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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 974.879044
EAN num: 9781400044542
ISBN number: 1400044545
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: April 01, 2008
Publishing house: Knopf
Release Date: April 01, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 57896
Studio: Knopf
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time.
At the heart of this collection is the long essay “Terror and Boredom,” an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West’s flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran, and Tony Blair’s lingering departure from Downing Street (and also his trips to Washington and Iraq). Amis’s reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a far-ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” its subject self-evident, and “In the Palace of the End,” narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant’s double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture, and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts.
Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.
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Rated by buyers 
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Mr. Amis expresses the bile that many of us feel for these deformed, ugly, self-proclaimed 'religious' 'men.' The Islamists don't design planes, don't administer flight training, don't create or offer much of anything. They fail to evangelize as other religious people do in the civilized world - (i.e. by being nice and generous while INVITING others to join them in bowing and scraping, chanting incantations, eating special food and wearing special clothes...)
Apparently they can only think to stab a 110 lb. stewardess in the back as item #1 on their 'to do' lists. Death cults are a little weak on subtlety and imagination.
All in a day's work, one might suppose ...and in line with the tradition of heaving wheelchair-bound old guys into the Mediterranean ...or butchering Olympic athletes or reporters or diplomats in cold blood ...or strapping bombs on trusting young girls who happen to have Down's Syndrome...
...and on and on and on.
Amis' prose, glittering with hatred for these September 11th Islamist creatures, is relentless. ('Critics' are usually uncomfortable with relentlessness.)
We should thank our lucky stars for an honest, passionate good guy like Martin Amis. This fine collection of essays and stories is as stunning as his book a few years ago that tore into another vile bag of garbage: a certain Mr. Iosif Dzugashvili / Joseph Stalin.
Rated by buyers 
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In this book, Amis' target isn't Islam. Amis explicitly, and correctly, distinguishes Islamism from Islam. Islam is a religion; Islamism is a specific political-religious ideology which says everybody must be converted to that religion by force. Not at all the same thing; indeed, as Amis notes, Muslims have suffered much *more* from the Islamists than any other religious group.
Amis' target, then, is not Muslims; it isn't even, strictly speaking, Islamists. It is, rather, the appeasement and cowardice of many in the west, who--out of fear of being considered "racist" or "unelightened" or (God forbid) "right wing"--kowtow to the Islamists' demands.
So far, so good. The problem is that Amis seems to see both the threat of Islamism and the failure of many who should know better to stand up to it through a literary lense. He spends a a lot of the book complaining that in Radical Islamism here is no place for literature (apart from state-approved religious literature), and how the boredom of Islamist life hurts one's "independence of mind". Without dismissing the importance of freedom of thought and of literature, surely the fact that Islamists endeavor to genocide all nonbelievers which should worry us more than their offenses against literature.
Concentrating on these (relatively) minor ourages of Islamism that are particularly offensive to a novelist makes the book seem like a narcissistic rant. One gets the feeling that if, per impossibilium, Islamists loved literature for some reason, Amis would care a lot less, even if they were just as violent. This is a very serious flaw in the book. But, that said, the book *does* make many good points and tells us to not be afraid to call a spade a spade.
Rated by buyers 
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Martin Amis's political books have typically been the least well received of his oeuvre. His 1987 collection of stories `Einstein's Monsters' felt too contrived and naively over heavy on the big ideas (nuclear weapons) compared to the two satirical masterpieces - Money and London Fields, it was chronologically sandwiched between, and his 2002 Koba the Dread, a book to honour the victims of Stalin, was a bit of a hash of an exercise that strained too hard for effect, comparing, at one point, the screams of his infant child with the millions that perished under Stalin in the Gulag.
In this collection of essays and fiction, however, Amis has rather more sucess in mixing his personal life and concerns with the big political themes that affect us all. The book brings together a collection of Amis's writings on the theme of September 11, and the myriad fallout from the events of that day: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wider concerns to assert American power more fully in the Middle East, and more generally (and this is Amis's real concern) the subliminal effects that terrorism has on us all: `it's mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism'.
The publication of this collection comes after a long running media spat concerning Amis's views on Islam. Terry Eagleton, Amis's colleague at Manchester University accused him of being tantamount to a `British National Party thug'; the satirical comedian Chris Morris tagged Amis as `The New Abu Hamza'. All this following an interview Amis gave to the Independent in which he mused that `don't you feel the urge that the Muslim community must suffer in order to get its house in order. What measures? `Things like strip searching people who look like they come from The Middle East, or Pakistan.'
Clearly, the old saw about all publicity being good publicity has worked in this case, as The Second Plane is already on its third print run. But what is Amis actually advocating in his views towards Islam? The reality, now that these pieces are all bought together under the same cover, and not merely the disparate fragments of journalism written over a variety of years and numinous publications, is an interestingly thought out, rationally developed view on the burgeoning problem of Islamism. Amis starts the collection with the title piece written immediately after September 11, the almost hallucinogenic quality of the prose bringing back memories of this period when everyone in the world was dealing with the shock of the event. The long term ramifications were unknown, but even then Amis was perceptive in turning his attentions to the terrain, mental and physical, he believed would be most keenly affected - the hitherto protected western liberal worldview, and the wrecked, Taliban crippled badlands of Afghanistan, `they should be firmly bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LENDLEASE USA', was his recommendation then.
Now, six and a half years on, we know a lot more. Amis states in the introduction that geopolitics may not be his natural subject, but masculinity is. And he uses this leitmotif to paint an interesting picture of terrorism as masculinity gone wrong, warped, banjaxed with religious and cultural strain. He traces this back to the figure of Sayyid Qutb, a young Egyptian man who came to America in the 1950s. Already semi-radicalised by the vestiges of the British Protectorate in Cairo, and the establishment of Israel, he found himself repulsed by the liberties that were established in America. With almost comical lack of self awareness he found himself threatened by the `bulging breasts and smooth legs' of the young women. Raged and inspired, he embarked on a large corpus of work, prose and poetry, of which the following lines are indicative:
A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an
enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she
approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside
her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent
of perfume but flesh, only flesh
Clearly, not a man at ease with his sexuality.
Islamism (at times Amis takes pains to distinguish this from Islam in general, at other points he seems to elide the two notions) as it is now, is at crisis point. The civil war within Islam has been won by the fundamentalists, Amis argues, the moderates have lost out, and now the dominant force is a retrograde, barbaric, misogynistic, homophobic, murderous ideology. This is the point at which Amis (like his fellow media cohorts on the left, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen - or should that be, formerly on the left?) parts company with type of liberal who would far more eagerly bash the administration of George Bush than the address the human rights disaster going on in the Middle East. Amis spares no effort in using his full descriptive talents to outline the horrors. For example he describes a magazine picture ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Early on Amis writes about writing. He wonders how to make some fiction out of the fact of September 11 -- a reaction I found initially puzzling since enough fiction concerning this has already tried to present itself as fact. So here we have a compilation of published opinion/journalism and short fiction, arranged chronologically and in places "revised". And yes, the fiction is perhaps the strongest, with one piece being quintessential Amis and the second, longer being something of an interesting hybrid.
In the factual pieces he again attaches his comprehension and fear to one of his long standing personal demons: nuclear holocaust. In the radioactive threat after September 11 he can no longer enjoy simply looking at his children, which is as grim a capitulation to what must be perceived as an absent future one can make. In so doing Amis tends to fall in step with some of the Bush Administration hyperbole concerning the scale of the threat. I guess if we take into account that the Bush Administration is "in charge" this might not be too much of an overstatement, but in "Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind" -- despite the "revision phase" -- Amis again trots out the old canard that "Everyone Thought Saddam Had Weapons of Mass Destruction". I admit to feeling confused by this orientation: was I the only person who repeatedly read and saw the reports of Hans Blix, all running utterly contrary to the WMD meme being circulated by the politicians and news media before the U.S. attack on Iraq? Amis gratefully does often see clear of such gross simplifications of the threat, but never completely.
The fiction is indeed the more rewarding work here: with "In the Palace of the End" Amis accomplishes another weepingly hilarious work in his now rather long string of the blackest of humors. His language and perception are uniformly remarkable in "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" -- typically brilliant Amis. "Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom" is a line that should read across vast and billowing banners at every airport checkpoint on earth. But as convincingly wrought as "The Last Days of Mohammad Atta" proves to be, it sadly falters to a rather cliché ending which simply pirouettes to the beginning: That final sentence lacks only the ellipsis...
It may well be worthwhile to have these pieces combined into a single volume. But then again, their proximity to one another doesn't really seem to enhance the value of each as a standalone. In the end "The Second Plane" might simply be an economically expedient way to extend return on effort.
Rated by buyers 
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Amis has never been shy. At his best, say in 'Money' or 'London Fields' his aim is high, his characters low and the language never less than taut and acerbic. What's depressing about 'The Second Plane' is how Amis has started to come across as the very characters he spent his time taking down fifteen, twenty years ago. He claims for instance, that though geopolitics may not be a strong suit 'masculinity is'. Is it? Well, sort of. But here he fails to turn his wit on himself, most often coming across as a posturing novelist who, rather than confronting such big themes in fiction, thinks he's got the brains to knock directly up against today's issues. And unfortunately, he comes bouncing back and turn out to be ... just an excellent novelist past his prime. It's hubris that lies at the heart of Amis's failure, the foolish idea that the invention of words such as 'horrorism' and 'self besplatterment' can cope with the post 9/11 world. Even in the fiction included in this book, such as the short story on Mohammed Atta, he misses yet again. Are we really supposed to believe that Atta is thinking in metapohors as he flies into the towers? That he equates the terror he's unleashing with the relief he's been seeking from a prolonged case of constipation? Arrggh, how can one of my favorite writers wasted so much of his ink and my time?
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