Mick Hartley

After l’affaire Eagleton, Martin Amis gets more abuse, this time in a review of his new book “The Second Plane” in the Sunday Times by William Dalrymple:

Martin Amis and politics have always been uneasy bedfellows. Even during his creative peak in the mid-1980s, when he was producing dazzling satires such as Money and his brilliant American essays, The Moronic Inferno, politics was always the arena where Amis seemed most out of his depth. His oddly naive collection of stories about nuclear Armageddon, Einstein’s Monsters, was his first weak book; later, Koba the Dread, his simplistic study of Stalin, showed a similar lack of nuance.

This was something the author’s facility for wordplay not only failed to conceal, but actually seemed to highlight. When writing about subjects as sombre as the Holocaust or the Gulag, Amis’s taste for the extreme and grotesque (such a strength in his best fiction) worked against him: the stylish prose felt inappropriately showy, like a go-go dancer at a scholarly conference. At his best, Amis could make the frivolous (bars, greed and pornography) seem deeply serious; but the endless puns and stylistic acrobatics sometimes made his more serious political non-fiction appear self-indulgent and flip.

I’ve posted before about Amis’s Koba the Dread. To point out what should be quite obvious: Amis never claimed historical expertise. Rather, he used his considerable literary skills to make clear precisely why Stalin and the Gulag should arouse our horror, against what he saw as the special pass that Soviet history has somehow acquired, notably on the Left, in comparison with our response to Nazism. All part, as he made clear, of his ongoing argument with friend Christopher Hitchens, and by extension with segments of the Left in general. So no, it wasn’t meant to be nuanced. Amis assumed, reasonably enough, that nuance wasn’t really what was called for when attempting to capture the flavour of Stalin’s Russia.

But this is all setting the stage for Dalrymple, who has a point to make:

The weaknesses of these two books are horribly amplified in Amis’s new collection of 12 essays and two short stories (all previously published) on the world after 9/11. The Second Plane is certainly witty, clever and polished. But while The Moronic Inferno gained much of its stature from the complexity of Amis’s love/hate relationship with America, a country he knew intimately, and whose finest writers were his close friends, here we have a wholly un-nuanced book about Islam by a man who appears, to judge from this text, never to have visited an Islamic country or to have talked seriously to any Muslim. Like Koba the Dread, The Second Plane is a compilation of second-hand views, in this case lifted from Islamophobic neocon primers (the works of Bernard Lewis, VS Naipaul and Paul Berman) about a subject on which the author has no personal experience, but which he still strongly dislikes. The result is not just flawed, but riddled with basic misunderstandings.

Yes, it’s those Islamophobic neocons again.

Like many Islamophobes, Amis believes that the march of political Islam represents the triumph of an anti-liberal “Islamo-fascist” ideology that aims to conquer the West through jihad and establish a universal caliphate. Although there are pan-Islamic ideologues who do indeed talk in these terms, to see this as the principal thrust in political Islam is ignorant and simplistic.

So what explains the rise of al-Qaeda? Dalrymple’s answer comes as no surprise: it’s a struggle against US foreign policy.

Amis’s simplistically Freudian explanation of terrorism ignores the stream of explicitly political statements issued by Al-Qaeda. From Osama Bin Laden’s Declaration of War Against the Americans, issued on August 23, 1996, he has made it clear that his grievance against the West was not cultural or religious, or indeed sexual, but political. He is fighting against American foreign policy in the Middle East, in particular its support for both the House of Saud and the state of Israel. These ideas have been repeated by Bin Laden’s followers, such as Mohammad Sidique Khan before the London bombings: “Your governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world . . . Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight.”

All terrorist violence, Islamic or otherwise, is contemptible. But because we condemn does not mean that we should not strive to comprehend. Amis does not try to understand. He does not even begin to penetrate why it is that groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, or the Ikhwan in Egypt, are steadily gaining in popularity. As far as one can tell from this book, he does not engage with Muslims, visit their countries, or talk to them. Instead, he merely uses his great stylistic gifts to denounce. The result is a book that is not just wilfully ignorant, a triumph of style over knowledge, but that, for all its panache and gloss, is at its heart disturbingly bigoted.

Well, there’s simplistic and there’s simplistic. As with his Stalin book, I doubt that Amis is going for nuance here (I should say that I haven’t read “The Second Plane” yet). But to state of Bin Laden that “his grievance against the West was not cultural or religious, or indeed sexual, but political” – that, in effect, al-Qaeda related terrorism has nothing to do with religion but is purely about politics – is surely, taking simplistic to a whole new level.

David Aaronovitch’s review, published a couple of weeks back in the Times, seems apposite:

Amis’s conclusion that an ideological struggle must be waged, in which the proper values of the West are championed, is what brings him into such a collision with the Eagletons. This is, after all, a period in which part of the Left has – remarkably – thrown in its lot with the less apocalyptic wing of Islamism, as well as the isolationist right, in a sort of anti-imperialist alliance. Many of the rest – “liberal relativists” – have settled, in Amis’s words, for a kind of “dissonant evasion” of the truth. This was bound to bring all of them into conflict with the man who is possibly the most fully engaged writer of our age.