Books
The tyrant of cool
by R Carl Shuker
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Thrillerish (it has a plot!), the novel owes its structure to a more mathematical Thomas Harris – Stephen King said of The Silence of the Lambs that Harris bats the plot along like a balloon full of poisonous gas. Yellow Dog’s four plotlines, before they fully interweave, bounce along in a sustained symmetry of weight and tension.
There’s Xan Meo, who begins the novel: “renaissance man”, actor and writer and, recently, “good” husband and father. That is, until he’s coshed in the head by the hired goons of an antique London gangster who believes he has been named in Xan’s book. Xan regresses into more id-dependent ways, and starts to make his wife uneasy when he’s around their little girls.
Clint Smoker (next in a long line of Amis characters with Pynchonesque cryptically expressionist names) is a paparazzo of the lowest order, writing sub-Daily Mirror sleaze for the Morning Lark. Smoker’s specialties are sub-celebrity sub-gossip, and life advice for the readers – the staff of the Lark mildly refer to these as “wankers”. (As in: “The wanker comes first.”)
Next up, it’s the King of England. Yes. Henry IX, replete with his Pastime Puzzles (“Oh I say, how fearfully clever”) and his Remy reserve. This is the King as a ponderous, irresponsibly olde world fop, with Chinese concubine in tow, utterly out of touch (“I am blind, like a kitten,” the monarch whimpers), and irritable-bowelled into the bargain. The King’s biggest problem, and the novel’s central hook, is that his daughter, the pubescent Princess Victoria, has been filmed engaged in lewd acts in the royal holiday house at Cap d’Antibes, and a process of blackmail, entrapment and double-cross of unknown origin has been set in motion.
Bleak satires about bankrupt moralities ought to be short (as Tibor Fischer’s notoriety) and extremely funny or they’re just exhausting. With Yellow Dog, Amis has the pacing and weight just right, and, along with Time’s Arrow, Experience, The War Against Cliché and (to a lesser extent) Visiting Mrs Nabokov, it’s certainly compulsory reading.
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