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Down, Yellow Dog:
Times tries to pre-empt Booker listing
[Excerpts from Richard Brooks' article in the Times, posted on the Martin Amis Discussion Web 10 August 2003. The BBC reported on 15 August that Yellow Dog is on a 23-long list of Booker contenders. Readers should keep in mind that the Times has harbored a grudge against Amis since he broke with the paper in 1996 in a dispute over the paper's decision to publish excerpts from Kingsley Amis's diaries]
Amis out of Booker with dog of novel
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
MARTIN AMIS, mocked for his bad teeth and declining talent, may be in for fresh humiliation. His new novel is expected to be left off the Booker Prize long-list later this week.
The omission will be a huge blow for Amis, 53, who has laboured on the book for four years, and for the Random House group which wooed him back from HarperCollins in a £1m package deal.
Yellow Dog is the author’s first novel for eight years and has been eagerly anticipated. Fans hoped for a return to form of such Amis successes as The Rachel Papers, Money and London Fields — a market taken over by female novelists like Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.
However, the Booker judges have been disappointed with Yellow Dog. “It’s very patchy,” said one. According to another: “All the stuff about the royal family is ridiculous. He’s also back in the 1980s with his obsession about porn.”
Such disdain chimes with criticism by the novelist Tibor Fischer, who sank his teeth into Yellow Dog in a newspaper article last week. Fischer, a previous defender of Amis’s work, said the book was “terrible” and “unworthy of his talent”. . . .
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The book, which is under strict embargo, tells the story of a “dream husband” Xan Meo, who, after a physical assault, has a personality change. He becomes a bad father and husband, and gets involved in the murky world of porn.
The “yellow dog” of the title is a “yellow press” journalist, Clint Smoker. Another plot line involves King Henry England, his wife Princess Pam, Chinese mistress and daughter Victoria, who is set up in a paedophile scam which undermines the monarchy. When interviewed more than three years ago by The Sunday Times, Amis described the book as “a novel about a clash of cultures — a disreputable cast from the underworld on the one hand and royalty on the other”.
His publishers remain doggedly upbeat. “It’s a comic novel, which satirises the gutter press savagely,” enthused Dan Franklin, his editor at Jonathan Cape, part of Random House. “It’s back to Money in style.”
Franklin may be in for a shock from the critics who have read copies. “It’s terrible,” said one this weekend. “It’s basically a lot of stupid wordplay. It’s all over the place.”
Amis took a literary pasting last year for his book Koba the Dread, which was a catalogue of Stalin’s crimes followed by an open letter to Christopher Hitchens, a close friend.
He can console himself that he is not alone among this year’s unsatisfactory Booker contenders.
The judges, who include the broadcaster and novelist Francine Stock, have not been impressed and their disfavour extends to big name authors such as Anita Brookner and Peter Carey. The long-list, which could include 20 novels, is expected to feature Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, Carol Birch’s Turn Again Home and Ali’s Brick Lane.
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