Yellow Dog [Paperback]

As a reviewer from the continent, I am blissfully unaware of what has made Martin Amis (MA) such a controversial person in his homeland. The Economist, in a quite positive review of MA's latest, "The Pregnant Widow", found it opportune to remind its readers that Yellow Dog (YD) was a substandard novel, but did not explain why.
Surely MA is not the world's greatest plotter of novels, but his characters are superlative and his language use astonishing. He writes to sooth his many fears and obsessions, such as the Bomb, pollution, competition among males, fatherhood, flying, the resurgence of Russia, and the non-working working class in Britain.
In earlier books MA invented some unforgettable creatures such as the baby, then toddler-from-hell Marmaduke, the organ-teasing Nicola, and the masterpiece of Keith Talent, a fat moron aspiring to immortality in the game of darts.
In YD, MA returns to his obsession with tabloids, its writers and their daily targets.
YD's hero Xan has become a model husband and father of two since his acrimonious divorce years ago. Moreover, he has become a public figure, active on TV and recognised as a writer. Once a year he visits a neighbourhood pub to celebrate his continued good behaviour with a few drinks. And out of nowhere he is accosted by two strangers and beaten up very badly. When he is released from hospital his personality is changed, perhaps forever...
MA links Xan with an outrageous cast of characters to explain the attack: wife, ex-wife and children; a tabloid journalist obsessed with the size of his manhood and his mobile phone girlfriend; King Henry IX ("Henry England")and his Chinese girlfriend, his male personal secretary and his daughter Victoria, very blackmail-prone. The cast is completed by a rancorous crime boss/long stay guest of penitentiary institutions and a psychotic football star.
The novel provides SMS-talk from another planet and previews to totally new sub-genres in filmed pornography. Depressed? Read this book. It makes you laugh. Translators of MA deserve pity, admiration and stipends on top of their normal rates. But no translation can better the original.

Juvenal called his book of satires a `farrago', and the word fits Yellow Dog very well. It's satire, it's a farrago of many different themes and plots, and it's a very clever farrago because Martin Amis is a very clever little man.

I shall say immediately that I didn't much care for the book, and I shall try to explain why. However I don't criticise either book or author for being clever, for instance in having so many threads to the narrative. Amis's skill and professionalism ensure that the variety of plots and threads combine very well. If any of us find it a bit of an effort to hold the thing together in our heads, that's our own look-out in my opinion. It is not the job or duty of any author to write down to any sort of common denominator. What would be an interesting essay or exam question for advanced Eng Lit students might be `What is this book about?' `Yellow Dog' is the title of a column by a downmarket tabloid journalist, but a yellow dog puts in an appearance right at the end in a more serious context. Various press summaries that I have seen select as some kind of central theme the personality change undergone by one character, but, really, who are they to say, and why should that be the main narrative? Why should it have priority over King Henry IX, for instance?

I am not going to stick my head above the parapet and offer my own opinion about what the main plot is, perhaps because I have no clear opinion on the matter. However one definite common factor is the satirical observation that pervades the story. There are brilliant take-off's of Prince Charles, man-of-the-people journalism, footballers' statements, tough-guy criminals, text messaging, very likely of the pornography industry too, and probably indeed more types of people and types of culture are being mimicked than I have detected. What about north London intellectuals? What Russia (a female character) writes to her husband about father/daughter interactions definitely has a serious side to it, but I'd be surprised if there is not a bit of mockery of north London chatter there as well. It's all very clever, as I said, but it gets on my nerves after a while. Imagine if you will some smartyboots type of guy who specialises in taking everyone off. He quickly becomes a bore, and often a downright objectionable bore. I loved a lot of the detail and I certainly admired the acuteness of much of it, but I soon got enough of it.

The press clippings adorning my edition are nothing if not fulsome. One feature that comes in for considerable acclaim is the humour `Extravagantly funny...' `As funny as Dead Babies...' `...devastating comic gift'. We are not devastated, we fear. In fact I laughed at precisely three things in the whole 140 pages of the novel, and two of those are not of Amis's authorship. Certainly he had a good instinct when he chose to tell us that Henry VIII had a Groom of the Stool to attend his bowel movements, and I had to go along with the derision at the sentiment `Flowers are God smiling at us' when uttered by the monstrous gangsters the Kray twins. Full marks to the author himself for choosing the name He (pron `Her') for a Chinese erstwhile mistress of the King. Otherwise I found the humour about as funny as dead Gazans or dead Zimbabweans for the most part.

It must be quite clear that all this is a purely personal reaction of my own, and I do not wish to pass it off as objective criticism or evaluation. If asked what I liked most about the story I would pick out the strong element of fantasy, and I am quite prepared to rate that as more important than the narcissistic smartness that I found wearisome. Where I see that others have found fault with the book, namely in its complexity, I will come to the author's defence, and indeed I have already done so at the start of this notice. What I have tried to do, as fairly as I can, is to convey something of the flavour of the book. Not my own favourite flavour, but no reason why it should not be yours.

Amis's first novel proper since 1996's The Information is a profound disappointment. The "great stylist" seems to have started believing his press and delivered a book that is all style and no substance, to the point that it reads rather like a parody of Amis rather than the man himself.

There is no plot; not necessarily a drawback as plot has never been his strong point anyway, but he's got away with it in the past thanks to strong, entertaining characters such as Keith Talent and John Self. Here, sadly, the characters are merely ciphers, stereotypes - the boring New Man, the retired Cockney villain, the slobbish tabloid journalist, the bad lad footballer. The royal subplot detracts from the book's credibility, and the corpse-in-the-airliner subplot is a waste of paper.

It's not all bad - Amis's writing can still be a thing of wonder and some of the dialogue here, particularly that involving aged villain Joseph Andrews, is absolutely superb - but on the whole the book lacks coherence and some passages - the death of Mal and the blinding of Clint Smoker for example - are so badly written as to be incomprehensible.

In his old age, Salvador Dali used to sign blank canvasses so that less talented artists could make a fortune by passing off their work as that of the genius himself - Yellow Dog comes across as the literary equivalent of one of these fraudulent works. It's got Amis's name on it, but the writing within is a poor imitation.