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If you're feeling guilty these days about being a crass American, reading YELLOW DOG could be just the ticket. Martin Amis's version of England is at least as violent and crude as our own besieged Homeland. With trademark disdain and farce, Amis takes on pornography, male violence, incest and even a fictionalized Royal Family.
There are four distinct plots here. The most compelling concerns Xan Meo, a Renaissance Man in his late forties. At the beginning of the book he is a successful actor and writer, happily married to Russia, the mother of his two little girls. Each year on the anniversary of his divorce from his first wife Pearl, Xan allows himself two drinks and four cigarettes in a London bar called Hollywood. This year, malevolence awaits him in the courtyard. Two thugs assault him before he even gets to finish one of his Dickheads (the name of his chosen cocktail). The traumatic head injury seems to push civilization right out of Xan. Soon his wife and daughters fear him.
A second narrative strand involves an enormous and insecure journalist named Clint Smoker. His scurrilous invectives against women run in a tabloid whose readers even the editor refers to as wankers. When news is leaked about possible videotape of beloved Princess Victoria in her bath, Smoker is hot on the trail. The same news naturally only worsens King Henry IX's stress eczema, which he has in an "optimally inconvenient site … It was already clear to Henry that, generally speaking, the arse was a disaster waiting to happen." And so our third plot revolves around the King and his daughter and their general lack of enchantment with the roles they've been born into.
The fourth family revealed may be the most dysfunctional yet, and that's saying something in this book. But this family ultimately ties back in to Xan's injury, and Xan, thankfully, does experience a kind of moral renewal. In a letter to Russia he says, "Men were in power for five million years. Now (where we live) they share it with women. That past has a weight, though we behave as if it doesn't … We will argue about this, I hope, and you will win and I won't mind. No, strike that out. You will win, and I will mind, but I'll probably pretend not to."
As usual there is much to admire in Amis's inventive, caustic prose. However, naming characters "He" (the King's mistress) and "And" strikes this reviewer as a little on the cheap side. While the novel is darkly entertaining, one waits in vain for insights worthy of the slog through the sewage. The errant subplot about a doomed airplane and the angry dead man in the hold (only Amis could convincingly write about an angry dead man) does nothing to clarify this brilliant muddle of a novel.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman-Nicol
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