The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: conspiracy theories, core reason, Muhammad Atta, The Dependent Mind, Tony Blair (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These chronologically ordered essays and stories on the September 11 attacks proceed from initial bewilderment to coruscating contempt for radical Islam. Novelist Amis (House of Meetings) rejects all religious belief as without reason and without dignity and condemns Islamism as an especially baleful variant. Amis attacks Islamism's tenets as [a]nti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic and characterizes its adherents, from founding ideologue Sayyid Qutb to the ordinary suicide bomber, as sexually frustrated misogynists entranced by a cult of death. He also takes swipes at Bush and the Iraq war, which he describes as botched and tragically counterproductive, if well intentioned, but scorns those who draw a moral equivalence between Western misdeeds and the jihadist agenda. Amis's concerns are cultural and aesthetic as well as existential: terrorism threatens a reign of boredom in the guise of tedious airport security protocols, pedantic conspiracy theories and the dogma-shackled dependent mind fostered by Islamist theocracy. As much as Amis's opinions are scathing, blunt and occasionally strident, his prose is subtle, elegant and witty—and certainly never boring. (Apr.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Warren Bass

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest's publisher asked him to reissue his classic broadside against Stalin's outrages, The Great Terror. Conquest was asked if he might consider a new title. "How about 'I Told You So, You [Expletive] Fools'?" he replied.

Martin Amis gleefully recounted this story in his own fusillade against Stalinism, Koba the Dread, and there are moments in Amis's scathing collection of his journalism about 9/11, The Second Plane, when one wonders if he wouldn't rather have used Conquest's title instead. It's perfectly clear to him that Islamism -- that is, perverting a great world faith to create a radical, bloodthirsty modern "ism" -- has some creepy similarities to "the thanatoid political movements we know most about, namely Bolshevism and Nazism," all of which share "a self-pitying romanticism," a furious anti-Semitism, a loathing for liberal societies and above all a "rejection of reason -- the rejection of the sequitur, of cause and effect, of two plus two."

Amis is determined to make even the most complacent reader share his revulsion. Islamism and Bolshevism strike this novelist as, in a word, inhuman, and it appalls and fascinates him that so many humans sign up.

Amis's political engagement is passionate and permanent, absorbed not so much with his mother's milk as with whatever beverages his father, Kingsley Amis, might have had on offer. Like a depressingly broad swath of other Western intellectuals, Amis père had a soft spot for the Soviet Union. That fondness ultimately provided the germ for his son's fuming Koba and his most recent, Soviet-themed novel, House of Meetings. But the younger Amis's journalism deserves to be taken on its own ferocious terms. For one thing, his fury at the fanatics of al-Qaeda and "those sanguinary yokels, the Taliban," fuels some fine jabs; for another, our unconscious preference for pretending that the shock of the attacks has been "frictionlessly absorbed" is so stubborn that even a flawed attempt to admit our angry bafflement is welcome.

Amis may count himself lucky that this collection is now being published outside of Great Britain, if only because, for the first time, the book will have more chance of being read. Back home he's still living down a vintage fracas among the British intelligentsia; in a foolish August 2006 interview conducted when he was livid over a recently busted jihadist plot to blow up transatlantic jetliners, he admitted to "a definite urge" to hound the British Muslim community -- travel bans, curtailed freedoms, racial profiling, perhaps even deportation -- until "it gets its house in order." The resulting brawl mostly drowned out his book in Britain.

But for all the ugly bigotry of Amis's 2006 musings, the argument in The Second Plane bristles with intelligence. Amis sees Islamism as a particularly nasty ideology, "a death-brimmed bog of circular gullibility and paranoia." Osama bin Laden himself is memorably dismissed as an "omnicidal nullity under a halo of ascetic beatitude." Precisely because of his rage at the atrocities in New York, Washington, Shanksville, Pa., Madrid and London, Amis is obsessed with understanding what makes the jihadists tick, and if this collection sometimes flags, it may be because jihadism isn't all that interesting -- a sour, spoiled pseudo-theology rooted in "tinkertoy sophistry."

Of course, Amis also isn't crazy about religion in general. Unlike his old friend Christopher Hitchens, Amis is an agnostic, not an atheist, but he largely shares Hitchens's scornful dismissal of religious belief as ignorant sentimentality. Still, Amis is more or less content to casually sneer at your average theist. What really enrage him are not the believers but the killers. "Naturally we respect Muhammad," he writes. "But we do not respect Muhammad Atta."

So when Amis reimagines "The Final Days of Muhammad Atta" in one of the book's two surprisingly lame stories, he's not satisfied with having the 9/11 ringleader detour to Portland the morning of the attacks to pick up a bottle of holy water from Medina that's probably just ordinary Volvic. Amis has Atta shudder from months of constipation, shake with nausea, repulse those around him with breath that "smelled like a blighted river" and fall down in the shower. Contempt for a mass murderer like Atta is morally unassailable, but there's not a lot of insight in this story. Amis's cleverness also gets the better of him in a lengthy, indulgent and vague tangent about the meaning of boredom in the age of sacred terror.

"A rational response" to 9/11 and bin Ladenism, Amis writes, "would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust." But it's when he varies his siren that the book snaps and snarls. During a coiled, approving review of the movie "United 93," Paul Greengrass's almost unwatchably intense recreation of the flight whose abandoned, assaulted passengers did far more than NORAD to defend the country, a furious Amis imagines having to explain the hijacking to a child on board: "Well, you see, my child, the men with the bloodstained knives think that if they kill themselves, and all of us, we will stop trying to destroy Islam and they will go at once to a paradise of women and wine." Or there's his commendable disdain for Western conspiracy cranks, who indecently mewl that the U.S. government planned the attacks and desperately "want you to sit still and listen to an epic of futile pedantry." Or his skewering of President Bush over his Iraq policy (which Amis regards as imbecilic) and propensity to cast the post-9/11 world in theological terms: "It makes him feel easier about being intellectually null. He wants geopolitics to be less about the intellect, and more about gut instincts and beliefs -- because he knows he's got them."

The last word should go, perhaps, to Tony Blair, whom Amis shadows for several days and finds far from intellectually null. At one point, the devoutly Christian prime minister remembers being lectured by Alastair Campbell, his closest aide. "Look. This isn't America. Religion and politics don't mix," Blair recalls Campbell saying.

"And when religion and politics mix?" Amis asks.

"You start saying things," Blair replies, "like 'God made me do it.' "

That is the great geopolitical danger; Amis, for one, told us so.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400044545
• ISBN-13: 978-1400044542
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #581,797 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Collection of Previously Published Pieces Well Worth Reading, April 8, 2008

By	Dan E. Buoy "theater buff" (OH United States) - See all my reviews

Martin Amis, best known for his outstanding fiction, here offers a collection of previously published essays, as well as a couple of short stories, on the topic of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. The works range (in their original date of publication) from just after the horrible attacks through September 11, 2007. In his forward to this slim collection, Amis admits he was tempted to revise essays which, over time, show their flaws. But bravely, he allows us to see his original work untouched by the corrective pen.

As such, these materials afford Amis' fierciest critics ample opportunity to selectively slice quotations out of context in an attempt to show the writer in deceptively unflattering light (NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani immediately comes to mind). But chuckleheaded critics' opinions notwithstanding, Amis' gift for turning a phrase and cutting to the essence of an idea is without peer. If there is a living writer who matches Amis' vocabulary, stinging humor, poetic nuance and worldly insight I have yet to read him or her.

Take, for example, this excerpt:

"It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, in the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also calculated emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all to palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished") - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge."

Bloody brilliant. This excerpt alone makes "The Second Plane" worth the twenty clams.

Still, it is in his short stories that Amis' dark humor and unmatched skill as a fictionalist comes most alive. "In the Palace of the End" genuinely evokes Kafka, and was, in places, as haunting to read as "House of Meetings."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars September 11 Consciousness, April 25, 2008

By	Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews

Martin Amis's political books have typically been the least well received of his oeuvre. His 1987 collection of stories `Einstein's Monsters' felt too contrived and naively over heavy on the big ideas (nuclear weapons) compared to the two satirical masterpieces - Money and London Fields, it was chronologically sandwiched between, and his 2002 Koba the Dread, a book to honour the victims of Stalin, was a bit of a hash of an exercise that strained too hard for effect, comparing, at one point, the screams of his infant child with the millions that perished under Stalin in the Gulag.

In this collection of essays and fiction, however, Amis has rather more success in mixing his personal life and concerns with the big political themes that affect us all. The book brings together a collection of Amis's writings on the theme of September 11, and the myriad fallout from the events of that day: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wider concerns to assert American power more fully in the Middle East, and more generally (and this is Amis's real concern) the subliminal effects that terrorism has on us all: `it's mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism'.

The publication of this collection comes after a long running media spat concerning Amis's views on Islam. Terry Eagleton, Amis's colleague at Manchester University accused him of being tantamount to a `British National Party thug'; the satirical comedian Chris Morris tagged Amis as `The New Abu Hamza'. All this following an interview Amis gave to the Independent in which he mused that `don't you feel the urge that the Muslim community must suffer in order to get its house in order. What measures? `Things like strip searching people who look like they come from The Middle East, or Pakistan.'

Clearly, the old saw about all publicity being good publicity has worked in this case, as The Second Plane is already on its third print run. But what is Amis actually advocating in his views towards Islam? The reality, now that these pieces are all bought together under the same cover, and not merely the disparate fragments of journalism written over a variety of years and numinous publications, is an interestingly thought out, rationally developed view on the burgeoning problem of Islamism. Amis starts the collection with the title piece written immediately after September 11, the almost hallucinogenic quality of the prose bringing back memories of this period when everyone in the world was dealing with the shock of the event. The long term ramifications were unknown, but even then Amis was perceptive in turning his attentions to the terrain, mental and physical, he believed would be most keenly affected - the hitherto protected western liberal worldview, and the wrecked, Taliban crippled badlands of Afghanistan, `they should be firmly bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LENDLEASE USA', was his recommendation then.

Now, six and a half years on, we know a lot more. Amis states in the introduction that geopolitics may not be his natural subject, but masculinity is. And he uses this leitmotif to paint an interesting picture of terrorism as masculinity gone wrong, warped, banjaxed with religious and cultural strain. He traces this back to the figure of Sayyid Qutb, a young Egyptian man who came to America in the 1950s. Already semi-radicalised by the vestiges of the British Protectorate in Cairo, and the establishment of Israel, he found himself repulsed by the liberties that were established in America. With almost comical lack of self awareness he found himself threatened by the `bulging breasts and smooth legs' of the young women. Raged and inspired, he embarked on a large corpus of work, prose and poetry, of which the following lines are indicative:

A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an
enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she
approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside
her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent
of perfume but flesh, only flesh

Clearly, not a man at ease with his sexuality.

Islamism (at times Amis takes pains to distinguish this from Islam in general, at other points he seems to elide the two notions) as it is now, is at crisis point. The civil war within Islam has been won by the fundamentalists, Amis argues, the moderates have lost out, and now the dominant force is a retrograde, barbaric, misogynistic, homophobic, murderous ideology. This is the point at which Amis (like his fellow media cohorts on the left, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen - or should that be, formerly on the left?) parts company with type of liberal who would far more eagerly bash the administration of George Bush than the address the human rights disaster going on in the Middle East. Amis spares no effort in using his full descriptive talents to outline the horrors. For example he describes a magazine picture of a Saudi newscaster beaten by her husband as looking like a `crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half submerged in the crimson pulp.'

Does he go too far in trying to draw a clean cut line between the moral West and the backward and barbaric Arab cultures? There is little in this collection to suggest that Amis is an outright Islamophobe. His writing is certainly too precise, stylish and intelligent to lapse into careless racist slurs, and he does devote a small amount of space to acknowledging the vast cultural contributions Islam has made to the world. But there are undoubtedly weaknesses in the collection. The number of actual, real life Muslims Amis encounters is very few. There is an encounter with a gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem: `I will never forget the look on (his) face when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway', and an anecdote from Pakistan when, travelling with Christopher Hitchens, they encounter a street stall selling Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. That is pretty much it. Most of the pieces are from the viewpoint of a man who has approached the issue on a purely cerebral level - buttressed by a whole raft of books (4 pieces in these 14 piece collection are, themselves, book reviews, and citations to other secondary sources litter almost every page), privileged access to the entourage of Tony Blair (documented at length in an extended piece of reportage), and a strong position as a highly regarded intellectual figure in the Western world with a tendency to epater les bien pensants de la gauche. It is a little like the people who proclaim loftily and radically on how to reform the education system or the NHS. Those with experience on the ground can usually supply key insights that the pure thinkers don't have access too.

Further still, is a curious piece on Mark Steyn, a neo-con Canadian writer who most civilized readers can see through as a plain fascist in frontiersman's clothing. Amis considers Steyn's book America Alone and writes `Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a maniac.' After some fun poking at his style, Amis agrees that we should take very seriously Steyn's prediction that the rising birth-rates amongst Islamic cultures may drown out the culture of choice and rights and entitlements in the lower birth-rate, Western European countries.

Such points are the low end of the wide spectrum of Amis's us and them mentality towards Islam and Islamism. For the most part, he has devoted much time and intellectual rigour to this most vital of contemporary themes, and his writing is as vigorous and stylish as ever.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars BIFURCATED, April 14, 2008

By	Kerry Leimer (Makawao, Hawaii United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Early on Amis writes about writing. He wonders how to make some fiction out of the fact of September 11 -- a reaction I found initially puzzling since enough fiction concerning this has already tried to present itself as fact. So here we have a compilation of published opinion/journalism and short fiction, arranged chronologically and in places "revised". And yes, the fiction is perhaps the strongest, with one piece being quintessential Amis and the second, longer being something of an interesting hybrid.

In the factual pieces he again attaches his comprehension and fear to one of his long standing personal demons: nuclear holocaust. In the radioactive threat after September 11 he can no longer enjoy simply looking at his children, which is as grim a capitulation to what must be perceived as an absent future one can make. In so doing Amis tends to fall in step with some of the Bush Administration hyperbole concerning the scale of the threat. I guess if we take into account that the Bush Administration is "in charge" this might not be too much of an overstatement, but in "Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind" -- despite the "revision phase" -- Amis again trots out the old canard that "Everyone Thought Saddam Had Weapons of Mass Destruction". I admit to feeling confused by this orientation: was I the only person who repeatedly read and saw the reports of Hans Blix, all running utterly contrary to the WMD meme being circulated by the politicians and news media before the U.S. attack on Iraq? Amis gratefully does often see clear of such gross simplifications of the threat, but never completely.

The fiction is indeed the more rewarding work here: with "In the Palace of the End" Amis accomplishes another weepingly hilarious work in his now rather long string of the blackest of humors. His language and perception are uniformly remarkable in "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" -- typically brilliant Amis. "Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom" is a line that should read across vast and billowing banners at every airport checkpoint on earth. But as convincingly wrought as "The Last Days of Mohammad Atta" proves to be, it sadly falters to a rather cliché ending which simply pirouettes to the beginning: That final sentence lacks only the ellipsis...

It may well be worthwhile to have these pieces combined into a single volume. But then again, their proximity to one another doesn't really seem to enhance the value of each as a standalone. In the end "The Second Plane" might simply be an economically expedient way to extend return on effort.