The pieces are arranged in chronological order, beginning with an immediate response, published a week after the attacks. I don’t think Amis has much of a gift for prediction, in common with most of us, and the virtues of the collection, as he himself sees, largely reflect the attempts to come to terms with a rapidly altering world, and to make sense of it.

Nevertheless, the collection reflects some ongoing and unshiftable commitments. A distaste for religious belief is one Martin Amis shares with his father. Kingsley, asked whether he was an atheist, once said, ‘It’s more that I hate Him, really.’ In a number of books, notably The Anti-Death League and The Green Man — in which God, with an ‘untrustworthy’ face, puts in a personal appearance — Amis the elder assaulted God with an exhilarating directness.

Martin Amis’s distaste for religion is all-encompassing. ‘Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief — unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses.’ It has served its purpose by now. Granting that ‘the soul has legitimate needs’, he himself offers up literature to fill the gap. It’s a tempting vision, of something which provides ‘something tangible to venerate’; something which ‘nonchalantly includes the Bible and all other holy texts’. Unlike the long succession of religions in world history, a spirituality based on literature would actively seek to preserve its predecessors, the great beauties of the book of Ecclesiastes and the sublime poetry of the Qu’ran.

Nice idea, but people like me or Amis for whom these things are not just sufficient but boundlessly sufficient are always going to be the targets of fervent believers. I love the image, and the hope, but you can’t formulate it without an immediate sense of its tragic vulnerability.

The reason we ought to read a novelist — a great novelist, one must add — on our current predicament is not a simple one. As many people have observed, it takes at least 20 years before world-shaking events start to be rendered authoritatively in fiction, and it is never an easy or a simple transition — the great novels of Napoleon’s wars only start to be written 30 or so years after the fact. What we can ask of a novelist now is the display of the imagination.

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