Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Well, these Hitchenses are just Fourth-Estate playboys thriving on agitation, and Jews are so easy to agitate. Sometimes (if only I knew enough to do it right!) I think I’d like to write about the fate of the Jews in the decline of the West – or the long crisis of the West, if decline doesn’t suit you. The movement to assimilate coincided with the arrival of nihilism. This nihilism reached its climax with Hitler. The Jewish answer to the Holocaust was the creation of a state. After the camps came politics and these politics are nihilistic. Your Hitchenses, the political press in its silliest dishevelled left-wing form, are (if nihilism has a hierarchy) the gnomes. Gnomes don’t have to know anything, they are imperious, they appear when your fairy-tale heroine is in big trouble, offer a deal and come to collect her baby later. If you can bear to get to know them you learn about these Nation-type gnomes that they drink, drug, lie, cheat, chase, seduce, gossip, libel, borrow money, never pay child support, etc. They’re the bohemians who made Marx foam with rage in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Well, that’s nihilism for you, one of its very minor branches, anyway. Yet to vast numbers of people they are very attractive somehow. That’s because those vast numbers are the rank and file of nihilism, and they want to hear from Hitchens and Said, etc., and consume falsehoods as they do fast food. And it’s so easy to make trouble for the Jews. Nothing easier. The networks love it, the big papers let it be made, there’s a receptive university population for which Arafat is Good and Israel is Bad, even genocidal.6

  Irrespective of Bellow’s comments on Judaism, it would be difficult to find a shrewder account than this of the policical affiliations and private alliances that grew out of the 1970s, particularly at the New Statesman.

  Martin has always eschewed beliefs and abstractions of all kinds but Judaism, because of its paradoxes, its often infuriating refusal to conform to an easy classification, invites his admiration, even his empathy. ‘Fernanda and Clio are Jewish, but like their mother [Isabel] what they are entails no acquiescence to doctrine.’ Judaism in its manifest diversity provides him with a counterpoint to a fundamentalist creed, Islam, that outdoes even Communism and Nazism in its suffocation of reason. Between 2002 and 2007 Martin produced twelve lengthy articles in which his preoccupation with Islam incessantly breaks the surface despite the nominal concerns of these pieces. In October 2006 for example he was commissioned by the Sunday Times to cover the Poker World Series. Vegas in 2006 provides an abundance of raw material for his well-tuned caricaturist’s antennae, from main players with names that could have come from his fiction (Chris Moneymaker and Joe Hachem for starters) through strip clubs, lap-dance parlours, all-nude cocktail bars, twenty-four-hour hotel room hard-core porn and endlessly available prostitution. He has been here before many times and to his credit Martin invigorates the familiar with a refreshed tempo of fascination and disgust. But there is something else too, as ubiquitous as the prostitution yet brought with him by the author. ‘The Taliban . . . stamped out sports and used the stadiums for public floggings and executions. The Taliban would have warm work to do in Las Vegas.’7 The Western World even at its most inexcusably dissolute is preferable to governance by inflexible doctrine. Clive James: ‘Martin is the finest literary critic of his generation and literary criticism is the most testing of all combative forms. It demands, equally, intuition, evaluative logic and a stylistic elegance that matches its subject. Normally, these qualities would be incompatible and to practise each with ease and make them cooperate is the sign of a master. Martin can do this but in his maturity [with The Second Plane] he brought it also to his political writing. He does not expect ideas to connect as an all-embracing world view and nor does he attempt to force them into abstract presuppositions. He thinks with the mind of a poet, but not recklessly or self-indulgently.’ We are talking of a now notorious passage in his essay ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’ where he describes how, checking in for the flight from Montevideo to New York, his six-year-old daughter Clio is subjected to a methodical search with close attention given to the contents of her rucksack including story tape, crayon and fluffy duck. He confesses: ‘I wanted to say something like, “Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick, for now, to young men who look like they’re from the Middle East”.’8 James: ‘If that had been part of a novel Martin would have been spared the ire of the sanctimonious left. I believe that the barriers between fiction and non-fiction, literature and everything else inhibit the expressive potential of language, basically free speech. Martin transcends these distinctions. This is pure realism, he is giving expression to what virtually all of us felt at the time, but not without comment. Soon afterwards he goes on to make the point that in repressing our feelings, according to the ordinances of political correctness if you like, we have subjected ourselves to a regime of “boredom” similar to that of the Caliphate in which enjoyment – art, games, sex – is forbidden.’ In Britain he would not face the full backlash until after 2006, but in the interim he would endure the most pitiless and malevolent sequence of reviews of his career so far, prompted by the novel he began while completing Koba.

  In Yellow Dog (Cape, 2003) Martin appears also to have been drawn towards a collective fascination with provoking readers’ credulity while holding their attention. The book involves several interlinked stories. Principally, we spend time with Xan Meo (who despite his name is a white Anglo-Saxon; Xan is short for Alexander), a middle-ranking actor turned over-ambitious writer whose gangland background revisits him, literally, with a duffing-up in a Camden Town bar. As a consequence Xan sheds his liberal new-mannish persona and regresses to what we are caused to suspect is his genuine state, combining misogyny, aggressive lust and disturbing thoughts about what he might like to do with his four-year-old daughter.

  Next we encounter Clint Smoker, repulsive flatulent columnist of the Morning Lark, a downmarket version – if such could be envisaged – of the Daily Sport. Clint is humiliatingly poorly endowed and conducts a virtual relationship with a quiescent woman on the Internet. Alongside Clint we come upon the memorable presence of Henry IX, monarch of this crackpot kingdom who bears a close resemblance to the Prince of Wales with shades of Wodehousian absurdity and Private Eye-style satirical hyperbole thrown in. Simultaneously we learn that flight CigAir 101 from London to Houston is, probably, about to go into a nosedive due to the weird machinations of its most unusual passenger Royce Traynor, who happens to be dead and coffined in the airliner’s hold. Also it is likely that an apocalypse-sized comet will fly by close to the earth. In case one is not already too distracted by the menu of narrative oddities so far Martin then takes us, for no obvious reason, on a tour of the California pornography industry.

  Of the reviews in the mainstream press on both sides of the Atlantic more than 60 per cent found the work irredeemable and among those who praised it one detects a hint of sentimental indulgence, as if they too know that Martin has done something dreadful but cannot bring themselves to condemn him for it. The detractors seem united in their unease with the book’s resolute contempt for continuity, its parts seemingly being drawn from four separate novellas and dumped ad hoc in the same volume.

  . . . a dud piece of work so militantly chaotic, sprawling, and garbled that I had to read it one and a half times in order to fathom what in the name of Crikey was going on. And even now I am not sure . . . Overwritten overcrowded and underpowered . . .9

  Given that we have reached a point, idly referred to as the postmodern, where coherence is almost de trop, one might have thought such excesses would be excusable, even celebrated, but what really exercised the patience of the disparagers was that this monument to the avant-garde was built upon an apparent preoccupation with filth.

  It reads [not] as a fully fashioned novel but as a bunch of unsavoury outtakes from an abandoned project: nasty bits and pieces best left on the cutting room floor.10

  Much . . . of the novel reads as if it was cobbled toge
ther from the sort of dirty jokes you might find on an internet porn site.11

  . . . big ideas intrude on what might have been a collage of poisonous cameos sustained by nothing but their own weird energy . . . Amis’s intellectualism . . . sticks out like a parson at an orgy and shrinks and shrivels whatever it goes near.12

  It isn’t even abnormally bad. It isn’t special; it’s just kind of crummy.13

  For thirty years Martin Amis has been pointing out that pornography is boring, and now . . . he has conclusively demonstrated the truth of that proposition.14

  [A] dispiriting performance . . . The novel reads like a midlife crisis, a writer’s equivalent of buying a sportscar and running off with a woman half his age.15

  It reads like the work of a less talented, less funny Martin Amis imitator . . . Redundancy and embarrassment win, hands down.16

  . . . its plot randomly lurches and heaves like a person suffering from seasickness . . . the satire [is] feeble . . . It’s a very flawed book.17

  You get the picture. The book is not flawless or unimprovable – nothing is – yet it is none the less a work of genius. The revilers and those who reluctantly indulged it were united in one respect: none could locate a precedent for what he had done. Hence we find an overwhelming majority who mask their own sense of insecurity with unreserved condemnation. It is certainly the case that the links between the four strands of the novel are tenuous at best but it cannot be denied that the predominant presence, the figure who forms an alliance with the narrator in the classic third-person manner, is Xan Meo. Irrespective of the fact that the particulars of the book are variously implausible and repulsive in their nature and appear randomly discontinuous we are aware of a controlling presence; we know that the portrait of Clint the irredeemable grotesque comes from the same hand as the moment when Xan and his daughter see a fox on the roof of a garden shed and share the experience of its ‘entreating frown with its depths of anxiety’. Yellow Dog is a mischievous, radical piece of work in that it at once invokes and undermines the burdensome presence of Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce demonstrated that twenty-four hours of wearisome ordinariness could be turned into a stylistic and epistemological mosaic and Amis reverses the formula. He assembles a patchwork of uncooperative mini-narratives, scenarios and portraits and without compromising their fantastic independence informs each with the same stylistic signature. The effect is comparable to viewing, in sequence, a set of paintings each with a different synoptic content and mood by an artist whose technique is inextinguishably unique. Xan’s closest literary relative is Humbert Humbert, but Nabokov’s creation is made almost acceptable by the fact that we listen only to him; his creepily delicious prose style seems to both testify to his foulness and protect him from the world of decent ordinary people. But Xan is far more infectious, leaving an imprint on everyone else in the novel, from the most repulsive to the innocent. And he reaches out via his narrator, to us. One detects the Nabokovian legacy in Martin’s essay of ten years before. ‘Haven’t we been conditioned to feel that Lolita is sui generis, a black sheep . . . that Nabokov himself somehow got “carried away”?’18 How prescient he was, given that this is exactly what many of the reviewers said of Yellow Dog. Xan is, so the opening chapter wryly informs us, a ‘Renaissance Man’, an actor for whom celebrity means the crossing of borders between popular and high culture. We are introduced to him as he leaves the family home in North London. The cartography is rather skewed but each junction, road and building unpicks a memory from Martin’s recent life. Xan ‘passed the garden flat, opposite, which he now seldom used. Were there any secrets there? he wondered. An old letter, maybe; an old photograph, vestiges of vanished women . . .’ (pp. 5–6). This flat is very much like Martin’s, now exchanged for a studio in the backyard of his house. Did he, I ask him, sometimes pass it, and experience that inevitable sprinkling of recollections, fragments of an irretrievable past, that cling to a place where we have spent so much time? ‘Inevitably.’ After the flat he comes to a crossroads. ‘If he turned right he would be heading for pram-torn Primrose Hill – itself pramlike, stately, Vicwardian, arching itself upwards in a posture of mild indignation’ (p. 6). Primrose Hill, Kingsley’s final retreat following his own turn right and where he would drift from a state of antiquated grandiloquence to in those last days, his pitiable, almost childlike condition. Xan has time to check out the High Street bookshop where his debut collection of short stories Lucozade is still piled invitingly under the notice, ‘Our Staff Recommends’. Martin has now inured himself to the repetitive, reflexive media presentations of him as a playboy who writes novels in his spare time. ‘Curiously,’ he observes, ‘it is always one-way traffic. Martin Amis the Mick Jagger of contemporary fiction. Why isn’t Mick Jagger ever referred to as the Martin Amis of contemporary rock?’ He is joking, to an extent. In Yellow Dog Xan Meo effects just such a reversal, becoming a respected littérateur while maintaining his customary status as a media-generated image, a face that people will recognize from newspapers irrespective of their knowledge of what he actually does: ‘. . . he was a conspicuous man, and knew it, and liked it, on the whole [. . .] His face held a glow to it – a talented glow, certainly, but what kind of talent? [. . .] he was famous, and therefore in himself there was something specious and inflammatory, something bigged-up’ (p. 8). Martin himself, when walking around the familiar parts of north Kensington, Notting Hill, Portabello, Regent’s Park, the area of London where he had lived since the 1970s, felt similarly ‘conspicuous’.

  Xan is walking northward, a long way still from Notting Hill, but were he to continue he might, like Martin, mistake silhouettes of strangers for people he knew intimately. ‘Up ahead he picked out a figure that reminded him, or reminded his body, of his first wife – his first wife as she was ten years ago’ (p. 9). Xan’s destination is a bar, called Hollywood, an establishment which has attempted with negligible success to exchange its origins as a rough-house pub situated on the Regent’s Canal near Camden Lock for Beverley Hills-style ambience. It exists, standing close to the canal bridge that separates the upmarket Regent’s Park area from the less salubrious Camden Town. It is significant that ‘Hollywood’ should be the site for Xan’s encounter with the nastiest element of a subculture his creator had long cultivated as a mainstay of his fiction. The spokesman for the three hard cases who send him to hospital is Mal Bale, last come upon in ‘State of England’, Martin’s caricature of the dodgy types whose children attended the same school as Louis and Jacob. This is an act of contrition and prurient masochism. From it emerges a version of Xan whose conditioned resources – predominantly rationalism and self-control – begin to give way, following his head injury, to far more visceral inclinations, instincts that few would allow themselves even to privately contemplate, let alone indulge. No character like him had previously appeared in fiction. Humbert is virtuous by comparison.

  Paedophilia, even as an inclination, has been written about openly only since the 1980s, but not in fiction. To have a principal character, whom we are otherwise invited to treat with amusement, fascination, even sympathy, confide in us his sexual attraction to his infant daughter was a very dangerous strategy; some reviewers saw it as condonement. But despite those who might suspect Martin of having dispensed with a sense of proportion or, even worse, flagged up autobiographical signals, his method was ruthlessly single-minded. He had dealt in his writings with several embodiments of vileness, notably Unverborden of Time’s Arrow and more recently the Islamist suicide bomber in The Second Plane, but now he was bringing the hypothesis home, almost literally to a household and a family that mirrored his own.

  The other prompter was Kingsley. ‘During the last few weeks of his life my father slipped in and out of focus as the man I had known since my childhood. In those last weeks he lost control.’

  Yellow Dog is about losing control but as a work of art it is as brilliantly orchestrated as anything Martin has produced. Had Xan and his world been its exclusive focus – as was Humbe
rt’s for Lolita – the charges of its myopic reviewers would be justified, but the rest of the book, the weird assembly of Henry XI, Clint Smoker and the dead Royce Traynor, is an extrapolation of Xan’s disturbed and disturbing condition. They are refashionings of characters from Martin’s earlier work, now horribly unfettered, but the novel is far more than an exercise in self-absorbed freakishness. There are just enough parallels between the world of the novel and the one we are in to make us pause and consider uneasily: are we that far from the former?