The Second Plane. September 11: Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis

The Barnes & Noble Review

Is there any reason for us to take an interest in what a novelist, even a very good one, has to say about current affairs? When -- as seems to be the case -- every major historian, political scientist, and journalist in the Western world has written about September 11th and its aftermath, resulting in more expert commentary on the subject than one could possibly absorb in a lifetime, is there any reason to read a novelist's thoughts on the matter?

Possibly, if that novelist brings skills to the task that only an imaginative writer commands. In Martin Amis's case, one doubts that he is the man for the job. He is undoubtedly a brilliant observer, but his work is characterized by an almost inhuman coldness and a preference for ruthless judgment over imaginative empathy, and he has never shown any particular aptitude for analytic thought or historical reflection. As he himself has said, correctly, "[N]ovelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on."

The Second Plane is Amis's bid to join the folks who write about what's going on. These 12 essays and reviews and two short stories, published between September 18, 2001, and September 11, 2007 -- the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks -- collectively establish Amis's chosen position: that of an atheist and rationalist appalled by the "institutionalized irrationalism" of religion in general and Islamism in particular. "Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any race or creed," he says, "let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful…. [I]f God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion."

Amis lays the blame for all terrorist acts in the Middle East on religious fanaticism. (Data collected by the Gallup World Poll, by the way, indicates just the opposite: there seems in fact to be no correlation between personal piety and radical views in Muslim countries, as John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed have pointed out in their analysis of the Gallup material, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, and the more radicalized Middle Easterners generally come from the best-educated sector of the population.) Amis denies being an Islamophobe, instead defining himself as an "Islamistophobe": "Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta." Good enough; but it's clear that he doesn't respect Muhammad, either, and in any case he quickly loses sight of the distinction and begins to speak of Islam and Islamism almost interchangeably. In reference to the subjection of women, for example, he writes of "the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its population." Here he indiscriminately lumps countries like Iran and Iraq, in which women make up a significant portion of university students and the work force, with regimes like that of Saudi Arabia. Amis rejects the liberal piety that would have it that all men are brothers: "[A]ll men are not my brothers," he says. "Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother." This kind of self-righteous piety suits Amis very badly; after all, he has built an entire career on witty, politically incorrect misogyny.

Most irritating of all is Amis's habit of making broad generalizations based far more on emotion than knowledge. The experts he invokes -- Bernard Lewis, Paul Berman, John Gray, Sam Harris, Mark Steyn (and since when have Sam Harris and Mark Steyn been experts on the Middle East anyway?) -- are almost exclusively Western; the only Arab writer he seems to have read is Sayyid Qutb, the "father of Islamism," and he has obviously perused Qutb's work more with an eye toward the author's sexual neuroses than his political philosophy. He doesn't seem to talk to many Arabs, either, though at one point he cites an unnamed Sunni military man as authority that "Iraqis 'hate' Iraq -- or 'Iraq,' a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering" -- a statement that would come as quite a surprise to the many Iraqi authors, bloggers, and journalists I have been reading since the war began.

Amis's dramatic hyperbole in describing the September 11th attacks ("in that instant America's youth would turn into age"; "this moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era"; etc., etc.) is a function of the stunning historical provincialism of the baby boomers, who for half a century led an existence more sheltered than any in history and came to take it for granted. Our parents, who lived and fought through the Second World War, experienced not only Pearl Harbor but Auschwitz, Stalingrad, the enslavement of France, the bombing of London, the destruction of Berlin and other German cities, and the atomic humbling of Japan. That generation, I remember, was not as shaken up by the 9/11 attack as ours was, apparently seeing it more as one in an eternal stream of atrocities that have been committed by every race and creed in history than as some uniquely horrible and unprecedented act.

While so much of The Second Plane is jejune and overwrought, there are still some exquisite moments that remind you of how good Martin Amis can be when in his natural element. "On the Move with Tony Blair," a piece originally published in The Guardian (and later added to and embellished) is a wickedly observant portrait of the prime minister as he makes his way through official functions in Washington, Belfast, and Baghdad -- the kind of imaginative journalism that can only be done by a novelist. And the two short stories included here, though marred by a pompous didacticism that has no place in fiction, contain some touches that only a master can pull off. Here, for example, the author imagines the last moments of Muhammad Atta as his plane hits the Trade Center:

American 11 struck at 8:46:40. Muhammad Atta's body was beyond all healing by 8:46:41; but his mind, his presence, needed time to shut itself down. The physical torment -- a panic attack in every nerve, a riot of the atoms -- merely italicized the last shinings of his brain. They weren't thoughts; there were more like a series of unignorable conclusions, imposed from without…. How very gravely he had underestimated life. His own he had hated, and had wished away; but see how long it was taking to absent itself -- and with what helpless grief was he watching it go, imperturbable in its beauty and its power. Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.

From the Publisher

A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time.

At the heart of this collection is the long essay “Terror and Boredom,” an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West’s flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran, and Tony Blair’s lingering departure from Downing Street (and also his trips to Washington and Iraq). Amis’s reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a far-ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” its subject self-evident, and “In the Palace of the End,” narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant’s double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture, and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts.

Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.

The Washington Post - Warren Bass

…the argument in The Second Plane bristles with intelligence.

Publishers Weekly

These chronologically ordered essays and stories on the September 11 attacks proceed from initial bewilderment to coruscating contempt for radical Islam. Novelist Amis (House of Meetings) rejects all religious belief as "without reason and without dignity" and condemns "Islamism" as an especially baleful variant. Amis attacks Islamism's tenets as "[a]nti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic" and characterizes its adherents, from founding ideologue Sayyid Qutb to the ordinary suicide bomber, as sexually frustrated misogynists entranced by a "cult of death." He also takes swipes at Bush and the Iraq war, which he describes as botched and tragically counterproductive, if well intentioned, but scorns those who draw a moral equivalence between Western misdeeds and the jihadist agenda. Amis's concerns are cultural and aesthetic as well as existential: terrorism threatens a reign of "boredom" in the guise of tedious airport security protocols, pedantic conspiracy theories and the dogma-shackled "dependent mind" fostered by Islamist theocracy. As much as Amis's opinions are scathing, blunt and occasionally strident, his prose is subtle, elegant and witty-and certainly never boring. (Apr.)

Stephen K. Shaw - Library Journal

Amis has a reputation, well deserved, for being an intellectual provocateur. This reputation will only grow with the publication of these latest musings on life in what he calls "the Age of Vanished Normalcy." As John Updike, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and others have before him, Amis seeks to make sense of a world in which passenger airplanes are used as weapons of destruction and religious fanaticism has muscled out reasoned deliberation. His critique of Islamism may seem enlightened to some, imbecilic to others. Amis rejects the chimera of moral equivalence between modern, secular civilization and radical Islamic jihadists. He argues that he is not Islamophobic but rather Islamismophobic-that is, opposed to militant Islam. Amis contends that the West shares no common discourse with jihadism and contrasts the Western, secular mind of intellectual curiosity with the strident, noncurious mind of the likes of Mohamed Atta. The most impressive of these 14 pieces is "Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind," in which Amis mounts his own crusade against religious violence and secular triumphalism. Amis is intentionally and controversially combative in this work, which makes it essential reading. Recommended for all libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Fourteen essays on the theme that "our understanding of September 11 is incremental and can never hope to be intact and entire."Islamism (Islamic fascism to some, Islamofascism to others), notes the ever-provocative British novelist and essayist Amis (House of Meetings, 2007, etc.), may be associated with Saudi Arabia, but it had its modern origins in Greeley, Colo., in 1949. "The story is grotesque and incredible," he writes, "but then so are its consequences." One of those curious consequences, familiar to anyone who has experienced war, terror or extreme stress, is boredom, for in such endeavors when one is not scared witless there is by definition not much going on. The war against Islamist terror has, Amis hazards, an especially boring additional component, our presumed inability to begin to communicate with "a mind with which we share no discourse." Amis's alignment as a self-described "Islamismophobe" puts him in a similar orbit with sometime friend and sometime rival Christopher Hitchens, save that, unlike Hitchens, Amis does not support the war in Iraq, as one of the pieces, an in-flight interview with Tony Blair, makes clear. (But then, that interview hints, Blair didn't much like the war either.) Amis is rather less blustery than Hitchens; one piece is a surprisingly empathetic attempt to get inside 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta's mind. As always, Amis proves eminently readable, his observations enlightening. Who other would ascribe to Kuwait City an "almost artistic cheerlessness" that speaks to the deadening touch of women-hating fundamentalism "under a sinister mist of damp dust"? Amis may not make any friends among the PC set, but he makes clear and inarguable the fact thatthe Islamist enemy is an enemy of reason, just like Hitler and Stalin. "The only thing Islamism can dominate, for now, is the evening news," Amis concludes in good fighting spirit. His book fires a welcome, left-tending salvo.

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