Christopher Tayler on Martin Amis’s latest The Second Plane, which focuses on 9/11:
How did Amis - who has written some good novels and used to be a sharp and funny critic - end up throwing so much effort into arguing that suicide bombers are interested in death? It's not easy to say, but his sense of himself as a novelist seems to be part of the problem, and not only because it often makes him address September 11 from the perspective of "the writer", with digressions on FR Leavis and so on. "All of us are excited by what we most deplore," he once wrote in a review of a book by Joan Didion, "'especially,' as Miss Didion says in another context, 'if we are writers'." This is certainly true of Amis, who has steeped himself in the literature of September 11, though part of him seems to disapprove of its appeal. (Hence, maybe, his otherwise mysterious emphasis on "boredom" as a key by-product of terrorism: to a Nabokovian aesthete, this is powerful dispraise.)
Judging from the stories reprinted in The Second Plane, and the pages from his abandoned novella in the newest issue of Granta, terrorism isn't a workable subject for Amis's brand of fiction. In his op-eds, on the other hand, he seems more like a novelist than a political writer, inhabiting ideas like characters, trying to bring them to life and dramatise opposing viewpoints. The arguments that stimulate his imagination aren't automatically good ones: it's less boring to picture your nine-year-old daughter's forced marriage under a global Islamist caliphate than it is to lay out a series of judicious qualifiers. It's also more novelistic to personalise things, to embody abstract arguments in resonant details, and for Amis this usually comes down to the details of radical Islam's version of "the male idea". Qutb, for example, would have been less puritanical, the novelist suggests bathetically, had he not lacked the wherewithal to get laid.
His arguments draw on various sources, with Berman exerting the strongest influence. Hitchens and Sam Harris beef up the muscular secularism, and Bernard Lewis helps with the Islamic background. But the most depressing piece in the book opens with the following sentence: "Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a maniac." Steyn, a jocose Canadian columnist, is the author of a US bestseller detailing the Islamofascist takeover of Europe that's being brought about, he says, by a low non-Muslim birth rate resulting from social liberalism and profligate welfare states.
I think that Tayler takes his obvious disdain for Martin Amis a step too far and proves in fact that there is something “Amisian” within him. He, too, suffers from the same illness that plagues Amis’s work: his imagination and logic are both wounded by solipsism and egocentrism. He is unable to imagine a world where he isn’t right, where his views aren’t representative of the “truth,” and everything that is good. The problem with Martin Amiss and Christopher Tayler is that it isn’t impossible to have a dialogue with them because since they assume that they omniscient and omnipotent, any dialogue becomes a bloody fight where the other side isn’t only wrong, but petty and despicable. After reading Tayler’s review, I wonder why if the Second Plane was that bad, he couldn’t just focus on its shortcomings instead of reminding his readers of all of the ones of Martin Amis. Maybe his point is that it is impossible to live in Amis’s abyss and to produce good literary works; if he is right, literature is in trouble and will soon be replaced by fluffy politics.
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