. . .

. . . However long ago it is since you read your last Martin Amis, the sensation of picking up Yellow Dog is like that of settling back into the driving seat of the first car you ever owned: everything is exactly where you expect it to be: fear - check. Loathing - check. People without moral spirit-levels doing unspeakable things to and with each other - check.

Yellow Dog weaves together three strands of plot. One concerns a novelist, Xan Meo, who is (like his creator) divorced and remarried, with two small daughters from the second marriage, and bigger boys from the first. His life seems perfectly lovely, until it is undone on the instant by a brisk duffing-up in a Camden Town bar, name of Hollywood.

Then there is the turbulent narrative of flight CigAir101 from London, Heathrow to Houston, Texas, carrying 399 passenger and crew, plus a corpse called Royce Traynor, who gets up to all sorts of destructive mischief in the hold.

Last, there is Amis's take on the royals and the press. There is a king, Henry IX, a fusion of the more vapid bits of the Prince of Wales and Edward VIII. He has an assistant amusingly nicknamed Bugger, a wife in a coma and a teenage daughter, Victoria, who seems to have been filmed without her clothes on. This (or rather, the unclothed female body in all its infinite variety) is the preoccupation of a newspaper called the Morning Lark, for which a journalist called Clint Smoker works.

Smoker has a sharp, repulsive mind, a tiny male organ and a virtual relationship with an improbably acquiescent female. Amis's intention in this area is perceptibly satirical. He is an adept parodist of the prose styles of both the royals and the gutter press. In fact he is highly satirical all round, except when it comes to small children. In this area, not even Dickens can match the sugary reservoirs of Amis's sentimentality.

At least one of Amis's fellow novelists, impertinently ignoring the press embargo, has called the novel bad in vivid terms. Well, it isn't. Amis is too clever and too adept with language for that. Whatever the literary equivalent of junk-food appeal may be - fatty, salty, addictive - he is the master of it.

Yellow Dog is readable, amusing and clever, which gives it a head start on the majority of modern novels. On the other hand, it doesn't give the feeling, which its publisher would clearly like to claim, of a great modern novelist at the full stretch of his powers. There is a sense about Yellow Dog of Amis not coming up with something: of something held back, which might be idleness, or fear, or even incapacity. If he were a racehorse, you'd be afraid he was getting sour.
 

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