. . .  Yellow Dog, at least in the opinion of The Guardian, which seems never to have heard of JK Rowling, is quite simply “the most talked about novel of the year.”. . .

. . . his world is endemically, preternaturally violent. “Male violence did it,” we are told at the beginning of Yellow Dog. The victim of this violence is Xan Meo who, up until the point he is thwacked on the head, is living the kind of life that exists only in glossy mags. He has a gorgeous American wife called Russia, two young daughters, a house in central London with a high-ceilinged hallway, and is “quietly” famous, a consequence of his success as an actor and the publication of his first collection of short stories, Lucozade.

All seems to be going swimmingly for Xan as he heads for Camden Town where he will arrive at a bar called Hollywood, order two cocktails, called Dickheads, and sip them slowly while musing on his disastrous first marriage and the effect of the divorce on his two sons. Yellow Dog’s overture is archetypal, inimitable, vintage Amis, the prose fizzing with untappable energy, the wit keen and devastating. Overhead, as Xan strolls, are “distant aeroplanes like incandescent spermatozoa”. He spies a drunk with “a face like a baboon’s arse”. The wind is a “ragged and bestial temperance ... a rodeo of a wind”. A young mother wears her clothes so tight they are “woman-crammed”.

Whatever else one may accuse Amis of, laziness is not on the charge sheet. What we are witnessing in these opening pages, and what we will see a lot more of in the 300 and more pages to come, is “the obscenification of everyday life”, the brutalisation of society and culture. It begins when Xan is battered and gradually reverts to his former coarser, cruder, lewder self, an animal of a man who sinks so low he even considers incest.

He is not alone. At every level of society there are plenty examples of degeneracy, from the sewer journalism of the Morning Lark, a so-called newspaper with w*****s rather than readers that makes the Daily Star look like the People’s Friend, to the Royal Household, where the incumbent king, Henry IX, makes hay with a courtesan in Paris while his wife lies like a vegetable in hospital and stills of his naked 15-year-old daughter circulate.

Xan’s descent gives Yellow Dog its momentum. As a satire, however, its humour is too often reliant on scatology or the kind of sexist comedy that Viz readers think is funny. Amis’s intention is to shock, which he does with conviction, but as the novel goes on and on one’s senses are blunted and the harder it gets to see the point in the incessant pornography, the orgy of lust, the absence of redemption.

We are bombarded with characters with cartoonish names (Clint Smoker, the Morning Lark’s ace writer; Brendan Urquhart-Gordon, aka Bugger, the King’s right-hand man etc). The atmosphere is Orwellian, apocalyptic, turbulent, underlined by CigAir101, carrying 399 passengers and crew, plus the corpse of one Royce Traynor rolling about in the hold, from Heathrow to Houston, Texas. Meanwhile, a comet is hurtling earthwards. No-one, it seems, can escape.

How all this knits together is not the least problem confronting readers of Yellow Dog. In places it is exhilarating, but these are too few to compensate for the considerable passages of tedium when Amis is operating on autopilot, rolling out metaphors as if from a conveyor belt. Xan, the main man, a contemporary Everyman, is a man at sea, morally adrift, unsure whether he is the skipper or a deckhand. His excuse, his alibi, is the bash on the head which rendered him insensible. “Male violence did it.” That’s his defence. Ordinary men, who have taken for granted their role in life for millennia, have no such get out.

For them, the present is unsettling and the future uncertain. Women hold the balance of power at work, home, in bed. As ever with Amis, sex holds the key to everything. If only it were that simple.

07 September 2003