. . .

Martin Amis always sets the media a-buzz. Each book he publishes reactivates hubbub about his personal life and personality. What makes this persisting newsworthiness peculiarly remarkable is that it's now almost 20 years since he wrote anything really worth getting excited about.

. . .

YELLOW DOG, his return to fiction, marks a further plummeting in his literary trajectory. Ambitiously, it begins by reeling out a variety of story-lines: Xan Meo, a middle-aged actor, is brutally coshed in Camden Town, suffering memory loss and drastic personality change; Henry IX, king of England, is horrified to receive sexually compromising pictures of his 15-year-old daughter from a mysterious blackmailer; Clint Smoker, a journalist on a sleazy tabloid, becomes entangled with an enigmatic e-mailer; in California, a geriatric gangster called Joseph Andrews (just one of many roguish literary allusions pressed into the text) brags his memoirs into a tape recorder; and on turbulence-tossed flight 101 a corpse stored in the hold gets jolted into dangerous motion. Interweaving all this into a compelling or indeed coherent novel, however, proves beyond Amis's capabilities.

Although he declared in EXPERIENCE, "I know what makes a good narrative", he gives little sign of doing so here.

Wonkily put together, his book is also copiously second-hand. Most of the material in it has been used by Amis before. This isn't just a matter of his continuing engrossment with the fetid and feculent. There's a far more extensive sense of deja vu. As often with him, the main plot is motored by male hatred and female treachery; as in MONEY, its climactic revelation involves a character's paternity.

Amnesia, which served Amis's purposes in OTHER PEOPLE (1981), MONEY and THE INFORMATION, is to the fore again. Impotence, a concern in SUCCESS (1978), MONEY, TIME'S ARROW and THE INFORMATION, gets another outing. Child abuse, dwelt on in LONDON FIELDS, is prominent. Another synthetic vamp swells the line-up of Amis's plastic temptresses. And as in LONDON FIELDS, a yobbo in grubby Y-fronts is addicted to porn videos. Urban scumminess is once more silhouetted against cosmic menace: in LONDON FIELDS the sun goes into total eclipse on November 5; here a comet sweeps close to earth on Valentine's Day.

Staleness of content stupefyingly combines with torpidity of treatment. Amis's longtime habit of fitting out his characters with bizarre names now lapses into puerile chortling. Henry IX has a Chinese mistress, He Zizhen, so that Amis can come up with facetiousnesses such as "He touched him. He touched He" (or, by way of variant when Henry is using the royal plural, "we will enter He"). There is also a character called And, which opens the way for such hilarities as "And And said".

Merriment manufactured from quaint names proves endlessly entertaining to Amis.

Xan has "an American wife Russia" which, besides the incongruous juxtaposition, facilitates such witticisms as "at night...he invaded Russia". A character called Snort causes heavily jocose confusion between "Doing Snort" and "Doing snort".

Along with an equerry nicknamed Bugger, Henry has a butler called Love, which allows Amis frequently seized opportunities for sitcom-like felicities such as "If you would, Love".

This limp stuff isn't alleviated by much verve elsewhere. Scenes in the office of the cheesy tabloid, the Morning Lark, ill-calculatedly assume that the witless accumulation of over-the-top grossnesses constitutes trenchant satire. Clint, the rancidly misogynist creep at the core of these episodes, is a feeble recast of more vividly repellent lowlife gargoyles in earlier Amis books.

Efforts to convey the novel's main theme (the pervasiveness of pornography, which has brought about "the way the world is now: the end of normalcy") push Amis's prose, always generously hospitable to repetition, into wearisomely mechanical reiteration: "Sir Dork Bogarde lived in a porno pad with a porno pal...they were out on the porno patio...around the porno pool...Dork lolled on a porno pouffe, his head supported by additional porno pillows; Hick poured the porno wine..." Back in London, there's "a porno sunset" that "resembled a titanic firefighting operation...the firemen about their massive work of hell-containment, hell-control". This lurid jumble (what is pornographic about firefighting?) typifies Amis's often garishly slovenly handling of metaphor.

. . .

Along with the narrative sprawl and slack writing (the prose can read as though it has been ineptly translated: "This is going to be a storm in all the oceans of the thing which is called world", "the essential wrongness of the air...as if all the sequiturs had been vaccumed out of it") goes baggy theorising about the pollution of contemporary life and the redeeming potentiality of parenthood. A former porn queen (whose "famous breasts...were above all binocular") could, it's suggested, be rehabilitated by following the advice, "Have a baby...That's what your breasts are looking for...they're looking for your children." In keeping with this dotingly domestic vein, the novel ends with a baby getting triumphantly up on to its feet. But the impression it leaves is of a talent on its last legs.