Martin Amis: A laughter for our times

In his first full-length novel since The Information, Martin Amis tells the story of Xan Meo, an actor and writer, whose newly happy life with his second wife and two young daughters is suddenly interrupted by a blow to the head from a seemingly random attacker in a London street.

Xan is badly affected by his injury; his moral sense disintegrates and his sexual impulses become aggressive. He comes close to attacking his much-loved wife, as well as--in a horrifying episode for the reader--to molesting his four-year-old daughter.

Xan's story is interwoven with that of a floridly comic English royal family, in which an effete King Henry watches helplessly as his daughter, 15-year-old Princess Victoria, becomes the subject of a pornographic film through covertly recorded footage. Another narrative strand concerns a violent gangster, Joseph Andrews. Meanwhile, Amis' latest great comic creation is Clint Smoker, a muck-raking hack on the superbly sleazy Morning Lark, who compensates for his minuscule genitals with a series of misogynist tirades under the byline "Yellow Dog".

In a comment he made during the writing of the novel, Amis referred to it as a "post-September 11th comedy".

"I started this book quite a time ago, and put it aside to write the two memoirs [Experience and Koba the Dread]. Just as I was getting going again, September 11th happened. I thought, 'Is this the time to be writing a comic novel?' But after feeling stunned for some time, your fighting spirit gets going, and you think, 'This will be a comic novel--that was one of the values that was attacked on September 11th: the idea, the possibility of comedy.'

"During the Cold War you knew where you were; there was a genuine apocalypse in the shadows. Then came the fool's paradise of 1991-2001, and now there has been an injection of such randomness and irrationality, and anti-morality really, that I thought you'd need a new kind of humour to deal with this--slightly wilder than I felt I was used to.

"It's about laughing at amorality. Nabokov wrote once that in the novel you punish bad behaviour with laughter. So if you've got your gangster sitting at his enormous desk, you don't punish him by having a conspirator tiptoe up behind him with a handgun, you punish him by watching him delving into his ear or nostril and inspecting its contents on his fingertip. People dread being laughed at as much as they dread physical chastisement--it's particularly a male terror.

"I couldn't go at it by creating Charlie Chaplin terrorists, so my novel is more about inverted worlds. After Xan Meo is hit on the head, his moral world is upset; there's the Joseph Andrews character with his belief system so at odds with our own; and the morality of the Morning Lark newspaper is again a kind of inverted world. Even the royals are in an inverted world, although of a gentler kind--gentle in a way, but very distorting.

"I wrote a piece last year about the royals, as a way of researching them, and I found myself mildly pro the royal family. But when I went at it as a novelist, I found I rejected it, because of its denial of freedom to the next generation. After I finished the book, I read a piece about Prince William which said that he absolutely dreaded the idea of moving into this straitened, prescribed life that was waiting for him. It sounds as though they've worked on him and he's a bit more dutiful now. But that's the key to it--in this media age, it's just an intolerable position to be in. So the novel is republican--I found out while writing it what I really felt about it all.

"A writer always adores all his characters. John Updike said, 'Why do we like characters who aren't very nice? Indeed, why do we particularly like them?' Like Becky Sharp in Thackeray. He said what we like is life, and if a character is very alive, we like them. I don't think Clint deserves the fate he receives in the novel--it's a fairly gothic punishment for being a glorified wanker with a very disturbed sexuality. But masculinity and its foibles has always been what I write about--its foibles and its outrages. Clint is out on the fringe of a certain sort of confused, unresolved sexuality--and that's where, as we all know, a great deal of trouble arises.

"Xan is definitely nearer to my voice than anyone else. It seemed to me for a while that this would be a difficulty in the novel, that he dominated the book and everyone else was viewed at a greater distance. But something very extreme happens to him, so the disparity with the other characters is not so great in the end. Xan's head injury is an extreme situation which reveals the limits partly of civilisation and partly, as he puts it, of his talent for love. He becomes atavistic and primitive.

"When September 11th happened, I wrote a piece where I conjectured that the horrible feeling it disseminated had to do with shattering the illusion that you can protect your children. It was always an illusion, but September 11th pointed that out to us. I felt surprised that that conjecture settled in me and was what stayed with me throughout the novel.

"It's terribly painful being a parent. I think being a parent of girls makes that even harder. You are always telling your boys, 'Stiff upper lip, take it like a man', but it never occurs to you to say that to your girls. That ancient feeling of protecting the gentler sex.

"Innocence has always been the thing I value most, and it's a diminishing quality in the modern world, as children grow up quicker. You can't shield them from what I call the obscenification of modern life. So that period of innocence is reduced, and as the planet gets older by definition it becomes less innocent because it's been through it all before. And this rubs off on every successive generation."

* Martin Amis Yellow Dog (Jonathan Cape, 4th September, £16.99, 0224050613)