Review of ‘The Second Plane’ by Martin Amis

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 success 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 of a Saudi newscaster beaten by her husband as looking like a ‘crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half submerged in the crimson pulp.’

Does he go too far in trying to draw a clean cut line between the moral West and the backward and barbaric Arab cultures? There is little in this collection to suggest that Amis is an outright Islamophobe. His writing is certainly too precise, stylish and intelligent to lapse into careless racist slurs, and he does devote a small amount of space to acknowledging the vast cultural contributions Islam has made to the world. But there are undoubtedly weaknesses in the collection. The number of actual, real life Muslims Amis encounters is very few. There is an encounter with a gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem: ‘I will never forget the look on (his) face when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway’, and an anecdote from Pakistan when, travelling with Christopher Hitchens, they encounter a street stall selling Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. That is pretty much it. Most of the pieces are from the viewpoint of a man who has approached the issue on a purely cerebral level – buttressed by a whole raft of books (4 pieces in these 14 piece collection are, themselves, book reviews, and citations to other secondary sources litter almost every page), privileged access to the entourage of Tony Blair (documented at length in an extended piece of reportage), and a strong position as a highly regarded intellectual figure in the Western world with a tendency to epater les bien pensants de la gauche. It is a little like the people who proclaim loftily and radically on how to reform the education system or the NHS. Those with experience on the ground can usually supply key insights that the pure thinkers don’t have access too.

Further still, is a curious piece on Mark Steyn, a neo-con Canadian writer who most civilized readers can see through as a plain fascist in frontiersman’s clothing. Amis considers Steyn’s book America Alone and writes ‘Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious – but he writes like a maniac.’ After some fun poking at his style, Amis agrees that we should take very seriously Steyn’s prediction that the rising birth-rates amongst Islamic cultures may drown out the culture of choice and rights and entitlements in the lower birth-rate, Western European countries.

Such points are the low end of the wide spectrum of Amis’s us and them mentality towards Islam and Islamism. For the most part, he has devoted much time and intellectual rigour to this most vital of contemporary themes, and his writing is as vigorous and stylish as ever.

By Fred Bosanquet