Something Amis
Martin Amis's maligned collection of essays and shorts, The Second Plane, explores the fraught legacy of September 11.
By Jonathan Derbyshire
The ageing enfant terrible of English literati polarises opinion... and his own imagination (Photo by Tom Craig at Charles Agency)
Martin Amis’s study, which occupies
part of a converted garage behind
his house in Primrose Hill, shows the
signs of work in progress: his laptop
sails on a tide of paper and there
are books everywhere, in teetering
piles or splayed on tables and chairs.
He tells me he’s writing a novel: “It’s
about what we’re living through.”
‘What we’re living through’ is
the central preoccupation of The
Second Plane, a new collection of
essays, reportage and short fiction.
Subtitled September 11: 2001-2007,
it suggests that it’s the consequences
of that dreadful day in New York, as
much as the attacks themselves, that
exert on Amis what he admits is
a ‘desperate fascination’.
Arranged chronologically, the
book begins with a piece Amis wrote
for The Guardian a week after the
suicide pilots of Al-Qaeda has staked
their claims to a place in paradise.
There’s a dazed, anxious eloquence
about these few pages that sets the
tone for the rest of the book. “All
I was doing,” he says, “was trying as
hard as I could to express what I felt.
That piece is sort of vulnerable. It’s
gibberish. It’s written in shock.”
Despite feeling “species shame”
and “species fear”, Amis was able
to collect himself to attempt sober
geopolitical analysis. “It will also be
horribly difficult and painful,” he
writes, “for Americans to absorb the
fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly.”
These are lines Amis now
disowns – the word “intelligibly”,
he says is freighted with “rationalist
naïveté”, a term borrowed from
American politico Paul Berman.
He says he got over rationalist
naïveté and that “unvarying factory
siren of disgust” at Christmas 2001.
“I stopped thinking that September
11 was a proportional response to
anything I recognised. People like
Eric Hobsbawm or Noam Chomsky
place a value on imperturbability in
one’s reaction to things, but I don’t.
I think moral shock is necessary.”
However, some of Amis’s critics
have argued that the “siren” of shock
and disgust has long since turned
into a kind of Manichean whine.
Amis rolls his eyes when I mention
Terry Eagleton, who in autumn
ignited a brief and unedifying public
spat when he suggested the novelist
was flirting with views one would
expect to come from the mouth of
a “British National Party thug”.
He reminds me that Eagleton was
actually referring to an interview
in which he’d confessed to feeling
a “retaliatory urge” after the foiled
bomb attack on the Tiger Tiger
nightclub in the West End. “There’s a
distinction between those two mental
activities: confessing to a retaliatory
urge just after the revelation of the
third murderous plot in 13 months
and advocating it in an essay. But
it was the distorted position I was
being asked to defend and that suited
Eagleton down to the ground. It’s so
sloppy. He’s a disgrace to academia.
He’s like an old boxer who keeps
picking fights. But it’s time for him to
take off his trunks.”
Eagleton may be a washed-up
ideological hack, a “commissar”, but
he represents a strain of liberal or
leftish opinion that is as much part
of “what we’re living through” as
the ravings of the mullahs or the
“awful rictus” that took up residence
on George W Bush’s face once things
went awry in Iraq. “It’s onerous beyond
belief to be faced by something
so irrational, by a death cult,” Amis
says. “An enormous imaginative
effort is needed to put yourself in the
place of someone who really does
think that if they besplatter themselves
over a bus in Israel they won’t
die but will be snatched into paradise
before the moment of death.”
Amis attempts such an imaginative
effort in ‘The Last Days of
Muhammad Atta’. The presumptive
pilot of American Airlines flight
11 is ravaged by constipation and
intoxicated with the sweet feeling of
killing (“Here was the primordial secret…
killing was a divine delight”).
Yet the attempt to inhabit Atta seems
botched, somehow, and Amis is
unable to turn the sterile blocks of
debased Wahabbist theology into
something palpable and intimate.
The Second Plane is not a “book
about Islam” as one reviewer put it:
it’s about what a world-historical
event like September 11 does to the
literary imagination. And it’s an
altogether more uncertain, agonised
work than critics have allowed.
Amis devotes several pages to an
account of how he abandoned a novella
entitled ‘The Unknown Known’
narrated by an Islamist planning a
terrorist operation of extravagant
ingenuity.
“It wasn’t fear of consequences,
at least not hostile consequences for
me and my family,” he says. “More
the idea there would be consequences
for my conscience, in that it wouldn’t
look tenable as a satirical idea. It was
odd to feel any kind of inhibition.
But politics impinges, world history
impinges. Earlier in my writing life
I used to think, blithely, that the
imagination could exist without a
relationship to power. But there’s no
way around it.”
The Second Plane ($39.95) is published
by Jonathan Cape on 1 March.