Customer Reviews

Yellow Dog

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

1. Yellow Dog is a chore to read - its self-conscious post-modernity, its intentional tangle of narratives and voices, and its glee in confusing the reader make it tiresome from the first sentence.


2. You can call me old-fashioned, but I have a taste for finding humanity in at least one of the characters - in Amis' novel, there are about a dozen characters to keep track of and not a shred of heart among them.

3. I took this book from the library and suffered through it for weeks, enslaved to my own principles of finishing a book you start. But I was absolutely grateful when the library recalled it at about page 200. It's not worth a 50-cent late fee.

As a reviewer from the continent, I am blissfully unaware of what has made Martin Amis(MA)such a controversial person in his homeland. The Economist, in a recent, rather positive review of MA's latest, The Pregnant Widow, found it opportune to remind its readers that Yellow Dog(YD) was a substandard novel. According to which standards? Whose standards? MA is not the world's greatest plotter of novels, but his characters are superlative and his language use astonishing.
MA writes to sooth his many fears and obsessions, such as the Bomb, pollution, competition among males, fatherhood, flying, the resurgence of Russia, and the non-working working class in Britain. In earlier books MA invented some unforgettable creatures such as the baby then toddler-from-hell Marmaduke, and Keith Talent, a gross yob aspiring to immortality in the game of darts. In YD, MA returns to his obsession with tabloids, its writers, targets and readers.
D's hero, Xan has become a model husband and father of two since his acrimonious divorce, also a public figure, active on TV and as an author. Once a year he visits a neighbourhood pub to celebrate his continued good behaviour with a few drinks. And out of nowhere he is accosted by two strangers and beaten up very badly. When he is released from hospital his personality is changed, perhaps forever...
MA links Xan with an outrageous cast of characters to explain the attack: wife, ex-wife and children; a tabloid journalist obsessed with the size of his manhood and his mobile phone girlfriend; King Henry IX ("Henry England"), his Chinese girlfriend, his male personal secretary and his daughter Victoria, very blackmail-prone, and a rancorous crime boss/long stay guest of penitentiary institutions, a psychotic football star, to mention a few.
The novel provides SMS-talk from another planet and previews to totally new sub-genres in filmed pornography. Depressed? Read this book. It makes you laugh. Translators of MA deserve pity, admiration and stipends on top of their normal rates. But no translation can better the original.

Yellow Dog is very much in the same savagely satirical mode of much of Martin Amis's work, for example Money. It is set in an alternate present-day England, with an importantly different royal house, the last three generations of which feature such controversially named kings as John II, Richard IV, and now Henry IX. Also, a minor plot point is that a comet is heading towards Earth, predicted to miss by only a few thousand miles.

Yellow Dog interleaves several stories, all in the end revolving around pornography. The main character is Xan Meo, a "renaissance man": actor/writer/guitarist, but also the son of a gangster. Xan is nearing 50, and living a reformed life himself: he no longer drinks or smokes, he is a loving and faithful husband, and the loving father of two young daughters. He had previously been in a destructive marriage and had two sons, but after a far from amicable divorce he has changed his ways. But once a year, on the anniversary of his decision to quit, he heads to a pub and has a few drinks and a few cigarettes. But this time, at the pub, he is waylaid by representatives of a crimelord and beaten severely, apparently for "naming" their boss compromisingly, though Meo has no idea how or even who. But Meo's beating, and the subsequent brain damage, drastically affects his relationships with his wife and daughters, and also his careers, and he ends up thrown out of his house, with a former porn star turned producer trying to seduce him, and with a job acting (not as a "participant", though) in a porn movie.

Another key thread follows a vile journalist named Clint Smoker, who works for perhaps the worst of the London tabloids, and who despite his monetary success is an abject and humiliating failure with women. He too ends up on the set of the porn film, though as a journalist researching a story. There is also a thread about the King of England, Henry IX, and a crisis involving a secret pornographic videotape of his popular 15 year old daughter, Victoria. Finally, we end up meeting the gangster who has ordered Xan Meo to be beat up, and we learn much of his personal history, and of his financial and personal involvement with the porn industry.

(There is also a strange thread involving an airplane flying from England to the US carrying the coffin of a recently deceased, very rich, man, and also involving the threat of a crash -- I concede I never really figured out what Amis was after with this thread.)

The novel is very entertaining, full of rather savage and often vulgar wordplay, some gaspingly horrid behaviour (especially on the part of the tabloid folks), and some pretty scary things too, especially the degradation of Xan's character. The plot is somewhat intricate, and resolved cleverly and funnily. There are some details about the porn industry that I'm not sure are actually true, but have a horrible ring of possible truth to them. Except for the airplane thread, which as I said I simply didn't get, I thought it worked very well -- a strong, savage novel, not a great work, nor Amis's best, but, I though, pretty darn good.

My first Martin Amis, and I think, given his patriarchal theme, I will stick with his dad Kingsley in future.
Amis is bold - no question - dealing with subjects such as incest, gratuitious violence, rage, drug abuse, pornography, impotence, spousal rape. He even invents his own language for the character k8 (Kate) which is witty after you figure it out.He enters the world of porn with terms like Blackeye, Cockout, Redface, Boxback, Yellow tongue, Facial - some explained, others left to our imagination. His descriptions are equally visceral; he describes a planeload of disembarking passengers as " the tube of canned sex emptied in relays of tits, pits and zits "
Four of the five disparate story strands sort of came together in the end, while the fifth one about the crashing airliner, didn't connect at all, and I wondered why it was there - further proof of male superiority, even from the grave?
My issue with this book was that everyone in it (except for baby Sophia) is a bad, twisted person and I am not sure if anyone was redeemed in the end - so why bother?
And the writer demonstrated arrogance in starting his scenes anywhere he damned well cared, letting the reader hang on for dear life and try and fit all the pieces together. I dislike all this "work" when reading to be entertained, educated and enlightened.
I guess, in writing this book, Amis displayed his virtuosity with words but severely limited our view on his empathy towards human character.
Shane Joseph www.shanejoseph.com

Juvenal called his book of satires a `farrago', and the word fits Yellow Dog very well. It's satire, it's a farrago of many different themes and plots, and it's a very clever farrago because Martin Amis is a very clever little man.

I shall say immediately that I didn't much care for the book, and I shall try to explain why. However I don't criticise either book or author for being clever, for instance in having so many threads to the narrative. Amis's skill and professionalism ensure that the variety of plots and threads combine very well. If any of us find it a bit of an effort to hold the thing together in our heads, that's our own look-out in my opinion. It is not the job or duty of any author to write down to any sort of common denominator. What would be an interesting essay or exam question for advanced Eng Lit students might be `What is this book about?' `Yellow Dog' is the title of a column by a downmarket tabloid journalist, but a yellow dog puts in an appearance right at the end in a more serious context. Various press summaries that I have seen select as some kind of central theme the personality change undergone by one character, but, really, who are they to say, and why should that be the main narrative? Why should it have priority over King Henry IX, for instance?

I am not going to stick my head above the parapet and offer my own opinion about what the main plot is, perhaps because I have no clear opinion on the matter. However one definite common factor is the satirical observation that pervades the story. There are brilliant take-off's of Prince Charles, man-of-the-people journalism, footballers' statements, tough-guy criminals, text messaging, very likely of the pornography industry too, and probably indeed more types of people and types of culture are being mimicked than I have detected. What about north London intellectuals? What Russia (a female character) writes to her husband about father/daughter interactions definitely has a serious side to it, but I'd be surprised if there is not a bit of mockery of north London chatter there as well. It's all very clever, as I said, but it gets on my nerves after a while. Imagine if you will some smartyboots type of guy who specialises in taking everyone off. He quickly becomes a bore, and often a downright objectionable bore. I loved a lot of the detail and I certainly admired the acuteness of much of it, but I soon got enough of it.

The press clippings adorning my edition are nothing if not fulsome. One feature that comes in for considerable acclaim is the humour `Extravagantly funny...' `As funny as Dead Babies...' `...devastating comic gift'. We are not devastated, we fear. In fact I laughed at precisely three things in the whole 140 pages of the novel, and two of those are not of Amis's authorship. Certainly he had a good instinct when he chose to tell us that Henry VIII had a Groom of the Stool to attend his bowel movements, and I had to go along with the derision at the sentiment `Flowers are God smiling at us' when uttered by the monstrous gangsters the Kray twins. Full marks to the author himself for choosing the name He (pron `Her') for a Chinese erstwhile mistress of the King. Otherwise I found the humour about as funny as dead Gazans or dead Zimbabweans for the most part.

It must be quite clear that all this is a purely personal reaction of my own, and I do not wish to pass it off as objective criticism or evaluation. If asked what I liked most about the story I would pick out the strong element of fantasy, and I am quite prepared to rate that as more important than the narcissistic smartness that I found wearisome. Where I see that others have found fault with the book, namely in its complexity, I will come to the author's defence, and indeed I have already done so at the start of this notice. What I have tried to do, as fairly as I can, is to convey something of the flavour of the book. Not my own favourite flavour, but no reason why it should not be yours.

I'm a full on Amis worshipper, but this book might be my least favorite . There are the usual language theatrics, and that's not to diminish them; when Amis gets a head of steam there's nobody writing in English who can run with him. Still, for the first time ever reading an Amis book I hurried through the ending just to get it over with.

The book could just as well be subtitled "Martin Does Porn" because all of the story lines are in some way about prurient interest. Three of the characters spend at least some time actively in the porn business, while the pornography of violence and internet salaciousness are all over the place. Of course there are insightful moments and great humor, the descriptions from the point of view of a recently brain injured Xan Meo are fabulous and the autobiography of English gangster Joseph Andrews is a collection of numbingly repetitive violence and imprisonment that somehow manages to be incredibly funny at the same time.

Still, the character Amis seems to inhabit the best is Clint Smoker, writer for a London based tabloid named the Morning Lark. Amis geeks will remember the Lark from London Fields, where darts obsessed Keith Talent (one of the more brilliant characters in recent literature) kept a copy tucked under his arm for most of the book. In Smoker Amis comes closest to his great characters. Smoker is sexually insecure, socially awkward, wordy, and disturbing, and Amis seems most at ease and in best form while shuttling him about. He also saves some of his most exquisite writing for Smoker; the Lark op-ed about the princess Victoria losing her virginity (it's hinted to her father) is twisted brilliance.

Still, the various story lines never quite coalesce, and the book concludes with "family values" message that seems almost trite considering all of the blood and sex that leads to it. Yellow Dog isn't a bad book, but Amis made the mistake of setting the bar so high for himself. From nearly any other novelist this book would be a breakthrough, but from Amis it's quite average. Read it if you've already read everything else, but if you're getting to know him try London Fields of The Information first and read Yellow Dog when it's in paperback.

This is a disappointing work when compared to Money and London Fields and even Amis's shorter works such as Night Train and Other People. The book is all over the place really, but tangled up in the mess are dazzling threads of Amis's sublime wordsmithery. The behaviour of the characters strains credibility to breaking point and by the time you get near the end, you just want them all to f*** off. But maybe that's the point...