Yellow Dog [Hardcover]

Martin Amis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2003

When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog. Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. If, in the twenty-first century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. "Yellow Dog" is an early example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this much-anticipated 10th novel-which has already fomented a furor in Britain-the prose is brilliant and often hilarious, and the insights into contemporary culture are disturbingly prescient. But the book's many successes cannot hide its fundamental flaw: an overly complex and needlessly opaque narrative structure. The wildly plotted novel begins when modern "Renaissance man" (actor/writer) Xan Meo is viciously assaulted; his head injury changes this "dream husband" into an oversexed, sadistic lout, ultimately forcing his wife to cast him out. But the attack isn't an act of random violence. As one of his assailants, Mal, cryptically puts it, "You went and named him... J-o-s-e-p-h A-n-d-r-e-w-s." From this enigmatic opening, Amis weaves a complex tapestry of narrative threads: Xan Meo is trying to recover his lost personality and his family's loving embrace; teenage Princess Victoria-a future queen of England-is being blackmailed with a video of her in the bath; tabloid journalist Clint Smoker-emasculated by a laughably small penis-extracts his revenge by being relentlessly misogynistic in print. Meanwhile, the recidivist, violent criminal Joseph Andrews-now a pornography impresario in Los Angeles-is plotting a way to return to England to die. Making these intersecting narratives cohere would be a challenge for any writer, but Amis reaches even further with a backdrop of apocalyptic violence (a transatlantic flight that's doomed to crash, a meteor that might hit the planet). That background clouds his core themes, which are more than dramatic enough to be compelling: violence and its intimate connections to sex and gender, the "obscenification" of everyday life and the 21st-century preoccupation with fame. (A typical Amis apercu: "Fame had so democratised itself that obscurity was felt as a deprivation or even a punishment.") Thanks to Amis's pitch-perfect dialogue, his I-can't-believe-he-wrote-that humor and his perceptive critique of contemporary morals, this is still a novel of many pleasures-and still a novel to be reckoned with.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Amis elicits as much animosity as approbation, especially in his native England, but no reader can deny the audacity of his imagination or the tensile power of his subversive, fractured, vitriolic prose. In the opening scene in his first novel in five years, a crass and careening satire, Xan Meo, a self-declared Renaissance man with a grimy past, scans the bawdy drink menu in a London pub that offers cocktails called Blowjob and Dickhead and ponders the "obscenification of everyday life," a key theme in the insanity that follows. His brief reverie is violently interrupted, however, and he sustains a serious head injury. Meanwhile, King Henry IX, seemingly dim, dotty, and bored to paralysis with his witless duties, is facing a crisis: someone possesses highly compromising photos of 15-year-old Princess Victoria. And wouldn't sleazy tabloid genius Clint Smoker just love to get hold of those? Xan struggles to regain control over his addled brain and hyperactive libido, the king muddles along, Clint seeks new lows on behalf of the "wankers" who read his ludicrous rag, and a comet threatens to crash into Earth as Amis decimates the patriarchal paradigm (and the monarchy) by dissecting, in outrageous detail, the paradoxes of the pornography industry and the psychosis of father-daughter incest. A sloppy, maddening, hilarious, and oddly touching amalgam of Evelyn Waugh and John Waters, Amis' wicked burlesque evinces his disgust with the herd mentality and a surprisingly tender regard for women. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape; First Edition, Second Printing edition (September 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224050613
• ISBN-13: 978-0224050616
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,895,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lighten up, it's Martin, December 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Yellow Dog (Hardcover)

Martin Amis is the Transatlantic voice of the Baby Boom generation, and he sets the pace for other writers. Most of the modern novelists just don't get it. Martin does. He's post-PostModern, and of course "Yellow Dog" is a mess, because it's intended to be a parody of a novel. That's the whole point. Mr. Amis is famous for being famous Amis, and also for recurrent themes in his fiction, none of which he takes all that seriously. The silliness and unavailing nature of fame and wealth ("Money," "The Information"), the meaningless of life (nearly the whole list), and humanity's disappearing illusions as intellectual discovery continues. The point is, there's very little left to write about; you shouldn't quite take it seriously, a grown man making up characters and putting them through their paces. So he indulges in style, for fun, as a jape, heaping opacity upon banalities, fooling around with Joycean obscurity (clearly a major influence) and Bellow-like platitudinous bellowing. He's funny as hell (the stuff about Smoker's life"style" ["his bathroom was the only non-unbelievable room in the house;" who else could write that?]), he writes like a dream, and you simply can't waste your time while you're reading him. He's the best there is, and has been for a long time. If you like neat and tidy plot structures, deadpan sincerity, and no loose ends, read someone else. If you want to have fun and laugh at the world, read Martin Amis. The rest of the hacks do, even when they're trashing him.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Critics too harsh, November 3, 2003

By 

Joseph Grosso (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yellow Dog (Hardcover)

Ok it's not as great as his earlier works such as "Money" and "London Fields", but still better than most books published this year including some short-listed for the Booker Prize. It contains some typically wonderful Amis humor and word play. Yellow Dog is well worth reading: a decent achievement by one of the world's great modern writers.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars There'll Always be an England., July 4, 2006

By 

Lynn Cox "LC" (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yellow Dog (Paperback)

Whenever I find myself getting homesick for dear old England I'll just have to refresh my memory with some Amis. The shockingly awful rags pretending to be newspapers. The random acts of violence and petty crime. The drunken, loutish behaviour that has become socially acceptable. The rampant misogamy. The ridiculous anachronism that is the Royal Family. Amis hits all the targets in YELLOW DOG. It's the UK at its worst and fiction at its best.