The Second Plane
Updated on 30 January 2008
A collection of pieces, unrevised and in chronological order, written by Martin Amis in response to the September 11 attacks.
The Second Plane, by Martin Amis. Jonathan Cape, £12.99
Martin Amis does not shy away from the big issues. His non-fiction collection, Einstein's Monsters, from the 1980s, addressed the prospect of mankind's nuclear self-immolation.
Time's Arrow, a fiction from the 1990s, uses reverse chronology to trace a doctor's life history back to a time when he worked in a concentration camp/his involvement in the Holocaust. And in two of his recent works, one fictional and one historical, Amis try to make sense of Stalin and the gulag.
So no surprise, perhaps, that The Second Plane, a collection of fiction and non-fiction writings from 2001, has as its central subject the huge shift in global consciousness that followed the attacks of 9/11 and, in particular, the threat posed by "Islamism".
From the outset, the author is keen to clarify that he is an "Islamismophobe" but not an "Islamophobe". About Islam he writes: "We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being."
For Islamism, by contrast, Amis has nothing but scorn. It is a religious ideology that completely rejects western values and appears to seek a return to a medieval or pre-medieval version of Islam. "We can hardly be asked," he writes, "to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination." Islamism, he goes on, is characterised by "self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred".
Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind, the book's central essay, contains the focus of Amis's attack on Islamism's combination of anti-western "paranoia" and "thwarted narcissism". And it is all well and good and convincing.
But the distinction he makes between Islam and Islamism is not always clear. When he writes that "Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam... makes a total claim on the individual", it is surely Islamism (a fundamentalist version of Islam) that he is talking about. And is he not making the same confusion when he says: "Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin"?
The author is keen to clarify that he is an 'Islamismophobe' but not an 'Islamophobe'
Terror and Boredom, however, is not just an attack on Islamism. It is also a plea for secularism and a defence of western values. "Our (the West's) moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy." And he goes on: "...the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an ism: it is independence of mind - that's all."
The point about polemics, though - and some of the non-fiction writings here read like highly literate polemics - is that they are tendentious and opinionated, and their arguments are always susceptible to criticism. Moreover, their presence alongside fictional works in The Last Plane creates a real dissonance
It is as if we know what the author really thinks about Mohammad Atta, organiser of the 11 September attacks, despite the cool and almost sympathetic clarity of his prose in The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.
The other short story, 'In the Palace of the End', written when Saddam Hussein was still alive, is a first-person account of the daily life of a man acting as a double for "Nadir", one of the Iraqi dictator's sons. It picks up on the book's "terror and boredom" theme as it describes how the mundanities of daily life are occasionally interrupted by the need for the subject to mimic any of the injuries picked up by Nadir as a result of the many attempts on his life.
As ever with Martin Amis, much of the fictional writing is superb. The "compulsive vividness" of his prose, which Amis's father famously criticised, is not so much in evidence here (and is compulsive vividness such a bad thing anyway?). And who, encountering his description of the first plane's descent towards the World Trade Center in Manhattan, cannot fail to respond to the poetry of "First, the lesser totems of Queens, like a line of defence for the tutelary godlings of the island"?
