How does it come to be that a book which starts off being as gripping as they come can wind up fizzling out in an self-satisfied ramble that leaves you demanding the last two days of your life back?I'd studiously avoided M.Amis through uni and beyond, on the strength of a not unjustifiable prejudice sparked and fuelled by a pompous Eng Lit type who used to carry on about Time's Arrow and how clever it was because it ran backwards, which had struck me at the time as being exactly the sort of technical dick-waving that sucks all the fun out of books. This made it all the worse when I finally caved in years later and bought this book - my first Martin Amis, and likely my last - for two extremely unsound reasons, namely that I liked father Kingsley's work a lot so perhaps the son was to be trusted after all, and that the blurb at the back claimed that this particular novel was all sorts of good things.The book is presented in two halves. The first is magnificently clever - so much so that any kneejerk annoyance that a certain smug brand of craftsmanship normally provokes in me was well overshadowed by the astuteness of the observations, the quickness of the humour, the exponential build-up of suspense and the endless flow of wicked puns. The fact that there appear to be four or five parallel plots only serves to heighten the tension, leading one to expect a final, climactic, nimbly handled tie-up along the lines of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, with Martin Amis pulling a literary rabbit out of his top hat with a swish, a cloud of fairy dust, and an "Et voila!"The second half is the worst thing I've ever read.Not only do the plots not tie up after all - which leads you to wonder why anyone bothers - but it's astounding in its arrogance, the sheer hubris of single-mindedly dwelling for hundreds of pages on the kind of character and life that only M.Amis himself could possibly care about. Which is something Amis Sr. is periodically guilty of himself, except that he remains funny and light in his touch, so it might be forgiven in the scheme of things.Now, I will always stand by the notion that we must meet our best authors halfway, and that reading mustn't be reduced to passively waiting to be entertained, but Amis's ponderous and stately ascent up his own arse offers no rewards to his audience one way or another. It isn't funny and it isn't smart, and the symbolism - assuming that that's what he was aiming for - is worthless because it is two-dimensional, reducing real life to a caricature at the expense of all clarity and depth. It is the worst sort of pretension because it exists only for its own benefit. There are only two things worth doing with Yellow Dog. You may1. Read the first half and try to make up your own ending, which might keep you amused for a bit, or,2. Leave it to rot in the discount bin, where it belongs.--What is it about the symbolic use of characters and details that impresses so many educated people? It's not very hard to do: almost any detail or person or event in our lives can be pressed into symbolic service, but to what end? I take my dogs for a walk in New York City in January and see examples of ``alienation.'' An old Negro woman is crooning, ``The world out here is lonely and cold.'' A shuffling old man mutters, ``Never did and never will, never again and never will.'' And there's a crazy lady who glowers at my dogs and shouts, ``They're not fit to shine my canary's shoes!'' Do they tell us anything about a ``decaying society''? No, but if you had some banal polemical, social or moral point to make, you could turn them into cardboard figures marked with arrows. In so doing I think you would diminish their individuality and their range of meaning, but you would probably increase your chances of being acclaimed as a deep thinker. - Pauline Kael, ``Tourist in the City of Youth'', Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Atlantic Monthly Book Press, 1968, First Edition, page 36-37
When I started reading Yellow Dog you wouldn't have been able to prise the book from my cold, dead hands. Martin Amis on form is like nothing else, and the first few chapters of Yellow Dog, which open with Xan Meo (shades of the author?)'s brain injury, would merit 5 stars. A second plot line which satirises gutter journalism has real moments of greatness, balanced out by some complete dirge (Amis's own version of txt spk? No thank you). As we get onto threads 3+ his writing gets lazier and the novel as a whole runs rapidly downhill (or should it be up - "Amis's ponderous and stately ascent up his own arse" seems to describe it well). It was around this point that I embarked on a string of guilty affairs with other books until I recently forced myself to see the job through.Unusually for Amis, the hard-hitting themes and sheer horror are brought to a slightly more palatable conclusion. Xan's violence and sexual perversion (a flirtation with incest seems to keep Amis at top of his game as regards to shock factor) post-head injury are eventually understood as a symptom of his deep, terrifying love for his children, feelings of inadequacy to protect them from the world, etc etc. Whether that is psychologically sound I will leave to the judgement of those more encumbered with masculinity than I, but personally I didn't buy it. As for the other threads, fraught with unexplained events and multiple undeveloped characters, I had simply lost interest in them by the time they were tenuously threaded together.In the words of many a school report, Yellow Dog has great potential but struggles to fulfill it. I'd quite like to give this book back to Amis and ask him to have another go.
What do You think about Yellow Dog (2005)?
I have to admit I was a bit leery about whether I’d like Yellow Dog by Martin Amis or not, since I haven’t been impressed with any of his fiction since London Fields. (Time’s Arrow structurally was interesting, but he holocaust has been so overdone really/ The Information-in terminal and really not all that engaging, a bit of navel gazing novel since it’s bout two writers/ Night Train-dreadful American pulp fiction, which shows that you should really stick to what you know). That being said, it is his best novel since London Fields. One of the main reasons I think he is successful with this novel is that he is satirizing the culture and the people that he knows so well: hard men, the royalty, and journalists. I think he has always maintained his masterly stylistic writing and here it is put to goods use, as it usually is with his non-fiction as well (see Experience for a recent example of why Amis is still a great writer). This is an ambitious novel, some of the themes, motifs, and satire includes: the dark side of the male (which is manifested in violence and incest), pornography, the amorality of tabloid journalism, royalty, hard men/gangsters, father/daughter relationships, and family. I see a sort of similarity in how Amis develops the amoral journalist Clint Smoker to how he developed the lager lout Keith Talent in London Fields-each is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the male species. There are a few weak points to the novel, there is one story strand about a doomed airliner that seems completely superfluous as well as the potential apocalyptic comet that passes the earth without striking it, I guess he was looking for that apocalyptic edge that informed a lot of his mid 80s writing when the cold war was still on-however it seems unnecessary in this case. There are some disturbing sequences in this novel, but overall quite satisfying-it’s good to see Amis back at the top of his game as far as fiction goes.
—Patrick McCoy
When you are reading this you are highly confused and remain so long after you have finished. That is not to say that the process of reading is not an enjoyable one. I find Amis to be very much a style over substance writer, but do not mean this in a negative way. It is easy to engage with each of the four stories, their characters and the imagery have a way of drawing you in even when you have no idea what is going on. However, I find it difficult to establish how much I like the book as I was left slightly unfulfilled at the end. I can't work out if it is truly awful writing from an otherwise talented man or whether it is redeemed by it's strangeness.
—Olivia
After Ian McEwan spent a year shadowing a brain surgeon while writing his rather Amis-like Saturday, Martin must have felt the bar was raised a bit and confesses in the afterword to doing "some light research" for this one (presumably something beyond the customary darts at the public house). The research was on recovering from head injuries and what actually happens in the cockpit when a plane is in danger of crashing - both also quite congruent with Saturday. The medical angle allows Amis a little more focus and plot complexity around his usual fascination with street violence and the plane is one of three plot lines that are advanced in alternating segments; one with our kicked-in-the-head hero, another with an alternate universe instance of the royal family and one with the plane that takes place on an entirely different time scale and seems perhaps just an elaborate metaphor. Overall more tightly structured than the London trilogy and fanciful in new and fascinating, albeit slightly disturbing, ways.
—Bob
