The Nub of the Node

...Amis gets a lot of fun out of this poker-faced jargon...

...Limitless supplies of state funds support and abet a variety of dangerous shenanigans, furnishing the main characters (most of them members of the British Armed Forces) with board and lodging, costly destructive toys, unending rounds of drinks, and pastoral expanses of free time in which to screw up the works and then ruefully discuss the screw-ups...

...But this and all the other discreditable human phenomena are in the background...

...At first you think that Amis has something up his sleeve, that he is going to spring a nasty surprise...

...If anything, he writes even too preciously...

...This is the last place that either the hero or Amis wish to start from...

...He has become almost unrecognizably tentative and involuted...

...All comes out right in the end...

...the foreground is occupied by the dupes rather than the deluders...

...In his other novels, which stuck to the grimy particulars and eschewed broad statements and generalized situations, Amis' preference for an easy-going but perceptive moral insight was quite appropriate...

...Thus, the nymphomaniac-one of Amis's jargon-mongers calls her affliction "promiscuous polyandry"-who sleeps with a selected group of invited men guests every evening, is pretty, very expert, unhysterical, and warm-hearted...

...Perhaps even the atom bomb is a figment of some master spy's imagination...

...The indignation directed at God and his mysterious workings most likely represents Amis' effort to get at first principles...

...Amis, in his Bond phase, turns out to be a spitoon philosopher with an immense hatred for that late Victorian bogey-God...

...Ordinary human nature, Amis appears to be saying, is unimaginative, fumbling, dull, yet utterly incommensurate with the terrible inventions it seems able to create...

...At the start one has the notion that Amis is picking off his satiric targets by the murky sounds they emit...

...The point of sending a man to prison is to shorten the part of his life he can be free in, to bring his death nearer...

...The last pages of this novel could go unchanged into the movie that won't be made...

...So the hero, musing on the string of accidental, unpleasant deaths he has recently witnessed and the fact that his girl friend may have cancer, offers his thoughts in this fashion: "You've probably heard of these things they call lethal nodes...

...The shift into this airy, less substantial sphere has not been advantageous to Amis' imagination...

...In the surcharged atmosphere of spies, atomic secret weapons, horrible germ warfare and "lethal nodes," the easygoing tone jars and the negligent elegance of the writing calls attention to itself in a rather disagreeable fashion...

...But each metaphysical thrust is blunted in the end by a happy turn of events, and the philosophizing comes more and more to look like adventitious decoration...

...Well, we're in a lethal node now, only it's one that works in time instead of space...

...His sweetheart digests this in silence and after a time replies: "But we're not happy and we're not innocent We might as well start from there...

...It appears that He, not the government, is responsible for the mess we're in...

...Human evil is shown in this particular instance to be a pasteboard mask employed in the shadowy cold war battle of rival spy systems...

...But Amis does not follow what one would think was his own and his story's natural bent...

...His great natural gifts for novel writing are still vividly evident...

...The wherewithal for him to be bad...

...There are few living writers who could have handled so intricate a plot, deftly uncovering layer after comic layer with nimble grace...

...Pain and madness were there already...

...The things his characters do, starting with Operation Apollo, which is supposed to spread an incurable and especially dreadful form of rabies among "our" Eastern enemies, are invariably detestable...

...It is a discursive man's world with, of course, a few complaisant women on hand, ready to offer sexual surcease to these atom-age warriors when the going gets too tough...

...The alcoholic homosexual is preternaturally sensitive and certainly the most intelligent member of the outfit, while the brooding, music-loving chaplain deflects malign attacks on the Lord and keeps his religious misgivings closely to himself...

...The striking thing is how nice everybody is...

...It's not much more than incidental...

...nothing sleek or shiny...

...The hero falls in love with a girl who has just recovered from a nervous breakdown after being married to a brutal sadist for a number of years...

...This is the voice of British common sense and it is pleasant to hear amid all the current apocalyptic blather...

...Whoever said that Amis was a sloppy writer...

...They also fall in love, go crazy, get killed, and develop all sorts of deep philosophical objections to the work they are pledged to do...

...but the people who intend to do or indulge them are cheerful, helpful, kind and generally obedient...

...They didn't invent it...

...There are many other such efforts scattered through the book...

...But the essential blandness of the style finally reflects a more covert blandness in the author himself...

...I think that Dr...

...In other words, we are in James Bond territory...

...In fact, he has invented for this occasion a new genre, half high comedy and half knock-about farce, yet neither with sufficient force or conviction to really come off...

...in the context of his exquisitely finished sentences and paragraphs, the clich?©s stand out with the force of original epigrams and the simplest turns of speech and idiom take on an unexpected relief...

...And if it had never existed, there'd be no point in treating people badly in other ways...

...The unaided and self-constituted human spirit" which Amis is endeavoring to rescue-that "final proof of the non-existence of God"-cannot brook such damaging reminders of fallibility and weakness...

...At any rate, we are quite a distance away from that region of dirty diapers, furtive adultery, red-brick universities, and proclaimed, determined prosaicness which was supposed to be the area of Amis' particular concern...

...We'd be innocent too...

...The very little violence that erupts is viewed in a consistently comic light...

...Amis does not say so flatly...

...And even more so, the first men found out that if you picked up a big rock and dropped it on somebody's head, then something very peculiar happened to him...

...Amis' version of the Bond world is considerably muted...

...You don't have battles or fronts anymore, you have small key areas it's death to enter...

...Whenever anything really nasty takes place, it is off stage or in the past...

...The atom bomb is not an emanation of mankind's spirit but a visitation of incomprehensible fatality which we must try to weather, as one gets through a storm or a run of bad luck...

...The lower classes don't think atomic destruction is fun when, to help it along, they have to do a lot of marching on a torrid day...

...But he might as well have, since, if you are writing consoling fairy tales, you should not be impeded by such inconvenient details...

...WRITERS & WRITING The Nub of the Node By Raymond Rosenthal Kingsley Amis' latest novel, The Anti-Death League (Harcourt, Brace and World, 307 pp., $5.95) is a fairy tale in which the good folk, ogres and wizards are all provided with magical means by a powerdriven government...

...The surprises, however, generally leave the original impression of unexampled niceness undisturbed...

...So if there was no such thing as death we wouldn't all just be happy...

...Moreover, the quality of the thought is surprisingly pedestrian...

...Its message, though, is delivered in the gibberish that seems to accompany all top-secret projects for widespread destruction...

...His subject, too, spy hunting and middle-echelon skullduggery, seems admirably suited to his talents as a superb writer of farce...

...And people have been using that effect on one another ever since, but it was all there waiting for them, before they found out about it...

...If you couldn't do that, he wouldn't mind going to prison and you wouldn't bother to send him...

...It is also an upper-class world, politely oblique and proper and sarcastic, and the other ranks are present simply as supernumeraries, seen in the misty middle distance as awfully nice chaps or griping foot-sloggers who uninhibitedly curse their bemused superiors...

...Best is probably about as bad as a man can get, but he didn't create his own materials, did he...

...Here, for example, is the hero thinking aloud to his sweetheart about the evil of death: "Human evil is just an instrument...

...Just as an amazing proportion of his characters withdraw into decorous insanity, quiet promiscuity or sedate alcoholism when the environment becomes too violently invasive, so Amis himself, confronted by the absurd violence of the atomic age, has withdrawn into a mild and muffled comedy that touches on all the key problems of our age without being decisive about any of them...

...All the characters indulge in it, but Ross-Donaldson, the Adjutant, a technician of military life, has the best lines...

...He refers to his chief's attempts to bewilder possible enemy agents as "an omnifariously randomized schedule indistinguishable from the genuinely random," discusses the era of "prenodalization," and describes a sudden dazzling burst of searchlights around the encampment as the "second-stage concealment theory in a non-hostility context...

...Later it becomes clear that this is a pure comedy, nobody is going to be led to the satiric slaughter, and the root of evil lies elsewhereat least not in any of the characters so neatly and nonchalantly depicted...