Amis in the 21st Century

MORE
Book Review

• The Clothes Whisperer
• Raise a Glass of Eau de Bloomberg
• Sucking the Life out of Animation
• Abu Ghraib Unplugged

All on one page >>

THE SECOND PLANE: SEPTEMBER 11: TERROR AND BOREDOM
By Martin Amis
Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24

Martin Amis’ The Second Plane is a collection of essays, short fiction and book reviews arranged in order of composition. It thus functions, in some ways, as a walking tour of the motley post-Sept. 11 mind—its fears, madnesses, misapprehensions and insights. While the book’s first essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, aches with the same “reflexive search for the morally intelligible” (as Mr. Amis elsewhere calls it) that animates the desperate relativism of the paleo-left, the end of the book finds him, having now enlightened himself on modern Islam’s intellectual traffic jam, condemning the very same left’s “hemispherical abjection” to the “Thanatism” of radical Islam.

The author of not a few of the funniest novels ever written, Martin Amis has also periodically examined some colossal human bummers and published his findings in what are typically slim but rigorous volumes. The Amis of this mode has his detractors. Einstein’s Monsters (1987), with its forceful denunciation of nuclear weaponry, was slighted as little more than an empty declaration of seriousness. More recently, Koba the Dread (2002), an historical sleigh ride through the left’s collaborations with Stalinism, rolled many eyes with its supposedly needless revisitings. These books were, in some ways, vulnerable to belittling encapsulation. So is The Second Plane, which might be called a psychic survey of our terror-haunted terrain—the smoking fumaroles, flash-flood magma flows and exploding horizons. Some of its sentiment (“the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked”) is coarsely put, and some of its broader arguments undoubtedly wrong. Like its predecessors, then, it, too, will be ridiculed—but not by any reader who has attempted to read it or Mr. Amis carefully.

The centerpiece is a long essay here titled “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind.” (When it appeared in the Guardian in September 2006, the title was “The Age of Horrorism.” During an Internet roundtable six months later, a cheeky youngster asked Mr. Amis if he had any more such “unintentionally hilarious” phrases. “Yes,” he replied. “Fuck off.”) This fiercely argued and frequently striking essay attempts to drop a rhetorical neutron bomb upon radical Islam and its soft-minded apologists. Reading Martin Amis inveigh against radical Islam is almost identical to reading Martin Amis on nuclear weapons: However much fun you (and he) are having, there’s something inescapably imbalanced about the confrontation, as though one were watching Einstein fly through multiplication tables.

Along the way, Mr. Amis, leaning heavily upon other writers and scholars (and he remains a cribber of unparalleled gifts, which sounds like faint praise only to someone who’s never had to do it), fashions an affecting portrait of Sayyid Qutb, the Jeremy Bentham of Islamism, whose sojourn in the “pullulating hellhouse” of Greeley, Colo., in the late 1940’s somehow radicalized him. (Noting the “drunken, semi-naked woman” Qutb claimed to have once run into on an America-bound ocean liner, Mr. Amis writes, “It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently had a cocktail.”) Mr. Amis’ goal here is only partly ridicule. It’s also an attempt to understand how a parochial Egyptian came to provide an entire movement with its philosophical rationale for mass murder. Mr. Amis’ Qutb, in his sentimentality, unexamined contradictions and cross-eyed rectitude, seems an almost familiar character—as if Keith Talent, antihero of London Fields (1989), had settled upon not darts and statutory rape but rather memorizing suras as his life’s work.

Other portions of the essay are less compelling. Mr. Amis writes, “Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.” For a writer whose interest in Islam was discreet prior to the fall of 2001, Mr. Amis discusses its essences with surprising comfort, and it should be said that after the original version of “Terror and Boredom” appeared, the Amis effigies began to snap, crackle and pop. The most devastating critique came from Pankaj Mishra, who noted that, despite his essay’s length, Mr. Amis described only one direct personal experience with a Muslim. As for the attempt to link radical Islam to more familiar historical terrors (“the influence of Hitler and Stalin”), Mr. Mishra allowed that such cogitation satisfied “the nostalgic desire of some sedentary writers to see themselves in the avant-garde of a noble crusade against an evil ‘ism,’” but did not at all “deepen our understanding of the diverse nature of Muslim societies or of the schisms and contradictions within those we call radical Islam.”

Anyone who has used the phrase “Islamofascism” (I have) knows the bluff Mr. Mishra called, and any traveler who has been treated with kindness and respect by Muslims with alarming core beliefs (I have) recognizes that the totalist fanaticism Mr. Amis describes does justice to precious few actual human beings.

ALTHOUGH MR. MISHRA obliterated the arch of Mr. Amis’ argument, parts of its foundation remain. His description of radical Islam as “a massive agglutination of stock response, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations” is memorably put and indisputably correct, and his frustration that adherents of only one faith can be driven to violent fulmination by the cruelties of Scandinavian cartooning is difficult to counter. Thankfully, no particular expertise is required to point out hypocrisy or mock papier-mâché pieties, and Mr. Amis does both as well as or better than anyone. (He has also written the single funniest observation ever made about Osama bin Laden: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.”) Next Page >