The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007 [Hardcover]

THE SECOND PLANE is made up of 12 essays and two short stories, all exploring the issue of Islamism. To paraphrase Wikipedia, this is the belief that "...Islam is not only a religion but a political system. Its proponents believe that western military, economic, political, social, and cultural influences in the Muslim world are un-Islamic and should be replaced by purely Islamic influences." For Amis, Islamism has these features. But its primary characteristic is violent extremism.

The subtitle for this book, September 11: 2001-2007, explains what Amis is up to. In his own words, he is presenting a "narrative of misery, and also of desperate fascination" on the currents flowing into and out of 9/11. What was surprising to me is that his essays don't read like yesterday's news. Instead, his pieces, many appearing first in The Times or The Guardian, are built on fundamentals that, in America, are often obscured as our politicians and their hacks justify or attack policy for short-term political gain. Here's a sample of Mart's thoughts:

o "We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism: the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq."

o "Why, in our current delirium of faith and fear, would Bush want things to become more theological rather than less theological? The answer is clear enough in human terms: to put it crudely, it makes him feel easier about being intellectually null. He wants geopolitics to be less about the intellect, and more about gut-instincts and beliefs--because he knows he's got them."

o "We may compare radical Islam with ... Bolshevism and Nazism (to each of which Islamism is indebted). Of the many affinities that emerge, we may list, to begin, some secondary characteristics. The exaltation of a godlike leader; the demand, not just for submission to the cause, but for utter transformation in its name; a self-pitying romanticism; a hatred of liberal society, individualism, and affluent inertia; an obsession with sacrifice and martyrdom; a morbid adolescent rebelliousness combined with a childish love of destruction...But these are incidentals. Thanatism derives its real energy, its fever and its magic, from something far more radical.... I mean the rejection of reason."

As a Yank living in New York, I don't see Amis much on TV in his role of wise man and commentator. Instead, Mart, for me, largely remains a novelist. As a result, I was also happy to see Amis make a few literary asides in THE SECOND PLANE. Here's one:

o "Commentators respond, not to the novel, but to its personnel, whom they want to `care about', in whom they want to `believe'. Such remarks as `I didn't like the characters' are now thought capable of settling the hash of a work of fiction. This critical approach will eventually elicit what it fully deserves--a literature of ingratiation."

This is very high-level and interesting work and recommended.

At the end of the author's note that prefaces this brilliant collection, Martin Amis asks of extremism: "Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?" These are rhetorical questions, of course. Religious extremists are more likely to fly planes into buildings or carry bombs onto buses than to write a novel worth reading or curate an exhibition worth seeing, or carry out a life-saving operation or discover a new treatment for cancer. The positive contributions of pure religion are as thin on the ground as the remains of the twin towers. These essays, short stories and reviews, in contrast, do add to our understanding of the world after September 11, and - in terms of style if not subject matter - they are a pleasure to read.

Extremists "belong in a different psychic category" to the rest of us. They have contempt for both life and death. However, in other important ways they are not so exceptional: they share with most people of faith the belief that their religion is the only true faith, and they share with most people who have ever lived a pride in their faith. According to Amis, on any longer view, "man is only fitfully committed to the rational - to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of."

In the first piece - "The Voice of the Lonely Crowd" - Amis gives a potted account of his own religious trajectory, from vehement apostasy at the age of nine, to "open-and-shut" atheism at twelve, to his more recent reclassification as an agnostic ("not quite an atheist"). His younger self, apparently, did not recognize "that the soul had legitimate needs". This ambiguous phrase aside, we are left in little doubt as to his current attitude to religion: "Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful."

Not quite the attitude of the average agnostic, but it ties in with some remarks Amis made in a radio interview in which he characterized those few in the modern world who were both religious and creative as "occasional freaks": there isn't room in the brain for a delusive belief system, as all belief systems are, and real creativity. Just as science and religion don't mix, neither do art and religion. Apologists for religion naturally shut their eyes to the evidence and continue to assert that this is not happening, that religion still matters. (For example, I recently heard Richard Harries accuse new atheists of not taking culture and history seriously, forgetting that taking culture and history seriously provides many very good reasons for atheism.) Science certainly doesn't need religion to flourish, and does anyone seriously believe that art cannot thrive without religion?

Now that the traditional arguments for theism have failed, the more sophisticated believers are on the lookout for new justifications, and might take comfort when Amis describes imaginative writing as "slightly mysterious". In fact, he goes on to say, "it is very mysterious". Since mystery is religion's main commodity, do art and religion share a deep connection after all? No. In religion, mystery is a substitute for explanation, and therefore everywhere. In fiction, mystery lies hidden at the root of its creation. Novelists "don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on. Yet the worlds so created aspire to pattern and shape and moral point. A novel is a rational undertaking; it is reason at play, perhaps, but it is still reason."

Playfulness is not a quality readily associated even with so-called moderate religion (what is moderate about believing, for example, in the resurrection?). A sermon is also a rational undertaking, but one based on false premises and concerned more to preach than to please (there is plenty of smiting in scripture, but a single smile?). Reason at play in fiction is an exercise in plurality, in exploring diversity, in imagining other worlds and other people. Contrast this exercise in tolerance with the terror to be found in religious and political ideologies that claim exclusivity, that do not admit of alternatives. After all, each religion blasphemes all the others, and even within a religion tolerance is a pale shadow of the secular ideal. Typical of religious and political ideologues is the claim that they have all the answers for what you should make of your life, when most people don't even have the answers for their own lives let alone the lives of others.

"Religion is sensitive ground," Amis observes. No kidding. "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." Faith has recently and almost endearingly been defined as "the desire for the approval of supernatural beings". But make no mistake: faith "is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor" - a force for evil and an actor in a terrible play. Faith flew those planes into the twin towers and then throws a temper tantrum when it's not accorded maximum respect. Anyone still tempted to pay lip service to faith as an unquestionable virtue may think twice on reading this collection.

Amis understands and describes with a superb eye, both the ugly soul of totalitarianism and the death cult of religous fanaticsm facing the west. Along with Paul Berman, Amis helps you make the leap into the minds of those who want to kill us and shows us the dreadful emptiness of their souls. This collection of essays includes two short stories. "In the palace of the end," the story is based on a body double for the psychotic and sadistic son of the dictator and is based in a torture centre. The horror is skilfully amplified by the dullness of tone and terrifyingly, sadism and rape are reduced to bureaucratic procedures. The essays range from the wacky evilness of Ahmedinijad in Iran to spending time with Tony Blair and are rich in detail colour. Even though I would disagree with some of Amis' emphasis and conclusions, each essay stands up as a fine piece of writing. This is an excellent book. I would urge anyone who enjoys it to also read Berman's "Terror and Liberalism"