Martin Amis: The Second Plane
February 7th, 2008Martin Amis’s collection of his writings on 9/11, The Second Plane, briefly revived the Eagleton feud sparked by an interview in which the novelist made some ‘controversial’ comments, including owning up to a “definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Amis later made it clear that this was not “advocating” “discriminatory stuff” but “adumbrating” a “thought experiment” and “conversationally describing an urge” which “evaporated in a few hours.”
Amis’s comments have been endlessly quoted, as above. But it is significant that the whole lot is prefaced by the disarming, license-giving admission of that human “definite urge.” There is after all an important distinction between saying ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer’ and saying you have an urge to say ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer’. One makes you a racist, the other makes you a sophisticated, postmodern, controversial comically-inclined intellectual, turning upon the interviewer with the confident charge that ‘you’ also harbor a repressed definite urge to conduct your own thought-experiment into how to get the Muslim community to behave. But to be honest the honest detailing of potential discriminatory measures is very honest. Too unambiguous to be straightforwardly intended, it comes of sounding inoffensively, caustically comic, harmless controversy-courting. You’d be an intolerable over-sensitive bore if you took affront.
Reviews of Amis’s new book seem to be terrifyingly black and white, either denouncing it as offensive because bigoted or praising it as plain-speaking therefore brave. Amis admirers highlight one important factor: it’s “a pleasure to read”. This emphasis on the brilliance of Amis’s “banalities delivered with tremendous force” would seem to set up a counterargument to the reactionary charge based on the simple principle that this book cannot be racist because it is readable. Therefore, unless you believe pleasure is evil (as an Islamist would) you can’t find fault with any sentence constructed by Amis.
No one, I suppose, would put enjoyable and xenophobic together in one sentence without turning to the mirror in abject horror, expecting a Hitler moustache. But here’s a horrid confession: I have come across a few books to which I would have to apply the adjective readable despite stumbling over sentences to which I would have to apply the adjective racist. If I ever read the Second Plane from cover to cover, I suspect it would be one of them. I remain, however, a firm believer in the fine distinction between calling a sentence racist and calling a writer racist.
Amis’s thought experiments or “the openness with which he has been willing to think out loud” is one of the aspects his admirers seem to admire most about this new book. One Amis-fan comparing the novelist to “non-practicing Muslims-I-know”, found Amis to be “almost exaggeratedly respectful,” “an old-fashioned defender of truth, beauty and the values of literature against the massing dark”.
It’s especially important for people like Amis to take a stand against the amassing dark, because according to the novelist, the majority of Muslims are “moderate and mute”, feeding Amis’s professional opinion that that the Islamists have won in the battle between Islamism and Islam.
Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it.
Amis bases this assertion on the observation that Islamism is very obvious “as a mover and shaper of world events.” Islamism is your morning, noon and evening news, every last bomb blast, and travel delay. The “loser, moderate Islam” on the other hand – good Islam – is “supine and inaudible.” It spends a lot of the time asleep and, inconsiderately, when it wakes up and goes to work it does so without making the news. But moderate Islam is not only too quiet; it is also too loud. It should apparently be less audible, because “on the level of public debate” it is too audible, and its audibleness is deceptive – it is “deceptively well-represented” – considering the fact that it is really, privately – ‘elsewhere’ – inaudible.
In his three-part essay the Age of Horrorism, Amis did make a very clear cut distinction between Islam and Islamism. “Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.” This distinction becomes less clear elsewhere, when, for example, he says “they” are gaining on us demographically, he is, as Ronan Bennett pointed out, demonstrably not talking about “Islamists”.
Amis does however spend a lot of time talking about Islamists, investigating motivations, and turning ideology into story, as in the Last Days of Mohammad Atta. Through his immersion into Islamist thought (read Qutb), he has come to the conclusion that “they want it, you know.” “They’re hugely hypocritical in their hearts. Their big beef against the West is that it’s tempting them.” Using this logic, defining terrorism becomes infinitely simpler: violence against civilians for the purpose of thwarting temptation. Amis doesn’t think much of Bush but this seems a small step away from Bush-doctrine “they hate us because they hate freedom.”
In the Second Plane, this theory turns up again in more dignified prose, as the core realization behind what David Aaronovitch refers to as the ‘political journey’ Amis undertakes, the realization “that Islamism itself was a problem, since what it loathed about the West was, as Amis puts it, not our active seductiveness, but our passive attraction… Amis connects this existential envy to the political failure of Islam and attributes this in turn to the suppression of women in many Muslim countries.”
According to Amis, there is no end in sight to this irrational jealous hatred: “We should understand that Islamists’ hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it.”
This incisive analysis does seem to come from Ziauddin Sardar’s Planet Blitcon, Blitcon fiction being “orientalism for the 21st century, shifting the emphasis from the supremacy of the west in general to the supremacy of American ideas of freedom” with Islam as the greatest threat to this idea of civilization and ‘Islamists’ as “ inexplicable, irrational cults divorced from geopolitics and reality”.
Robert McCrum, among others, heaped derision on Sardar’s planet, acronym and all – the whole “ludicrous piece” is “simply nuts”. There does seem to be some exaggeration in Sardar’s argument. Perhaps the Blitcon three (Amis, Rushdie, McEwan) don’t dominate the English literary landscape. But they can, probably, be described as leading literary figures, or as McCrum says “contemporary novelists addressing contemporary themes”, a statement which makes it sound as though Sardar argues they are Victorian novelists addressing medieval themes.
The Second Plane is unquestionably about contemporary issues, investigating as it does the causes and consequences of the moral crash which Amis believes is “the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties”. The novelist’s summary of this moral crash draws a line down the middle, with bullet points on one side and a blood bath on the other
On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution.
In the next sentence, Amis asserts “we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria).” Its unsurprising Amis would rush over black marks on “Our Side” in one sentence, considering his conviction that “Here in the west we have the most evolved society in the world and we are not blowing people up” (the “tens of thousands of dead bodies” Amis refers to could have appeared as the result of an unfortunate plague). It is also unsurprising that this one sentence should be largely comprised of US-sanctioned terminology, technical circumlocutions and pseudo-scientific euphemisms, freed from the constraint of parody by the exigencies of dealing with the opposed ideology.
There’s a sudden grinding shift of register in counting up the crimes on the other side – the irrational ‘abattoir/madhouse’ appearing in sharp contrast to the rational ‘techniques/procedures,’ effectively sidesteps the slight insinuation of equivalence which would instantly appear appear if a less ambiguous word were to be slipped in to replace “coercive psychological procedures” and “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
What is most surprising about the moral crash summary however, is the crossing over into an alternate universe into an Algeria where the army supported the ‘Islamists’. Unless Amis uses ‘army’ interchangeably with ‘guerrilla group’, this reverses the actual situation where the war was sparked by the (Western-supported) Algerian army’s cancelling of elections which the ‘Islamist’ FIS seemed set to win.
Vague and/or erroneous statements such as this abound – Amis also seems to believe Surah means ‘sayings of the prophet’ and translates ‘intifada’ authoritatively as ‘earthquake’. This seems especially discordant in light of the novelist’s attention to detail, which extends to a discussion on whether 9/11 is too lightweight a contraction to describe the tragedy of that day.
Pankaj Mishra passed over the “startling claim” on Algeria, to point to the wider issues involved in “the illusion of profound knowledge” which writers like Amis often project, taking up an authoritative position, perhaps to satisfy a “nostalgic desire to see themselves in the avant-garde of a noble crusade against an evil ‘ism’.”
The Second Plane is clearly not intended to be a balanced, journalistic account. The authoritative position Amis takes up however, is somewhat at odds with the ‘personal’ quality. Frequently hijacking the reliable royal we, the ‘I’ behind these collected writings also address the very rational ‘you’ who reads them: “Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this?” The answer to this question is provided given by throwing reason/s out of the window: “We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.” Having dismissed reason/s out of hand, Amis seems unlikely to engage with that more urgent question Mishra posed: where will all this rage and distrust end?
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