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London — The night before this, Martin Amis was in a fight. It didn't involve brass knuckles or shattered pint glasses, or anything like the solid thwack of male flesh on male flesh. Those are young men's fights, rutting-season rumbles over girls or respect, and they seem rather quaint in a city where 52 people were bombed to death under the earth three years ago.
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This tussle did, however, have something to do with his controversial new book, The Second Plane – September 11: Terror and Boredom. These days, men of Amis's station and age (he's 58) fight not over girls but over Whether America Has Lost Its Moral Authority.
Amis was arguing on the No side of that debate earlier this week at London's Royal Geographical Society; that is, he was in America's corner, with his allies, historian Simon Schama and novelist Howard Jacobson.
British author Martin Amis photographed in his London home. (Randy Quan/Special to the Globe and Mail)
Did it feel odd, to be taking America's part? “Yeah,” says Amis the day after, digging fingers into eye sockets, “it did, slightly. I thought, ‘We're going to get humiliated here.' But we didn't.”
An understandable panic: Arrayed against him, dancing over the corpse of America's moral authority, was the heavyweight team of John Gray (political philosopher), Will Self (novelist) and Matthew Parris (columnist).
Amis and Schama argued – to grotesquely telescope their views – that America may have dirty skirts, but that they could be made clean. On the other side, Gray said that the sanctioning of torture renders questions of moral authority meaningless. At the beginning of the debate, nearly a quarter of the audience was undecided, and by the end almost all those votes had gone to Amis's side. Still, 57 per cent of attendants agreed with Parris that “America has lost her moral authority more often than Fanny Hill lost her virginity.”
It's a good line, the kind of snarl you would have expected from Amis in full bilious sail, before he became so anxious about the state of the world, so preoccupied with the struggle of reason against irrationality, so sad. Yes, one of the great satirical novelists of our age, the arch mocker, seems freighted with worry – at least within the pages of that hotly debated new book. The Second Plane is dedicated to his five children, which perhaps provides some clue to his mental state.
“There have been moments in this story,” he says, in the quietness of his vast living room in north London, “where you felt that you might not win. That our society, with its freedoms, is tremendously vulnerable. That we're wide open.”
Not that it's a world without sun. After the debate at the Royal Geographical Society, even the forces of anti-Americanism “were talking about the power of hope, as represented by Obama. People do want to hope, and the thoroughness with which he would rewrite perceptions of America in his own person has a real glamour, in the best sense.”
The last time I met Amis was 10 years ago, in Toronto, just after the publication of his metaphysical detective novel, Night Train. He was sleek as an otter, smoking roll-ups, an arsenal of devastating lines no farther away than his beer, each one uttered in a luxuriant drawl. He was still preoccupied with nuclear proliferation, the great shadow he'd lived under all his life, which had fuelled the stories in Einstein's Monsters and the millennial tensions in London Fields.
A decade later, the world has changed unutterably. No, it's changed utterably, that's the point. Amis, in the 14 pieces in The Second Plane, is trying to articulate how the world has shifted since Sept. 11 (the nomenclature is important; he loathes the abbreviation 9/11).
