Einstein's Monsters [Hardcover]

This is a well-meaning collection, crafted with all the earnest diligence of a passionate yet rather stolid social worker. I love the introduction, it articulates better than anything I've ever read the true issues and dangers posed by the arms race. Given its subject matter, eloquence, and emotional clout, it is one of the most important essays I've read in years.

But after this exciting beginning, the stories are a wash-out. The writing is clever, but usually too clever; there never seems to be any emotional investment in the characters or their conflicts. Because Amis's overwhelming motive was didacticism, his plots are populated by vehicles and symbols not human beings. The stories become thinly scratched fables, yet without even the insightful morals provided by Aesop. Often it is embarrassing to see all the work Amis puts into dressing up and "proving" a point to us, that is already a foregone conclusion. The science fiction settings and the variety of viewpoints (one speaker is an American expatriate Jew) are interesting, but I continually hear that sober social worker's timbre droning in my ears....

I'm trying to think of who would enjoy this book. Science fiction fans will be disappointed by Amis's half-baked scenarios, fans of emotional fiction will be bored by his shallowness, and fellow disarmament supporters will feel patronized. So--only for uncritical members of the Martin Amis cult, who consider his every jotting to be solid gold.

Kingsley Amis wrote in the introduction of his 1980 book Collected Short Stories, that, to an author, writing a short story is like a bus driver taking a holiday on a bus. It is like work, but it's a holiday nonetheless. He went on to explain that although short stories are angst free - ("A couple of botched pages can be filed sine die or even scrapped; a couple of hundred - well, I hope it never happens to me"), it is the rarity of decent novel ideas that naturally limits development of starts into the short form. Hence, one might presume that short stories arise in dry times, or when an author is merely tinkering with an idea, not really sure whether it is the next novel or not. Einstein's Monsters, for all intents and purposes, reads as a period of freestyle for Kingsley's son, Martin.

At the time of Einstein's Monsters publication in 1987, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock sat at a mere three minutes to midnight. Brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet had been running white hot. The global nuclear malaise would be soothed with the 1988 treaties between Gorbachev and Reagan, but in 1987 a treaty seemed a lifetime away. Perhaps, not in time to prevent a full scale nuclear holocaust. It was widely known that the USSR was horribly decrepit and increasingly inert, but this only fuelled uncertainty about whether to Soviets would give up or go for broke. It is in these grim and undecided times that Amis wrote these short stories.

The introduction to Einstein's Monsters, Thinkability, isn't nearly as strong as Amis' typical literary endeavours or his other non-fiction. It's bloated, packed with fatuous statements and constantly applies repetition as a means of emphasis. As a means of emphasis. Nevertheless, it contains some cracking observations. A personal favourite of mine is "Like god, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike god, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here." Those glistening assessments, however, are not frequent enough to save a wasteful opinion piece.

Thankfully, the stories are mostly better than the introduction. As with many short stories, they are experiments with themes, ideas and techniques. The beauty of short stories is that neither the author nor the reader need be heavily invested in the normal sensibilities and customs that are required of the full novel. The author can play, and the audience can appreciate the attempt. In Einstein's Monsters, Amis tries to find resonant emotional scars amongst backdrops of nuclear conflict and knowledge of the atomic mechanisms, or as Christopher Hitchens put it "With Einstein's Monsters (1987), and its accompanying flight of articles and polemics, he investigated the diseased relationship between suicide and genocide that is disclosed by the preparation of thermonuclear extinction." Indeed, in this collection, genocide, homicide, suicide, rape, revenge, disease and mental illness all feature in one or more of these shorts. Not every creative indulgence here works (making a disease called time for example) but the stories and the observations and the vividness all persisted in my mind for some time after reading them. In particular, the final story features a god, or immortal, who is impotent, depressed and suicidal. His ponderings, sad and insular, find no solace in the solitude of nuclear induced global extinction.

It is interesting that more is not presently made of the threat posed by the global nuclear arsenal. Beneath the humdrum of political speak surrounding nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament, the reality is that no one country is likely to dismantle their bombs while another still has them. Thus the globe remains locked in a wicked Mexican standoff, where the victims are not just the banditos holding the guns. The U.S.A and Russia once had their missiles pointed at each other, but have since lowered their weapons. This outcome is not the guaranteed one for other nations though. In essence, nuclear bombs remain inert only insofar as the button pusher does not wish to die as well - whether they are suicidal. The explanation is simple enough: reciprocity won't be `in kind'. The raining down of proportional responses will be instantaneous genocide. So, to see where the global concern should lie, one need only look to those most likely to accept their own death as a means to a grisly end. Pakistan, it would appear, is currently most likely to initiate given it has the bomb and a corrupt government that enables global islamist terrorist organisations. It isn't hard to imagine finding one of their 100 or so warheads have been `misplaced.' North Korea also has bombs, but for all its aggression and irrationality, it's not suicidal. It has proved that recently with its measured upscale in violence. Iran is the other only candidate given their ongoing mission to get nuclear weaponry into the hands of the radical, martyr approving mullahs. Think about the consequences of such devastating power being handed to the tribal leaders of Islamism. Chances are you won't have to think for long - in all likelihood we will find out in the next few years. It is as Mike Altman wrote, suicide is painless.

The synopsis has it wrong - well, not wrong so much as not right. Amis delivers not a caveat, nor a sci-fi pomo romp, but a startlingly clear elucidation of his very justified fear of the end of the story of man. It couldn't be more inevitable, as Amis makes clear in the introductory essay, "Unthinkability." He has identified the source of his nausea for the last 50 years, and it is nuclear weapons. There is no turning back; there is no "winning"; and there is no fixing the mistakes. These burn indelible in his writing, and he makes these points neither to make us all lose sleep nor to educate us. Rather, Amis tells it like it is: there is no tomorrow after a nuclear war, and there is no way a nuclear war is able to be isolated to one bomb dropping. Once the accident happens, we are all screwed, and at this point we are on borrowed time. The stories, if you are unfamiliar with Amis's style, are charming and compelling, and in some cases only abstrusely about nuclear war. The one real notable exception is "The Little Puppy That Could," truly the most horrifying tale I have ever encountered. A slim read, a permanent addition to any bookshelf, Einstein's Monsters reminds us what it is that is catching in our throats nowadays - the very life-force of all human history.