|
Evening Standard review of Yellow Dog
[posted on the Martin Amis Discussion Web, 3 September 2003]
The Evening Standard (London), September 1, 2003, A.36
Martin Amis versus the modern world, by ROBERT MACFARLANE
MARTIN Amis has always styled himself as among the most "street" of contemporary novelists. For 20 years he has been our man in the gutter, slumming it with the poor and the nasty. Down into the dark cantonments of London he has gone, and in book after book he has returned bearing detailed reports of the underclass. His novels identify him as a connoisseur of the unfortunate, an expert in their "alien moralities", in their walks - "the pimp roll" of the young men in London Fields - and in the texture of their skin: its "cheese-and-onion crisp" consistency (The War Against Clich), its "rubbery look of cold pasta" (Yellow Dog).
Seediness, squalor, turpitude - for two decades these have been Amis's soap, loofah and shower gel as he has bathed in the sewage of civilisation.
And yet Amis, it is important to understand, has also always styled himself as among the most moral of contemporary novelists. He believes himself to be a writer who will not fall for the warm and easy seductions of the historical novel, but will always, in his own words, "attempt a reading of the present".
His hatred of received ideas, his belief in the ethically detergent qualities of laughter, and his conviction - derived from his acknowledged master, Vladimir Nabokov - that moral choice by writers occurs not at the level of the chapter but at the level of the word: these have been as much part of Amis's self-presentation as his street savvy.
According to Amis, his new novel, Yellow Dog, continues this project. He wrote the book, he has said in interview, as a protest against the "diminishing" of "innocence in the modern world". It is hard, at first glance, to see how a novel which stars a tabloid hack with a penis inferiority complex, a make-believe King of England who calls his personal assistant "Bugger" and "wishes he were the prettiest, pretty boy in an Alabaman prison", and an ex-East End thug turned liberal humanist who fiddles with his own daughter, could be considered anything other than a furtherance of this diminishment.
But Yellow Dog is, at bottom, a comedy, and for Amis comedy is a deadly serious business. Like Nabokov, Amis sees humour as a powerful salutary force: if you make something or someone risible, you achieve a victory over the values which they represent. You defeat the "anti-morality" that they perpetuate.
The novel's hero is Xan Meo, who was born and raised in an East End family dedicated to thuggery, before "escaping or evolving" out of his past to become a Hollywood actor, married to a beautiful academic historian. Early in the novel, Xan suffers a serious head injury in an apparently unprovoked attack.
His injury causes a shift in his mental health. "Daddy's different now," cries Xan's young daughter, and indeed he is.
Post-assault, Xan becomes Nineties laddism made flesh - all bullish sex-drive, GQ-IQ, and bipolar worldview of "chicks" and "blokes".
The book's other principal character is Clint Smoker, a heavily pierced "identikit modern uggy" who "subscribes to the look-like-shit look" and works for the Morning Lark, a paper that runs stories on "adulterous golfers, satyromanic jockeys and rapist boxers".
During the course of the novel, the lives of Clint, Xan, and a shadowy gangland boss known as Joseph Andrews, become intertwined, until everything issues into a messy, meaty finale.
The familiar themes of Amis's earlier work are all blurrily present in Yellow Dog - masculinity, conflict, comedy, sex, money. Present, too, though in a restricted form, are Amis's extraordinary skills: the rocket-propelled metaphors, the armour-piercing one-liners ("After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship, marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest"), the zinging essaylets and riffs. And Amis remains a masterful evoker of microclimates: the antiseptic atmosphere of a doctor's surgery, for instance, or the grungy editorial room of the Morning Lark.
HOWEVER, all these special effects are local, and where the novel fails - and it fails spectacularly - is at the larger level of organisation.
Scenes do not fit together, characters become confused, and the jerky, jump-cut narrative fractures any attempt to read across the novel. True, this is a book principally concerned with failures of meaningful modes of human communication, and with the surrogate forms of connection - violent, libidinal - which have proliferated to take their place.
But the idea, which we might call the "mimetic heresy", that the best way to write about disintegration is in a disintegrated way, is one that has sanctioned far too many bad novels over the past few decades.
Yellow Dog is, despite the streak of cowardice implicit in its title, a brave book. It grapples with the loss of innocence within a familial context, and with the loss of shame within a societal context. The theme of incest - Xan's sexual attraction to his own daughter - that runs through the book is, curiously, its most bracing aspect.
Like Nabokov in Lolita, Amis squares up to a taboo and tries to acknowledge and analyse its existence without ever condoning it. Despite its courage, however, and despite its stylistic panache, Yellow Dog does not in the end work.
It proves that Amis can still construct fine sentences, but no longer a fine book. |
|
|
This site is featured in
BBC Education Web Guide
Site maintained by James Diedrick, author of Understanding Martin Amis, 2nd edition (2004).
All contents © 2004.
Last updated 10 December, 2004. Please read the Disclaimer
|
