The politics of anger

Acerbic author calls Islam 'pathological cult,' claims it isn't 'dealing in reason'

By Duane Davis, Special to the Rocky

Published April 10, 2008 at 10:10 a.m.
Updated April 10, 2008 at 1:15 p.m.

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Author Martin Amis

British novelist, literary critic and journalist Martin Amis is a writer of strong opinions most often expressed with an acid tongue.

In novels such as Money: A Suicide Note and London Fields, and in essay collections including The Moronic Inferno and The War Against Cliche, Amis has demonstrated a furious, boiling energy that is at times almost terrifying in its savagery. You open one of these books and it clamps its fanged chapters on your throat like a rabid pit bull and refuses to let go, even when you shove a tire iron between the pages and try to pry it off.

A master of invective and satire drawn to the bizarre and strange, at his best Amis seems often to write like Charles Dickens on meth. There is a knotted, pop-eyed, clenched-jaw and manic concentration in the prose, an obsessive interest in just how awful people can be. Amis has, in spades, what he attributes elsewhere to fellow writer Gore Vidal, a "grisly relish of human folly."

There is, perhaps, less of the "relish" and more of the "grisly," in Amis' newest nonfiction book, The Second Plane - September 11: Terrorism and Boredom, a slim collection of 12 journalistic pieces and two short stories originally written and published between Sept. 18, 2001, and Sept. 11, 2007, all revolving around those two empty holes in the air where the World Trade Center towers once stood.

A formidable polemicist, Amis wastes no time letting us know where he stands on Islamism and terrorist acts. On the first page he states, "The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an intercontinental ballistic missile, launched in Afghanistan and aimed at her innocence."

It's not, however, Amis' intention to help the reader "understand" Islamist terrorism. In various essays - most prominently in the 45-page Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind, written in September 2006 - Amis notes that we Americans try too hard to come to that "understanding": "Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, 'What are the reasons for this?' And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason."

Amis states flatly and categorically that Islamism is "a pathological cult," an example of "institutionalized irrationalism." And the argument widens: Not just Islamism, but "all religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent."

"Today, in the West," he later continues, "there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses."

In case you might be worried about sorting out "religion" from "ideology," Amis clears up the matter by stating, "Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion - illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there . . . Itself profoundly retrograde, Islamism may force retrogression on us all," Amis writes.

In other words, we may have to respond in kind. Perhaps what Amis noted of Islamism is true for us all: "Violence is all that is there."

All this is not much different from what you might hear, or even say, over a few beers late at night with friends when the dark and the latest news of suicide bombings crowd closer and closer. The problem is not so much that many of us have felt something like this, but that by demonizing "understanding," by banishing subtlety and nuance, Amis leaves us with nothing but fear and anger, incomprehension and violence.

The book as a whole jumps with jittery abandon from reviews of books on Islamism to diatribes about why " 9/11" is inferior to "September 11" as a shorthand reference to the WTC attack. Elsewhere, as when finding similarities between Ronald Reagan and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or detailing a long, intercontinental chat-up Amis had with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the author will leave readers more puzzled than intrigued.

And then there are the two short stories. The first, In the Palace of the End, is a first-person narration by a body double for a very Saddam-like dictator. Although interesting, it's quite gruesome, and coming after three serious essays, it seems to break the book's momentum. The other, The Last Days of Muhammad Atta (the pilot of the second plane), comes sixth in line, just after Terror and Boredom; it fails not because of placement but because it doesn't seem to find any better cause for Atta's behavior than constipation.

Despite the book's flaws, Amis is always interesting. He has an eye for the chilling, telling detail: "One of the exhibits at the Umm al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad," he writes, "is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein's blood (he donated twenty-four liters over three years)."

And he excels in the finely realized observation: "We gathered in the forecourt and advanced to the airport, by humble motor coach, through the almost artistic cheerlessness of the Kuwaiti capital - a conurbation seemingly put together, from top to bottom, without a woman's touch, its only colors commercial, its only curves devotional, under a sinister mist of damp dust."

When it comes to 9/11, the value of this book is not that it's the last word in the argument. It's in the challenge it poses to those who believe that the situation is more nuanced than Amis suggests. I would, then, recommend this book - but only as a preparation to picking up the next one that will surely come along to counter its conclusions.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

The Second Plane - September 11: Terror and Boredom

* By Martin Amis. Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages, $24.

* Grade: C+

What's next for Amis?

"The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme," Amis told London's The Independent several years ago. "It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow." The book is reportedly due out later this year.

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