Martin Amis: Yellow Dog

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON for canvas

Yellow dog begins with a whack on the head. The recipient is Xan Meo, a quietly famous actor who has written a successful book of short stories. He is a good father. A good husband to his second wife, Russia. He was once a bad father and husband. "The truth was that he knew what it was like, being a bad husband, a nightmare husband; he had tried it the first time; and it was murder."

Now here he is, on the way to a pub called Hollywood to partake of the two drinks and four cigarettes he allows himself once a year to celebrate the day his divorce came through - the day he also gave up the drink and the fags. It is a perverse sort of celebration. It is about to get much worse.

So, here is Meo inside Hollywood, ordering "Two Dickheads" from a list which includes a Boobjob. "It was not his intention, now, to ponder the obscenification of everyday life."

That "obscenification of everyday life" is the thread which loosely tacks together the characters' stories.

You can't avoid a blow to the head.

Meo gets his for having been too clever by half. He has "invented" a character called Joseph Andrews, which happens to be the name of a real-life crim who takes exception and has Meo done over.

The bash sends Meo reeling backwards: he's mean again. Much, much meaner. He contemplates incest.

There is a royal family: an ineffectual King who labours over puzzles and is stumped by cryptic crosswords. There is a blackmail attempt over some pics of his Princess in her bath.

There is a tabloid hack, Clint Smoker, who churns out vile copy which revels in stories of sexual assault - while he worries about his small penis.

Casting a bleakly comic cloud over all of this, is Flight CigAir 101, out of control; a malevolent corpse crashing about in its hold.

Nobody does London like Amis: "If he turned right, he would be heading for pram-torn Primrose Hill - itself pramlike, stately Vicwardian, arching itself upwards in a posture of mild indignation."

Nobody irritates like Amis. The King's mistress is called He. Amis writes, infuriatingly, and feebly: "He touched him. He touched He."

Conversations and connections bark and stutter and fail.

Reading this book is like encountering a nasty, brindled beast of a thing on a dark street. Sometimes it bites. Sometimes it grins at you sideways. Sometimes it chases its tail to no appreciable end. Sometimes the characters are so thinly drawn they are less than shadows thrown up by the streetlights.

You can't quite get it in focus. You can't like it. Its theme - if you manage to keep track of it through all that deliberate stuttering and failing - is porn and violence, and men. But mostly porn.

You are not supposed to like it. Or at least you are not supposed to admit that you do.

That is rather the point.

Jonathan Cape, $59.95

*****

Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer