Unholy Thoughts

...In an interview with Ginny Dougary of the (London) Times, he confessed that he’d felt “a defi nite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering...

...The attitude against which Amis has ranged his talents, with varying degrees of success, is one without the least interest in the next page: The next page isn’t just dead...

...Because all women are my sisters...

...Amis has been accused, by Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun, of an “aesthetic, not to say hedonistic, understanding of liberalism,” one unlikely “to inspire, in most readers, the kind of devotion that the defense of our liberties requires...

...But what if “someone other than yourself ” really is just a deluded teenager...

...Amis is squarely against religious belief, as “reality is suffi ciently awesome as it stands...

...But what we have in The Second Plane, Amis’s collection of September 11-related journalism and fi ction, is a man unwilling to stoop to any of the above—but perfectly willing to sound a bit crazy...

...For instance: Ronan Bennett, railing against Amis’s supposed “intolerance of otherness,” approvingly quotes Ian McEwan’s Guardian essay, published just four days after the September 11 attacks: “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity...

...The alternative he presents isn’t hedonism or aesthetic idolatry...

...This is less Enoch Powell than Bill Cosby—a reminder that, if parents sheltered their children from truly malignant infl uences while guiding their (gradual) assimilation into liberal society, the Semtex belt might be a bit less appealing...

...Islam is, he writes, “a total system, and like all such systems eerily amenable to satire...

...Asked whether he “liked” Osama, the man answered, “Of course...

...Amis argues that a “rational response [to suicide-mass murder] would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust...

...The late Oriana Fallaci did this twice, fi rst in The Rage and the Pride and then in The Force of Reason, and it nearly landed her in the dock...

...Of course, it needs no explanation, really: Beheading is suffi ciently terrifying as it stands...

...Anyone who believes that jihadists speak in Hamlet soliloquies, or even that they ham it up like Hannibal Lecter, is deluding himself...

...If we’re going to take McEwan at his word, we might as well imagine what it’s like to be Martin Amis: a manifestly talented and imaginative novelist with a deep-seated concern for the well-being of “half the human race: women,” for whom confronting the suicide/mass murderer is as exasperating as it is frightening...

...It’s a problem of youth, stymied masculinity, and, no matter how absurd it may sound, poor parenting...

...We’re warned by his detractors that he’s an Islamophobe, a racist, a hysterical fool...

...But we haven’t managed that...

...You come to write the next page, and it’s dead...

...the rest of us are expected to conceal, whitewash, and falsify...

...Amis, the seasoned novelist, is the only one who seems to understand that this isn’t a novel, that the characters may be as bland as rice pudding but their bombs will function just the same...

...Curtailing of freedoms...

...It would be nice to think so...

...It’s a fancy way of saying that he was angry, that he felt something, however ugly, and described it honestly...

...it’s death...

...Deportation—further down the road...

...All writers of fi ction will at some point fi nd themselves abandoning a piece of work—or fi nd themselves “putting it aside,” as we gently say...

...What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion...

...That’s not to mention that Amis is convinced, and rightly so, that his enemy is the “dependent mind,” governed by the “leaden-witted circularity” of Islamist reasoning, presided over by the “lordly and unintelligent visage” of Osama bin Laden...

...But it is Amis’s great victory—philosophical, not aesthetic—to see not the banality but the juvenility of evil, to make his characters infuriatingly twodimensional not because he lacks imagination but because he isn’t showing off his chops—he’s showing off theirs...

...Is this exercise in masochistic (not to say terminal) empathy still advisable...

...The two pieces of fi ction Amis has included here, and a third one described because it was never completed, are crude, grotesque, and unmemorable...

...It’s a huge dereliction on their part...

...If you regard polygamy as an affront to your “sisters,” and alcohol as a terrestrial time-killer, you’re liable to expect more of your afterlife...

...And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother...

...Is this a lazy oversimplifi cation...

...but the problem he identifi es isn’t one of religion, race, or ethnicity...

...Kirsch agrees with Amis on the basics (“his refusal to make mental compromises with fundamentalism,” for one) but he expects of his villains the same psychological complexity that has the Eagletons of the world fi ddling with the DSM-IV and confl ict resolution manuals while the world burns...

...A good line, Amis allows—but “all men are not my brothers...

...But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies...

...boxed in by the Osama bin Laden Fan Club in Peshawar, thought on his feet to get out of a bind...

...The original idea, the initiating “throb” (Nabokov), encounters certain “points of resistance” (Updike...

...It seems that spontaneous emotion is the luxury of those willing to buttress it with violence...

...To read the comments following what Eagleton et al...

...it’s the exercise of will and imagination raised to the status of religious ritual, the very antithesis of what he has called “dependence of mind...

...All men are my brothers...

...It has been suggested,” Amis writes, “by serious commentators, that suicidemass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend...

...One of the most distressing aspects of the martyrdom myth is that it promises to fulfi ll the very desires a healthy soul is meant to outgrow in the course of mortal existence...

...and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive...

...Is that fear, as Kirsch suggests, narcissistic...

...Is it a case of Amis putting his own “guild concern”—a world without great or good novels—above all else...

...When the literary critic Terry Eagleton drew attention to Amis’s mostly overlooked comments— in the same calculating fashion that certain “Muslim leaders” drew attention to the mostly overlooked Jyllands-Posten cartoons—Amis defended them as the product of “a thought experiment, or a mood experiment...

...The prospect of relinquishing that right to anyone is enough to bring out his rage, as it will be, one suspects and sincerely hopes, for many of us...

...This might explain why he contemplates the stunted, uncomplicated “reality” of Islamism with such trepidation...

...It encompasses his art, his family life, his unimpeded social interaction, his pleasure—indeed, everything...

...selectively quoted is to fi nd Amis struggling with inescapable frustration: They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people...

...In many ways this is the linchpin of Amis’s argument...

...The future promised us by Islamic radicalism is, as Amis genuinely fears, a wasteland of “perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else—a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the sole entertainment is the public execution...

...Not letting them travel...

...Amis opens the centerpiece of this book, “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind” (previously published as “The Age of Horrorism”), with an anecdote about a friend who, Stefan Beck writes on fi ction for the New York Sun, the New Criterion, and elsewhere...

...It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality...