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Back to Blighty
[an excerpt from the New Statesman review by George Walden, September 8, 2003; posted on the Amis Discussion Web, 5 September 2003]
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When D.H. Lawrence briefly honoured England with his presence in 1927, he stayed long enough to write a bilious piece about his country, in which the word 'pokey' featured obsessively, before he caught the sleeper back abroad. Although Martin Amis appears to suffer the occasional asphyxiating spasm, and has been reported as saying that it is all happening in America, at least he lives here---albeit, one suspects, as something of a spiritual emigre. Not counting the excellent collection of his criticism, THE WAR AGAINST CLICHE, after the not-too-successful THE INFORMATION, his two most recent works were escapes from contemporary Britain. Not that it helped: KOBA THE DREAD, a good and necessary book, was marred by an intrusion of the Amis personality cult into the rather more momentous matter of Stalin's murdered millions. And nobody (particularly not John Updike) thought NIGHT TRAIN, in which the author impersonated an American female detective, worth the detour.
In YELLOW DOG, Amis returns to Blighty, a phrase excruciating in its passé connotations, though apt enough here, since the England he comes back to is one that should by rights be long gone; like a dead character in the novel, the corpse continues to kick up in its coffin. The end-of-holiday timing of the book's appearance is neat. Soon the upmarket press will feature the seasonal lamentations of columnists holding their noses as they set foot in their homeland to find the tabloids still a-swill with royal bilge, with near-beer pornography, tales of crapulous footballers and the rest. All these are the subjects of Amis, the homecoming literary traveller.
In both the novel and its pre-publication reception, the first impression is that we have been here before. It is a sign of the galloping contamination of tabloid ethics that Amis's book should have been widely and lovingly trashed before it appeared---celebrity 'failure' makes irresistible copy. Yet even at its best (and there are virtuoso passages), the novel is a palace of echoes. The disorientated male, the stage violence, the sexual grotesquerie, the stylistic tics and leitmotifs, the outlandish names, the feared plane crash, even the extraterrestrial element familiar from NIGHT TRAIN---in this case, the ponderous symbolism of a near-miss meteor---all the old Amis riffs are there.
Have we been short-changed? If we wanted to learn something new about ourselves, the answer is yes. Yet if we insist that Amis stays at home like a good lad and writes about England, and England doesn't change much, why should he? Then there is the lack of competition. If not him, whom among the known names on the Booker longlist ought we to be reading? Presumably novels that have not been pre-emptively rubbished, by authors exempt from personal or (it sometimes seems) any serious criticism at all. Works such as THE LIGHT OF DAY, a hymn-like title by the sacerdotal Graham Swift, in which he reminds us once again of the essential decency of our fellow creatures, especially the humbler sort. Or the doomy ORYX AND CRAKE by the soothsaying St Margaret, whose reputation for prophesy remains undimmed by THE HANDMAID'S TALE, which imagined a Taliban future for America's women, denied even the consolation of books. Never mind that the fundamentalist Puritan fathers, as early as the 1640s, decreed that all women should be taught to read, or that US troops are currently protecting Afghan girls at school. Alternatively, there is inoffensive kidult stuff or the perfectly respectable ethnic prose of Monica Ali, both also beyond criticism.
A stifling literary pietism hangs in the air; pietism provokes humour, manic if need be, and on that score alone YELLOW DOG is a welcome change. The plot need not be over-analysed. Of Buddy Rich it used to be sung that 'A guy named Buddy plays the drums like thunder/But the melody is six feet under', and it is similar with Amis, whose obtrusive style tends to bury whatever intentionally half-arsed story is being narrated. If the reader, mesmerised by the stick-play, gives up on the melody and submits to the beat, does it matter? When Amis is really swinging, who cares about the obtrusion?
The tale revolves around intersecting upper, lower and middle English words. A scandal erupts when the imaginary king's teenage daughter is filmed naked. Meanwhile, Xan Meo, an actor and formerly loyal husband, undergoes a personality change for the worse after being coshed by crooks. And in the sump of society, a vortex into which everyone is sucked, all manner of yellow pressmen, porn stars and gangstars figure.
Amis's idol, Saul Bellow, is said to go through his drafts cutting out jokes, for fear of appearing light-minded. With the exception of the end, YELLOW DOG appears to have undergone the reverse procedure. The humour is occasionally coarser than usual and you may say that some of the jokes should have been blue-pencilled (such as the ones about the foreplay, the ring and the wristwatch, or the 5p and 50p anus) after you've had your laugh. Certainly, the king at stool, or the penis-elongation academy attended by Clint Smoker, a porn writer reminiscent of Keith Talent in LONDON FIELDS, is stooping low, but what do you want? Is it literary snobbery to suggest that, unlike Rabelais or the cruder stand-ups, at least this stuff is stylishly written? Naturally, the txt-messaging between Clint and his online admirer K8 is overdone, but you don't skip it, because K8's high-txting style is very funny. And given that it is going to be done, who else would you prefer to do it?
What does it tell you when your misgivings about a book surface after you have read it and, by and large -- hypocrite lecteur -- enjoyed it? Probably that both writer and (holiday) reader were in less demanding mood than they should have been. Amis has definitely let himself go a bit here. (Did Clint really have to live in Foulness? Must a porn-industry centre be called Fucktown?) The danger of linguistic nostalgia (Kray-brothers gangster-speak feature alongside the dated, orotund argot of palace officials) is exacerbated by Amis's perilous facility for doing the voices.
There are deeper problems. Amisry used to be a one-man comic genre, but for some time now the style has permeated literature and the media. When the successful innovator returns to base, he suffers the penalty of his own ubiquity. Every mother's son does the Amis voice, often unknowingly, and many a daughter, too, now that the ladies strain to out-booze and out-cuss the lads. Which leaves Amis ironising away about a culture already pickled in Amis irony, and a country all satired out. Clint Smoker and his fellow Nibelungs of the press would be Amis fans to a man and, to the extent of their capacities, recyclers of his style. The same is true of many a contemporary columnist and novelist who came out of Amis as surely (toutes proportions gardees) as later Russian writers swarmed out from under Gogol's OVERCOAT. Though at the end of the seemingly endless satirical day, as YELLOW DOG confirms, Amis still does a better Amis than Julian Barnes or Zadie Smith.
The mature Amis is not untouched by the circumambient pietism. No trace here of the feminist-baiting Nicola Six of LONDON FIELDS. Now Amis's women are more intelligent and more virtuous than the male; even Karla the porn magnate was interfered with by her father, so what else was she to do? And though the book will be criticised for a lack of up-to-date ethnic content, Amis seeks to cover this base by remarking how nice it is to have non-whites about. Which will doubtless make a lot of people more comfortable in their skins.
And after the clowning comes an excessively sober ending. 'It would be surprising if women weren't a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men weren't a little crazed by their losses', intones a remorseful Xan to his wife. Good on him. And there is more. 'It's about time we all grew up, wouldn't you say? The people will have to grow up. I'll have to grow up. And if I can grow up, they can grow up.'
So spake the king, clearly with authorial authority, as he decided on the abdication of royalty. An alluring prospect, but if satire is going to make quasi-serious points, it will be judged against reality. As Amis knows, the end of royalty and the red tops will come about, like reform of the National Health Service, over the people's dead bodies. Unlike our author, perhaps, they like it here.
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