When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of "Yellow Dog". Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. If, in the twenty-first century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. "Yellow Dog" is an early example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable - patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.
| ISBN | 0099267594 | | Pages | 288 | | ISBN13 | 9780099267591
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 244 | | Publisher | Vintage | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Vintage | | Previous ISBN | 9780099470427 | | Format | Paperback | | Height (mm) | 197 | | Publication date | 27 May 2004 | | Width (mm) | 131 | | Library of Congress | PR6051.M5 | | Spine width (mm) | 22 | | DEWEY | 823.914 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | |
|
|
|
"[Yellow Dog" "is]" "raucously funny, relentlessly fast-paced, delightfully intricate. . . . A marvelous novel, a powerful book, a work of pain and madness and love . . . a work of seriousness. A work of beauty." -"Baltimore Sun" "Amis is a force unto himself. . . . There is, quite simply, no one else like him." -"The Washington Post Book World" "Fizzingly intelligent . . . . mind-tinglingly good . . . Like all great writers, [Amis] seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could. . . . As he probes a human world increasingly disconnected from itself, Amis has found a subject to match the tessellated polish of his style. Here it all adds up." "-The Observer" "Viciously funny . . . zingingly vivid." -"The Spectator" "Brilliant and hilarious, and the insights into contemporary culture are disturbingly prescient. . . . A novel of many pleasures-and a novel to be reckoned with." -"Publishers Weekly" "Martin Amis [has] come back kicking and screaming." -"San Francisco Chronicle" "Martin Amis at his best, in all his shifting registers, his drolleries and ferocities, his unsparing comic drive, his aesthetic dawdlings and beguilements, his wry, confident relish of his own astonishing effects." -"The Guardian"
Be the first to write a
customer review
Enlarge
