorfully named
lowlifes, suffused with violence and physical decrepitude, whirring with
plotlets and straining to tackle big themes. It's the story of Xan Meo,
a successful London actor-writer and doting father who suffers a head
injury in a seemingly random (it isn't) act of violence and becomes a
crude, inarticulate jerk. His journey back to goodness pits him against
Joseph Andrews, a vicious East End gangster semiretired to the U.S.
Meanwhile, the royal family (a new element in Amisland; he has learned
what sells) is threatened with blackmail when King Henry IX receives an
anonymous screen grab of his 15-year-old daughter in the nude. Across
the pond, the Sextown Sniper is terrorizing a California municipality
set up under legal loopholes as a haven for the porn industry.
Simultaneously, sleazy Clint Smoker, who writes a misogynistic column
called Yellow Dog for a Fleet Street tabloid of dazzling
tastelessness, is hurtling across several plotlines toward a romantic
rendezvous with violent potential.
What holds all this together? Alas, not much more than glue and
stitching. Yellow Dog, sad to say, is a novelist's breakfast.
Chapters on California's porn industry read as if Amis were recycling
his 2001 Talk magazine article on that subject. A darkly
hilarious story line about a corpse jostled from its coffin and wreaking
havoc in the hold of a transatlantic jetliner deserves a novel of its
own, but it doesn't belong in this one.
Yet Amis' manic prose keeps Yellow Dog trotting along briskly. In
Henry IX's office, "every plane had been harassed with ornament," and
that describes Amis' style. Where other men see jets in the sky, Amis
sees "contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as
solid-looking as pipe cleaners, others like white stockings, discarded,
flung in the air, or light bedding after beauty sleep." When the King
visits his Chinese mistress He Zizhen, "He touched him, and he touched
He." But make no mistake. Amis is after more than just surface glitz:
"After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship — marked by
occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest." And: "Women
wouldn't mind pornography if reproduction took place by some other
means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy." Like a meaner, funnier Updike,
his talent finds its fullest expression in sentences so perfect they'll
keep you stuck on a single page. It's in the task of making all those
dazzling sentences add up to a novel that he sometimes goes astray.
Some of the sharpest words concern Clint Smoker's odious tabloid, the
Lark. What was in a terrorist group's "dirty bomb?"an editor asks.
"Radioactive medical waste, Chief, plus ringworm, West Nile virus,
liquid gangrene and a cladding of mad cow." The bombing story is
squeezed out by news of a man injured outside a kiddies' swimming pool
when he is caught watching too closely and flees with his pants round
his ankles. Headline: Pervs Him Right.
Yellow Dog isn't just about language; it's also about Amis, and the
predicament of being famous in a celebrity-obsessed age. Like the real
royal family, he has seen details of his personal life — failed
marriage, broken friendships, dental problems — chewed over obsessively
by the jaundiced curs of the British press. Now it's payback time.
Yellow Dog may not be the deepest, most Booker-worthy novel Amis
ever wrote, but it's such nasty, inventive, satisfying fun that his
critics will be panting with envy. |
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