Will Bowers on Martin Amis's The Second Plane

Amis’s sixth, and much publicised, collection of essays The Second Plane is concerned with the ramifications of the September Eleventh attacks on politics and literature.

The volume is chronological, beginning with an article published in The Guardian a week after 9/11 which gives Amis’s first reaction to the tragedy. Half a decade after the event this first essay provides an emotive reawakening of the atrocity through its concentrated style and its refusal to look for rational explanations. Constructions like ‘the bile of its atrocious ingenuity’ and a provoking reference to De Lillo’s ‘world hum’ being ‘as audible as Tinnitus’ show Amis’s prose artistry and grasp of literature are suitable for the subject. He focuses on the need for an America revaluation of its own self image, rather than the middle-east, and for an understanding of Islam.

With this in mind, are the liberal press and Terry Eagleton wrong to chastise Amis for his journalistic output concerning 9/11? In short, no. The first essay is the exception to a volume which only occasionally shows Amis’s unique ability to craft written English and is for the most part a poor diatribe on Islamism. The central essay of the collection ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’ and the smaller ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ flitter between interesting debates on literary theory, Amis’s dull ponderings on writer’s block and badly researched critique of Islamism.

Amis desperately tries to consolidate the disparate threads of literary theory and extremist Islam, but to no avail. When he begins to be engaging on the fall of Leavisism in ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ he insists on relating it to Osama bin Laden, who throughout the collection he seems just as obsessed with as the average mujahid. Later, in ‘The Wrong War’, Amis highlights the similarities between Saudi-Arabia and Texas: ‘great heat, oil wealth, brimming houses of worship, and weekly executions’. This witty insight is undercut by Amis’s stagnant polemic on nuclear weapons and a scrappy comparison of Islamism and National Socialism two paragraphs later.

The short stories in the collection, where one would expect a novelist of Amis’s talent to excel, offer no respite. A colloquial idiom which seems suitable in Amis’s earlier western-based fiction seems staged in ‘In the Palace of the End’, and echoes the clunky mysticism of a Paul Coelho novel. Amis also seems hypocritical in criticising the film United 93 in an early essay for ‘artistry’ of such a major event, and then providing a fictional monologue of a suicide pilot in ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ nearer the end of the volume.

Amis’s fiction is truly remarkable when writing about his own environment (in Money or London Fields) just as his non-fiction thrives on subjects (like Updike and Nabokov in The War Against Cliché ) in which he has a level of expertise. In this volume he is at his worst, because of his lack of cultural experience and intellectual knowledge on the subjects of global terrorism and Islam, which make this collection appear a droll publicity stunt by a once great writer.

Martin Amis - The Second Plane is published by Jonathan Cape in hardback at £12.99. A paperback edition will be released on 1st January 2009.