The many faces
of Martin Amis
by Nicholas Lezard
On the front cover, we are reminded
that the Observer said "here is a novel to silence the doubters". Yet
the doubters have been strident and vocal. The TLS's comment - "not
absolutely terrible" - was one of the kinder ones. Tibor
Fischer's celebrated denunciation ("It's like your favourite uncle being
caught in a school playground, masturbating") cannot have further
contributed to either Amis's peace of mind or bank balance. It certainly put me
off.
Anyway, when the paperback arrived,
I braced myself for the humiliating experience that I was assured reading
Yellow Dog would be. When I next surfaced I found that I had been reading for
an hour, and enjoying myself immensely. What on earth was going on?
It's funny that Fischer should have
used such an image to conjure up his idea of the novel's ghastliness, for adult
reaction to children's sexuality is one of the book's big themes. To summarise:
the actor/writer/rhythm guitarist Xan Meo, who has gangster ancestors, is savagely beaten up,
and, as a result of his injuries, undergoes a significant personality change,
from reconstructed to very much unreconstructed male. His grammar collapses in
on itself and he becomes given to such pronouncements as "salad is
bullshit" - and much worse. This is very well observed indeed.
Then we have nice-but-dim Henry IX
("interested in watching television - or in staying still while it was
on"), traumatised by the revelation that someone has been spying, or
worse, on his daughter, Princess Victoria. Amis is clearly soppy about the
royals (we have known this since the character with his own name in Money blubbed at the royal wedding), but at least his head knows
that the institution is an untenable anachronism.
There is Clint Smoker, yahoo
journalist of the sub-tabloid Morning Lark, utterly without redeeming
qualities, even with his tiny penis. There is also a coffin loose in the hold
of a passenger jet which doesn't seem to have much to do with anything but allows for some buttock-clenching moments of airborne
terror.
The standard critical line on Amis's
fiction can often be supplied or illuminated by recourse to his own
non-fiction. From a 1992 interview with Nicholson Baker,
complaining about Vox: "Its slightness is inbuilt.
It has no room to manoeuvre. It has no prose."
That's quite a good hostage to
fortune, isn't it? Because, famously, Amis's novels have not
much else but prose. Very good prose it is, too - but this can give them
too much room to manoeuvre. They flail all over the place, occasionally
knocking their heads against signposts saying "nuclear apocalypse",
"ceaselessly bifurcating universe" or "global warming".
(How one sometimes misses the much less grand, but no less personally urgent
theme of the earlier novels, namely: "I'm not getting enough sex".)
Off they trot in the direction indicated, before getting distracted by any one
of Amis's dazzling set-pieces, whether it's about finding the gents in a
cinema, a toddler having a poo in its romper suit, or
... well, you can fill in your own favourite. But this complaint is nothing at
all new in the world of Amis-evaluation.
Like a Necker cube, Yellow Dog
offers differing faces to the world, depending largely,
it seems, on how one is feeling at the time, or specifically, how one is
feeling about Martin Amis at the time. If you're feeling stern, it is a mess of
unresolved postures, of magniloquence at odds with the scanty and barely
comprehensible plot. With a bit more indulgence, though, it is considerably tighter
than not only The Information but London Fields, too, not outstaying its
welcome, and certainly more aware than its predecessors that it's all a bit of
a joke. Even the text-messaging jokes are funny ("r u o fait with the
poetry of Ezra £?").
Besides, when was the last time
anyone expected a tidy resolution from an Amis novel? They all seem to end in a
blur of shame and violence, like those cartoon whirlwinds with arms and fists
but no otherwise identifiable features. And all these questions are only raised
because Amis himself raises the stakes so emphatically. It seems a bit much to
complain about that.
Text taken from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/may/29/fiction.martinamis
(Viewed on November the 5th,
2008 at 21:00)