Books
The war after cliché
by Geoff Cush
Martin Amis’ newcampaign is against “de-Enlightenment” Islamism.
Recently, Martin Amis asked an audience of literary Londoners for a show of hands on the question: “How many of you feel morally superior to the Taliban?” Only a few raised their hands, and those who couldn’t make up their minds were subsequently lambasted by Amis all over the British media.
Like his father, Kingsley, Amis is a keen cold warrior – same cold, different war. A Concorde-class novelist whose lunching arrangements in New York were seriously upset by 9/11 – “a day of de-Enlightenment” – he was further radicalised after a period living abroad when he returned to a Britain whose archbishops now predict the inevitability of Sharia law.
Praising coalition efforts in Afghanistan on live TV, he was confronted by an audience member who told him “in a voice near-tearful with passionate self-righteousness” that “Americans should be dropping bombs on themselves”.
This is moral equivalence pushed to what Amis calls “hemispherical abjection”. So in newspapers and magazines he has been conducting a campaign to stiffen the resolve of secularists. The Second Plane is his pick of the crop.
For all the grave intention, the trademark comedy of early novels like Money and London Fields peeps out. At a party for a dictator’s doubles, 20 lookalikes gather in a state of social agony. Some are informers as well as doubles; one may be the dictator himself. Amis is not doing much more here than giving new life to an old joke about indistinguishable foreigners. Writing about the aftermath of 9/11, he describes “the writhing moustaches of Pakistan” on TV. The image flickers oddly from mass murder to Peter Sellers.
Of a Saudi husband who beat his wife because she answered the phone, Amis notes that he would be more likely to beat his wife because she hadn’t answered the phone. Then, suddenly earnest, he announces that women in Islamic countries are our best hope in the battle with Islamism.
“Naturally, we respect Muhammed,” he says, “but we do not respect Muhammed Atta.” Yet, in The Last Days of Muhammed Atta, he bestows some vintage empathy on the 9/11 pilot. This Atta has chronic constipation and a headache that “established itself like an electric eel from ear to ear, then from eye to eye, then both”. Atta goes to his death hating life, loving chaos, but acquitted of the greatest crime in Amis’ book: belief in God.
These days, Amis is dismissive of his 2001 collection of book reviews, The War Against Cliché. “We can live with ‘bitter cold’ and ‘searing heat’ … What we have to do now is live with war.” Everything pre-9/11 seems trivial, his own work included.
Yet we are still measuring the vigilance, or otherwise, of prose, and The Second Plane fires some potent phrases into a debate sorely afflicted by cliché. No one can be “deeply religious”; religion is “a varnish on a vacuum”.
In 30 mercifully lighter pages, lucky Amis travels around the world with Tony Blair. There is a joke about Downing Street’s Voicemail – “leave a message after the high moral tone” – and we find Amis the Stern taking feline satisfaction in proximity to the PM. “Our acquaintance, at least on my part, is becoming mildly, deplorably, flirtatious.”
Mostly, the tone of The Second Plane is sombre, and, somehow, this makes it easier to disagree with. On American blunders: “There is no exculpation in the fact that Muslim deaths, in Iraq as elsewhere, are predominantly Muslim on Muslim.” Really? None? Does it have to be all America’s fault? If it seems strange to impose on Muslim adults the irresponsibility of children, Amis’ error may lie in choosing that seductive “exculpation”, with its inbuilt thirst for guilt.
He probably drinks less now than he did in his days as an enfant terrible – and drinking has become a political act, a defiance of the mullahs. But Amis is permanently drunk with words.
Geoff Cush is a Wellington writer.
THE SECOND PLANE, by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, $44.99).
