Yellow Dog

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 recent, rather positive review of MA's latest, The Pregnant Widow, found it opportune to remind its readers that Yellow Dog(YD) was a substandard novel. According to which standards? Whose standards? MA is not the world's greatest plotter of novels, but his characters are superlative and his language use astonishing. MA 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, and Keith Talent, a gross yob aspiring to immortality in the game of darts. In YD, MA returns to his obsession with tabloids, its writers, targets and readers. D's hero, Xan has become a model husband and father of two since his acrimonious divorce, also a public figure, active on TV and as an author. 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"), his Chinese girlfriend, his male personal secretary and his daughter Victoria, very blackmail-prone, and a rancorous crime boss/long stay guest of penitentiary institutions, a psychotic football star, to mention a few. 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.

I don't know why people (including Amis fans) were so down on this when it came out. I loved it. It zoomed straight into my top ten Mart novels. Weeeeeeeeee! Ps don't you find it a bit silly when people have a little badge declaring their user name is their real name. I do. 1 star for that.

If I'd never read another Martin Amis book, I would have thought this book was absolutely amazing. I'm reviewing it in relation to all other novels and not all other Amis novels -- therefore, it deserves 5 stars. I thoroughly enjoyed it, it made me laugh, it was great. It was better than Night Train (read like a contractual obligation), and Time's Arrow (a clever conceit, but worth a book? really?) and Other People (I just don't get this one). If you haven't read The Information, buy it and read it twice immediately.

This novel's multi-layered plot defies the short summary. At the most fundamental level Yellow Dog is about the descent and subsequent return of Xan Meo, the novel's central character. The proximate cause of his fall from grace is a violent blow to the head intentionally inflicted as an act of revent in response to an inadvertent revelation in Xan's book, Lucozade. Xan's descent is evolutionary: from modern husband/father to a lower rung on the evolutionary societal ladder (but one tied to his past). This is a world, alas, not entirely foreign to today's readers. Still it is a long way from paradise. Here, for Xan, and manny of the people he encounters, incest tempts, tempers erupt and ordinary cognitive capabilities seem out of reach. We are cruising the primitive backwaters here -- petty, violent thugs, porn stars (a remarkably likeable lot in these pages), voyeurs and extortionists. Yellow Dog can at times seem frustratingly disorganized; yet Amis pulls the puzzle pieces together by the novel's end. Readers would do well to pay attention to the opening pages -- indeed the opening passage of this novel; it will begin to surface again, albeit in reversed form as Xan begins to regain his footing. In fact, the appearance of a plot in disarray is entirely deceptive. This novel is remarkably self-contained, including an explanation of its limitations: "You don't think it's shocking anymore?...look at the future .. we're not frightened." Yellow Dog does assume an audience capable of being "shocked," of distinguishing normalcy from the moral void, right from wrong.

As usual in an Amis novel the wordplay is sparkling. Yellow Dog examines in a bizarrely comic plot the way violence and pornography permeate our "sophisticated" culture, how these primitive phenomena percolate through our high-tech, media-saturated world. The horrible reviews this book has received are inexplicable except perhaps by jealousy or an exaggerated response to regression to the (very exalted) mean.