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The Second Plane

Defender, though not of the faith

Martin Amis
Cape, 224pp, £16.99,

Philip Hensher

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Philip Hensher on Martin Amis' new book

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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Wylie Marshall

January 18th, 2008 4:46pm

This article just rambled on and on. Didn't every say anything.

Wylie Marshall

January 18th, 2008 4:46pm

This article just rambled on and on. Didn't every say anything. Where's the beef?

Anmol Dogra

January 18th, 2008 7:24pm

Writers like Martin Amis forget that the Bible is not just literature.It has an extra dimension as well.It is literature infused with the spirit of God.Where are in literature the beatitudes,the Lord's prayer,the sermon on the mount and crucifixion? If these have no meaning for him,he is entitled to his belief.But he can't equate the Bible with mere literature.

JOhn HOlliday

January 19th, 2008 12:12pm

"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" COuld we have an English translation please?

daragh nugent

January 19th, 2008 9:49pm

drivel. The late and most lamented Sir Kingsley also commented that he did not wish his grandchildren to grow up in a world "where religious belief was impossible". "It's more that I hate Him, really", is not an irrelegious comment.

daragh nugent

January 19th, 2008 9:56pm

The late and most lamented Sir Kingsley also commented that he did not wish his grandchildren to grow up in a world "where religious belief was impossible". "It's more that I hate Him, really", is not an irrelegious comment.

DBH

January 19th, 2008 11:26pm

Shouldn't a "great novelist" have produced at least one great novel? Or perhaps a very good one? Not to seem naive, but how does Martin Amis--whose ambition to measure up to Bellow or Nabokov has so far got him about to the level of a somewhat more pretentious Stephen King--merit this sort of praise? Of course, perhaps the answer lies in Hensher's own prose, which seems (shall we say?) a little bit shapeless. Maybe he really believes that Amis's middle-brow drivel is genuinely great literature.

ian skidmore

January 21st, 2008 8:30am

On the basis of your selections of Amis's prose, I cannot think of a literate window cleaner ( my own was a B .A.) or indeed an illiterate one who could not give a more cogent explanation for his inability to believe. I am not a believer myself, but I much prefer to read St Mark as literature rather than Mr Amis who it seems to me has never exhibited any great talet in that direction. Though terribly good at Being a Novelist, which is not at all the ame thing.

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