Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable, but he's done it better before, 28 Jun 2004
'Yellow Dog' is not Amis's greatest book, but it's definitely not 'Tibor Fischer's Uncle' bad. I enjoyed reading it, and it is a welcome return to the dark urban setting of 'Money', 'London Fields' and 'The Information', my favourite Amis books. It has the same bleakly comic feel, the same Dickensian characters, and the same sense of horror at the state of modern life. At points, Amis's language reaches the dizzying descriptive heights of his earlier books, but for the most part the descriptive language is oddly flat. For example, although it's a good image, the description of a 'firefighting sunset' towards the start of the book seems to be an oddly lazy description if you recall some of the memorable linguistic shimmies, nutmegs and stepovers of which this author is capable.As usual with Martin Amis, the language, the humiliating situations, and the gleefully created characters are the most important thing, while the plot chugs away in the background, almost as an afterthought. The tabloid hack, Clint Smoker, is a classic Amis character, complete with a wonderful name, but he carries too many echoes of previous characters, such as Keith Talent ('London Fields') to get the reader too excited. The sense I got from this book was of an enjoyable pastiche of the Martin Amis that wrote 'Money', by a younger writer who is too in thrall to the senior writer to do something different. The plot involves a number of interrelated stories populated by lovingly portrayed grotesques, from royals to gangsters. The much anticipated 'post 9/11' dimension of the story is not explicitly realised, but merely hinted at with strangely menacing descriptions of airplanes, and the raging desire for retribution felt by the main character, Xan Meo, after he is attacked. The world depicted here is definitely the world of horrid moral confusion of 9/11, war and tabloid cruelty, but the book doesn't seem to have many wise words to say about the situation. If you are a fan of Martin Amis, you're likely to enjoy this book, but it probably won't linger in your mind as much as his other novels.
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Amis on top form, 3 Sep 2003
Amis' new novel - his first full-length fiction since "Night Train" in 1997 - has provoked considerable response in the UK press. As usual, the controversy has less to do with the book itself, than with the rather tawdry infighting so redolent of the London literary scene. Little attention has been paid to the actual novel, which does in fact demonstrate Amis writing (almost) to the peak of his considerable powers.
The themes and characters are familiar Amis tropes - low life crooks, the upper classes, pornography, and the "category-error" of rampant male violence. But "Yellow Dog" does see Amis branching out in the form to an extent not seen since 1991's "Time's Arrow". While the prose is versatile, endlessly inventive and cuttingly precise, Amis opts here for a fragmented form, stuttering and abrupt, that brilliantly reflects his central concerns. This is very much a 21st century novel, and it is permeated with a feeling of discontinuity and dull paranoia. It is also, as we have come to expect, very, very funny.
Occasionally this style doesn't quite pull together, and the ending (as is usual for an Amis book) isn't quite satisfactory, but there is no one else in the country who is producing literature as edgy and stylised as this. Amis is a modern master, and "Yellow Dog", while not being the best introduction for new readers, is absolutely essential for anyone who wants an early reading of what this century is going to be like. And in an unusual twist for the Amis canon, the book does attempt a redemptive conclusion. Perhaps Amis' dark and cynical imagination is beginning to move out into the light.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A difficult Amis, 26 May 2004
First of all, Amis' writing in Yellow Dog has never been bettered - there are passages of absolutely blatant bravura writing, and at least two of his characters are immortals - tabloid journalist Clint Smoker and his rants are truly astonishing, and London hardman Joseph Andrews is a reductio ad absurdum of all his bad lads. For these characters alone it's worth reading, although the twist in one of Clint's plots is telegraphed a mile away and Andrews is really more of a catalyst than a character deeply involved with the plot.
And for a throwaway minor character, the psychotic footballer Car is absolutely splendid.But there are two structural problems with the book. First, it's impossible to care about the protagonist Xan Meo. Recovering from a head injury and suffering from personality changes his descent into "anti-fatherhood" is uncomfortable reading, but we barely get to know him beforehand; we owe him no sympathy, and without knowing more about him we can't know whether his wrongs are really new behaviour... Secondly, the King. Amis invents an entirely parallel universe, invents several generations of monarchy, and ends up producing an occasionally embarrassingly poor satire of Prince Charles in King Henry XI; his Queen lying in a persistent vegetative state in a Scottish hospital. Henry also has problems with his daughter, who has been captured on film in a compromising position... again, though, the "twist" is telegraphed and there is no element of surprise when we find out what's happening. There's a great pure-Amis black comedy subplot about a corpse on a plane, some meaningless cosmic speculation, and all in all a plot (such as it is) that just sort of stops rather than coming to a coherent end. I enjoyed most of Yellow Dog immensely, but looking back on it, it didn't have the coherence of Amis' finest novels; it lacked the savagery and scope of London Fields, the formal revenge tragedy of The Information, or the sustained black comedy of Money. It's a pity that the structure of the book failed, because I think it contains some of Amis' finest writing yet.
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