Is something amiss with Amis?
Whatever
happened to Martin Amis? You know: the comic novelist who could
turn a phrase on a sixpence and make us laugh instantly (or better,
smile for a long time) at things we shouldn’t be laughing
or smiling at. By us I mean me, for if I wasn’t already
an admirer of Amis’s work (the name I use here is a bit
of a giveaway), why would I have bought this book which has been
roundly trashed in the press? “Strong whiff of racial prejudice”
… “disturbingly bigoted” … “wilfully
ignorant” - and that’s just The Sunday Times.
This current wave of Martiphobia comes from allegations
of racism for comments Amis made in an interview in 2006, apropos
Islamist terrorism: “There’s a definite urge - don’t
you have it? - to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to
suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering?
Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the
road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look
like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan…”
An eyebrow-raiser, for sure, to those of us weaned on the teat
of the liberal press, but Amis - always committed as a novelist
to acknowledging that we sometimes think the sort of things we
know we shouldn’t think - insists they were no more than
this, and that the “urge evaporated in a few hours.”
Instead, he suggests that what a writer says should never be their
last word on a subject, but what they write should be. We should
judge him, then, by The Second Plane. Let’s go.
The first question is whether Amis’s style
and wit, his linguistic charm, has deserted him. What else do
we read Amis for, after all? “Someone once said of my work,
and I didn’t mind at all, that I deal in banalities delivered
with tremendous force. That’s fine by me.” The chronological
arrangement of the pieces in The Second Plane is key
here. We see Amis on a journey, which begins - after the initial
shock and awe of his response to the September 11 attacks - with
business more or less as usual. The phrasemaking is there - “the
television, when you dared to turn it on, showed Americans queueing
for anthrax hosedowns, or the writhing moustaches of Pakistan,
prophesying civil war” - as is the air of insouciant omniscience,
as when he derides George Bush’s lassoing of North Korea
into his ‘axis of evil’: “the zombie nation
of North Korea is, in truth, so mortally ashamed of itself that
it can hardly bear to show its face, and is not a part of anything.”
He also misses no opportunity to have a wisecrack at Bush:
Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the
two presidents he is, in this respect, the more psychologically
primitive. We hear about the successful ‘Texanisation’
of the Republican Party. And doesn’t Texas sometimes seem
to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat,
its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly
executions?
We even see familiar traits in the first of the
two stories in the book, ‘In the Palace of the End,’
where Amis imagines life for a double (twins and pairings being
familiar tropes in Amis’s fiction) of the son of a Saddam-like
dictator in a torture house. Here we have recognisably Amisian
rhetorical reverses, a la Time’s Arrow:
I am wondering, as I always do at this time
of day, why the body’s genius for pain so easily outsoars
its fitful talent for pleasure; wondering why the pretty trillings
of the bedroom are so easily silenced by the impossible vociferation
of the Interrogation Wing; and wondering why the spasms and
archings of orgasm are so easily rendered inert and insensible
by the climactic epilepsy of torture. You don’t need to
dim the lights for torture, or play soft music. People will
respond. You don’t need to get them in the mood. Everyone’s
always in the mood.
All these pieces date from 2004 or earlier: WTC
attacks, Afghanistan; early Iraq. The bulk of the book, including
the longest piece ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’
(originally published in the Observer as ‘The Age of Horrorism’),
comes from 2006 and later: after, that is, the suicide bombings
in London in July 2005.
Is it this, the proximity of violence, which shakes
Amis and his words? Was the subject, before 2005, another interesting
intellectual exercise but not a matter of personal experience?
This has happened before. In the mid-1980s, for a time suddenly
everything Amis wrote was about nuclear weapons, and imminent
Armageddon. I was too young at the time to judge - I mean, OK,
we all thought Threads was pretty scary - but now that
stuff, including the stories collected in Einstein’s
Monsters, looks pretty hysterical, almost embarrassing.
Certainly there is a steeliness, an (oxymoronic)
humourless irony in some of the later pieces. Here is the key:
Religion is sensitive ground, as well it
might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself
an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for
religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction,
and sentimentality are good excuses.
Ultimately, Amis’s curled-lip contempt for
Islamism comes from a derision of religion. In this long piece
he professes admiration for Islam itself (though in the preface,
he regrets that it is “rather heavy on ‘respect’
for Islam”) but clearly this is a half-hearted position.
His disgust at religious belief - “we are not dealing in
reason” - bleeds through everything. Is this the source
of attacks on Amis: the notion that he must respect other religious
cultures, or cultural religions, when he clearly looks down on
them?
Here is a piece from September 15, 2001:
I am trying to call attention to the elephant
in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to
notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that
religion has on human life. … Religion teaches the dangerous
nonsense that death is not the end. … To fill a world
with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering
the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are
used.
Not by Amis, but by Richard Dawkins, writing in
the UK's Guardian newspaper. Dawkins’s message, right out
of the trap, was the same as the one which Amis took some time
to get to: religion is the problem here, religion gave us September
11. Like Amis, he has nothing but contempt for religious belief
and, mostly, religious believers. Yet Dawkins has not suffered
the same auto-da-fé that Amis has: indeed, the higher his
anti-religious rhetoric soars, the more books he sells. Amis’s
mistake then is in going off-message, in acknowledging the ‘unworthy’
thoughts that Islamists - fundamentalist Muslims - are often identifiable
by appearance, or at least identifiable by how they don’t
appear. He makes reference to this once in the book, again in
the context of an impulsive, reactionary thought, but it’s
one which looks as though it will haunt him for some time to come.
In any event, the book gradually returns to something
like business as usual for Amis. There is a piece near the end,
following Tony Blair in his last days as Prime Minister, which
is positively jaunty. Others, mainly book reviews, are filled
with Amis’s authoritative tone on the history and practice
of Islamism which have been called into question by others (one
accusation which Amis and Dawkins share is that they concentrate
on the most extreme forms of religious belief in order to attack
all branches), better informed than I am. But the overwhelming
experience, when coming to The Second Plane and looking
for all that racism, bigotry and intolerance, is: is this it?
This tends to be the result when reading or seeing anything that
one has been shrilly warned against: it’s not half as bad
as they make out. In fact, it’s very good.
Maybe I am too much of an old Amis-head to make
a worthwhile assessment but I got as much pleasure out of this
book as I think could have been intended. What can I say? I like
his style.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
