BOOKS:
The War Against Himself

By Sam Munson

Sam Munson on The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Martin Amis. The Second Plane. Knopf. 211 pages. $24.00

Martin amis: is there a contemporary writer of English whose prose shocks and delights more than his? Is there an Anglophone novelist possessing a more powerful and idiosyncratic vision? Any serious inquiry into these questions must return a negative answer. From his light-footed, dark-hearted debut The Rachel Papers to his latest novel House of Meetings, a remorseless inquest into the sexual and social pathologies of the Gulag, Amis has not flagged. And whatever criticism his work invites — for its structural flaws, its authorial self-involvement, its obsession with male potence and cruelty — his prose stands as a towering, shadow-casting salient in the monotonous topography of the republic of English letters.

His voice is inimitable, sovereign, recognizable. He unveils with contemptuous ease image after image of the most vivid, the strangest, clarity, the species of images after which lesser stylists struggle and snap. Item: In the book under present discussion, this masterful synecdoche for the populous roil of near-Eastern Islamist hatred: “the writhing mustaches of Pakistan.” (It scans, even, as hypermetric dactyls.)

Amis’s credentials as an essayist will pass, too, even the most unfriendly scrutiny. The War Against Cliché, which collects three decades of his literary essays, identifies him as a critic possessing a shallows-free fecundity. (This lies, it seems, in the Amis genes.) Experience — a long meditation on innocence, memory, sex, and the obtrusion of human evil — demonstrates his capacity for sustained investigations of consciousness not reliant on the necessary distortions and simplifications of fiction.

And Koba the Dread, his attempt at a historical reassessment of Stalin’s butcheries and the petulant, leaden refusal of the enlightened West to acknowledge them as world-historical crimes, remains a book poorly understood. As a work of history — which it purports to be and which it was criticized as — it is, as its detractors have claimed, negligible. But as a confession, as a self-indictment and implication of all his bourgeois coconspirators, it remains unrivalled in the literature of the postwar generation.

All of these qualifications — and particularly the last — would seem to single Amis out as the literary artist most capable of writing intelligently on the aligned subjects of September 11, the nature of modern Islam, the war in Iraq, and the entire knot of fearsome political, philosophical, and strategic questions that have come to blaring prominence in the past seven years. Some of these questions date to the opening moments of Platonic philosophy — how should human life be valued? What obligations do states have to their citizens? Can any collective ever behave justly? Some belong to the fearsome genus of specifically twentieth-century questions: how to join battle a world-hungry ideology? How to keep Western political and humanitarian ideals intact, without perishing by them?

One question in particular has temporal roots that ramify from our own era down through the various fulcrum years that Islam has experienced, from the establishment of the Caliphate in 622 to its dissolution by Ataturk in 1924, from conquests of Tariq ibn Ziyad in the eighth century to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the twentieth. This question is: Can Islam come to a stable accommodation with modern political order? Can it survive among the nation-states, as the other Abrahamic religions — and indeed, the non-Abrahamic religions — have, without degenerating into a blood-bolstered, sanctified craving for totalized secular power? Or perhaps that’s the wrong verb: It certainly can. Britain transformed itself from a druid-ridden pale able to hold the interest of the Roman Empire solely on the strength of its tin reserves to the post-historical island that elected the nickname-only (as Amis himself points out) Tony Blair. And while Amis’s hooting ancestors were dropping garlanded virgins into forest lakes, the Caliphate’s citizens busied themselves writing commentaries on the obscurer dialogues of Plato. Why shouldn’t their descendents jump on the great Hegelian bandwagon? The real question is subjunctive and terrifying: Will they?

Amis does not, emphatically, provide an answer to this question. But his book, much as Koba the Dread, must be examined as a confession of sorts: an explicit confession of an inchoate political faith, and an implicit confession of immortal longings. Its value as a document of the inner life of the Western haute bourgeoisie is almost unparalleled: The Second Plane will preserve, amidst the wonders of Amis’s prose, the strident clichés of thought used by opponents of the war, of Bush, and (in Amis’s case) of religion in general, alongside Amis’s higher impulses, which are noble and serious, often misguided and often correct.

The book is a collection of short pieces drawn from newspapers and magazines British and American, beginning on September 18, 2001 and ending on September 11, 2007. It’s hard to draw a coherent single thread out of Amis’s book: He begins with a thunderous indictment of American “geographical incuriosity,” managing to sound at once like a left Academic and a ruddy Tory snob, and finishes on a most peculiar note — the suggestion (and it’s just a suggestion) that, indeed, the Arab world at large is to blame for its hostility to Israel, and that the canard that Israel’s existence is the central fuel to the fire of Islamism is precisely that: a canard. How Amis manages to make this strange journey is not entirely clear. I will try to explain his route, here.

America, through a combination of “self-reliance,” “fiercer patriotism than any in Western Europe,” and “an assiduous geographical incuriosity,” has created a “deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away.” Check. “All over again the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic theocreatic/ideocratic system which is essentially opposed to its existence.” ok. “Religious belief is without reason and dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.” Well then. “The Champions of militant Islam . . . are misologists: haters of reason.” Double check. “We accept that there are legitimate casus belli, acts or situations ‘provoking or justifying’ a recourse to arms.” Hmm. “The first humanitarian disaster will be the war itself.” But didn’t you . . . “We must give the Iranians some face, and then all seven nuclear powers must begin to scale back to the zero option, and the Middle East must be declared a nuclear-free zone.” Really? “And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.” Familiar! “September 11th itself emerges as a chapter of hideous coincidences.” But I thought . . . “From September 11th to the autumn of 2003, [Bush] had the body language of the man who isn’t going anywhere until he has had his fist fight.” Ahh! I get it. “A practiced sayer of the unsayable, Mr. Steyn nonetheless fails to ask the central question: will the culture of choice be forced to give ground to the culture of life?” Huh? “I suppose we’re all involved. There are no Switzerlands in this fight.” What the . . . “Secular fanaticism, secular hatred — these false equivalences are fictions.” Here we are! “We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishization of ‘balance’ . . . the 100 percent and 360 degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel.)” Wasn’t expecting that. “September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, its terrible dynamism.” Holy #$*!

The Amis of The Second Plane, then, holds that America is a second-order cause of 9/11, which is also a chain of “hideous coincidences” brought on by “an irrationalist, agonistic theocreatic/ideocratic system which is essentially opposed” to the existence of the Western mores. This Amis recognizes that there are legitimate causes of war, but that America lacks them, and that war is a disaster anyway, but that we should be fighting Iran. He holds that we must engage in concurrent, consensual nuclear disarmament, but requires that the Middle East be “declared” (by whose authority?) a nuke-free region.

There are no Switzerlands in this fight, he claims, but Bush is nonetheless a simian aggressor. Secular regimes, like Stalin’s ussr, are incapable of the violence that theocratic regimes practice. But we’re hampered in our discussion of the state of the world by the “100 percent and 360 degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel.)” And despite the fact that 9/11 and all that followed were caused both by American mores and by an implacable stateless foe of American mores that has groaned and murdered its way into our consciousnesses, the whole affair retains a shrouding veil, a mystery. And, oh yes — this Amis believes in the endurance, if not necessarily the transcendence, of human love.

The Second Plane will preserve, amidst the wonders of Amis’s prose, the strident clichés of thought used by opponents of the war, of Bush, and of religion, alongside his higher impulses, which are noble and often correct.

Quotation is unfair in its nature. But Amis has produced an unfair book, one that refuses to follow any of its multidirectional logical positionings. Collections of short, journalistic pieces (he has included here two stories of a decidedly journalistic bent, in that they seem to have no purpose other than the conveyance of disturbing facts) are rapid, point-to-point affairs at the best of times. And Amis has taken on an enormous subject, one that he treats in effortless musical prose, with desperate detachment, as though he knows that larger consequences await him, too, beyond the (purely secular) veil of mystery and the (purely secular) triumph of love, and is trying as hard as he can to avert his gaze from them.

Again and again, though Amis takes numerous digs at religion, and though he pours scorn on the conduct of the Iraq war, an image of radical Islam rises up, terrifying and alien in garb, brutal and relentless in means.

For actions do possess, as Amis repeats over and over, inevitable consequences. And so do thoughts, albeit ones of a less immediate nature. It is difficult, in the end, to know what to make of a man who recognizes the enormous existential threat Islamic political terror represents to Western political mores, and yet seems incapable — at least in his published pieces — of reaching the necessary conclusion. Perhaps Amis painted the apparatus of Islamic terror as “an irrationalist, agonistic theocratic/ideocratic system” “essentially opposed” to the existence of the West just to harness some of the runoff energy of the phrase’s stirring rhetorical sweep and scope.

But again and again in The Second Plane, though Amis takes numerous digs at religion in general, and though he pours scorn on the Bush administration and the conduct and relevance of the Iraq war, an image of radical Islam rises up, terrifying and alien in garb, brutal and relentless in means, and incomprehensible in nature. Those “writhing mustaches,” for all the freshness, comedy, and accuracy of the image, would find a home in the lexicon of Rudyard Kipling. As would Amis’s withering, patronizing scorn for Islam’s extremist theologians. While he delivers a few excoriating lines about the similarities between Jewish and Christian fundamentalism and that of Islam, between our war practices and those of our enemies, he saves the heavy barrages of his paragraphs for his real, non-Western quarry.

No amount of armchair psychoanalysis of George Bush, and no amount of frothing over Dick Cheney, whom he refers to as a “dark genius” — an insult far more complimentary than any he bestows on the masters of the terror cadres — can camouflage the animus Martin Amis bears toward the institutions and philosophies of Islamist terror. There is no other way to describe it. He does not go in much for uplift: no platitudes about liberty and victory and human achievement. Even in the midst of painstakingly drawn historical portraits, and of desperately nuanced apologetics, you’ll find him unbottling high-test vitriol and hurling it ad the numerous homines populating his field of fire:

The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of [Sayid Qutb’s] philosophy is steadily colonized by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred — the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the from the thirteenth (when the “last” Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the twentieth. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero.

The above passage is from the longest, the most brutal, the most honest, and the most confused essay in The Second Plane, “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind.” It is as close as Amis gets to propounding a philosophical explanation of the existence and purpose of Islamist terror. The main thrust of the piece is that Islam preys on male insecurity to incite the aimless and searching to violence. Much of it is dedicated to personal attacks (like the above) on Sayyid Qutb, the theological architect of modern Islamism — a virgin, a “humorless civil servant,” a sexual hysteric, a witless theocrat whose mind is condemned to a “leaden circularity.” Some of it is aimed at Donald Rumsfeld for his now-infamous known/unknown taxonomy, and for his failed strategy in Iraq. And much of it is given over to a close examination of the history of Islamist violence before 9/11.

But despite all the context Amis has taken such pains to include, and despite all the effort he expends in painting a (deservedly) cruel portrait of the inner life of Islamist terror, he ends the piece with a general condemnation of religion, identifying it as the “unknown known,” that cause of chaos which we don’t know we know. These concluding pages — which are transcriptions, mostly, from Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” and Joseph Conrad’s “The Shadow Line” — comprise a balletic display of evasion. Is it going too far to call appealing to Joseph Conrad disingenuous in this connection? To claim a respect for the insuperably complex nature of reality even as you contort your way out of reaching the conclusion toward which you have been straining and striving? This is a funny species of realism. This is a strange rationalism.

I noted above that Amis’s book does not provide an answer to the question of Islam’s future among the nation-states. But it is hard to avoid concluding that he thinks it has none. And though he has tried, in The Second Plane, to mask his particular criticism of Islam as a general jeremiad against religion, the effort does not convince. Particularly in light of the comments he made in three interviews, given over the course of 2006 and 2007, in the first of which he stated that

There is a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

And, in a 2007 interview, that

Some societies are just more evolved than others. . . . I am not saying these people are genetically incapable of not being terrorists. . . . I am just saying some societies are more evolved than others. Young men in those kinds of societies are growing up full of loathing and hatred. Something has to be done about it.

In an interview with Johann Hari, the pudding-faced cherub-enforcer of the Europe’s New Old Left, he admitted to thinking that

The Jews have a much, much worse history than the Palestinians, and in living memory. But there’s just no impulse of sympathy for that. . . . I know we’re supposed to be grown up about it and not fling around accusations of anti-Semitism, but I don’t see any other explanation. It’s a secularised anti-Semitism.

And in his essay “Iran and the Lord of Time,” he spells out, in a brutal and concise paragraph, what journals like Commentary and National Review, much of the blogosphere, and at least one former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations have devoted uncounted words to: the case for immediate war against Iran.

It’s clear, I think, where Amis’s own powerful mind is pushing him, whether he likes it or not. He’s not a racist, or an anti-theist, or a last-gasp disarmament peddler. He’s something much, much worse — at least by the lights of his milieu. And, given that he’s still a resolute critic of the war in Iraq, and still delivers elegant, snobbish verbal drubbings to America’s current administration, perhaps also by his own lights. But the dictates of reason must be followed, space must be carved out to admit the perdurance of our human love, and something, to coin a phrase, has to be done. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce Martin Amis, the newest neocon.

I mean this facetiously, of course. I have no doubt that Amis would be appalled to be painted as such. And, to be frank, his blank hostility to Islam has little to do with the larger aims of neoconservatism which, insofar as it is concerned with religion at all, is (rightly or wrongly) concerned with the spread of a positive, god-free, civic religion. Indeed, the whole point of neoconservative thought, you might say, is the export of the very sort of civic structures that might allow Islam to blossom, rather than to produce envenomed thorns.

But what can one do, in the case of The Second Plane, except sit and gape? It is difficult to watch an artist of fierce intelligence marshal damning evidence and powerful, focused rhetoric, bring them to bear on one of the most important geopolitical questions of the past hundred years, and then — at the precise moment when an act of aesthetic and psychological synthesis (the twin powers of all serious novelists, powers which Amis possesses amply) is required to draw forth meaning — turn away, mute his voice, lower his eyes, and wander into generality.

If, as Larkin implied in “Church Going,” and as Amis seems to believe, human death can consecrate grounds physical and metaphysical even in the absence of God, then this subject, of all subjects, should awaken the hunger to be more serious that inspired the atheist Larkin in the empty, showy church, a hunger after truth not factual but spiritual, a truth permanent and unavoidable. Amis is, alongside Ian McEwan, one of the two preeminent novelists in English. His powers of moral observation are razor-keen and often-used. So where, we must ask, after reading The Second Plane, is he going?