From "a stone-solid genius ... a dazzling star of wit and insight"
(The Wall Street Journal), a brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny
as hell novel about a family man who is attacked in a garden and
suddenly becomes an anti-husband and anti-father.
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; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan. 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" that 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.
If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel
is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model 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.
