Amis's first novel since THE INFORMATION- a post 9/11 comedy
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. Koba the Dread, the successor to his celebrated memoir, Experience, was published by Cape in 2002.
In his first novel in seven years, Amis examines the "obscenification of everyday life" via four narratives that spindle toward one another on a literal collision course. First is the story of Xan Meo, an actor with a dark past who suffers a personality-altering head injury after a savage attack. In the second, a fictionalized royal family is blackmailed as they face a legion of other potential scandals. The third is the saga of Clint Smoker, an insecure tabloid journalist, whose interaction with several unsavory denizens of the criminal underworld brings the other stories together. In the background, Amis interjects the odd but compelling story of a casket-bound corpse resolute on crashing the airplane transporting it. That all of these disparate plots connect in an intelligent and hilarious fashion is to Amis's credit, but readers might also be distracted by the persistent misogyny, which serves the story well but leaves an unsettling cloud over the work. Highly recommended for comprehensive literature collections.-David Hellman, San Francisco State Univ. Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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 aper?u: "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. (Nov.) Forecast: A rant by Tibor Fischer in the British press ("It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating") fueled literary gossip mills for weeks and stoked reader interest, already high. Scandal aside, this is Amis's first novel in more than five years, and it should sell strongly. 14-city author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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