A study in desperation

Fiction:  A man gets a crack on the head and loses himself in a haze of guilty secrets that return from his sexual past. Meanwhile, an aircraft carrying passengers and a full coffin is about to crash.

Then there's the old con having fun recalling highlights of his career as a sexual terrorist. And let's not forget a young princess, daughter of a vague to the point of brain-dead king, who seems to be looking for a way out of life as a royal and could be about to find it through an impending scandal.

Running parallel to all of these side-shows is the frenetic activity of one tabloid journalist, Clint Smoker, whose specialist subject is sleaze of a pornographic hue. He's a busy lad, is our Clint.

No one could suggest that the pages of Yellow Dog, the 10th novel and the first in eight years, from Martin Amis, self-avowed devotee of Bellow, Nabokov and Updike and a natural street satirist with a flick-knife flair for the grotesque comedy of popular culture, will offer solace for any reader.

This a loud, busy, often crude book, and something of a study in male desperation on many levels. There are some goodish comic set pieces, but none aspire to the dazzling heights of vintage Amis, although the crazed monologues of the above con, the villainous Henry Fielding, indicate he has not lost his feel for replicating authentic low life argot.

That said for all the shouting, the chaos and the gags, it is not all that easy to identity exactly what is going on. It could be that now, almost 30 years after his swashbuckling début, Amis the literary stylist has become utterly at one, make that hopelessly entangled with, the social commentator shaped by his other persona, the free-ranging journalist with an opinion on everything, from US literary masters and women's tennis to nuclear disaster and belated parenthood.

Who would have suspected that the author of Money would eventually become a writer whose life marched side by side with his work - but this is what has happened, initially because of begrudgery and press reports, but increasingly because Amis has permitted his life and circumstances to infiltrate fiction that previously swaggered with comic genius, confidence and satirical style.

Within his gifts as a writer and literary critic lie his weakness as a thinker and ultimately as a storyteller. Outrageous linguistic virtuosity and innovative prose - not ideas - have made Amis an exciting writer, albeit one who, with recent books, has appeared to have allowed memory, imagination and a campaigning righteousness paint him into a corner, most dangerously with his ill- advised foray into Stalinist studies, Koba the Dread. For all its appealing candour his memoir, Experience (2000), leaves one feeling Amis, son of Kingsley, wrote it not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had to in order to set the record straight about lost friendships and public misconceptions.

He has always been a good writer, although there had been lapses of judgement even before Koba The Dread. Night Train (1997), an unconvincing monologue delivered through the tough-speaking voice of a troubled US lady cop, derailed itself, surprising, considering that Martin Amis has always had one ear to America.

But Night Train was excused within a year by Heavy Water and Other Stories, a good collection dominated by a terrific yarn, State of England, featuring a classic Amis thug-on-the-climb, Big Mal, a moronic bouncer, whom we meet under pressure with Amis giving us a sense of his scrambled state of mind ". . . wife, child and, other woman. It was mid-September. It was Sports Day. The running track he was strolling along would soon be pounded in earnest by his nine-year-old son, little Jet".

A couple of pages into this new book, "a square-looking, almost cubic individual, stood about ten feet away in the weak dusk". Even before he introduces himself, we welcome the return of Mal. It looks like Amis is going to continue his acquaintance. Alas, Mal merely recedes into the chorus line of minor characters. More's the pity, leaving lesser creatures to man the lifeboats of a narrative that never steadies itself.

Yellow Dog is a half-hearted, improvisational performance, more worthy of the recent Rushdie than Amis. It is reaching for mood not plot. But the mood here, that of male panic and male nastiness in the face of waning powers, sexual and otherwise, never match either the lamentation and genuine menace lurking at the edges of his underrated epic, The Information (1995). All the elements that made The Information so convincing, conspire to make Yellow Dog random and chaotic.

The two central characters, Xan Meo, actor and attack victim, and Clint the porn journo are sketches of men in trouble. Meo is possibly the more developed of the two, if only just. Recovering in hospital he makes the journey from the intensive care unit to the head injury ward, "his condition felt like the 21st century; it was something you wanted to wake up from - snap out of". Meo also represents the latest version of the familiar Amis character who has invariably slouched through the fiction in a cameo capacity. A husband to a second wife and father to a second family, this time two girls to match the two boys from family number one, Meo might mean Me - as in Amis. Either way, it will be perceived as such. Yellow Dog wears its episodic construction as a ball and chain, it sighs rather than flows. Where as J.G. Ballard, whom Amis admires, imbues the pornographic with profundity, in Yellow Dog pornography is not even dangerous, it is merely pathetic.

Martin Amis began his career with a precociously good reconstruction of the minor triumphs and major defeats of adolescent sexuality with The Rachel Papers in 1974 and went on through Dead Babies and Success to demonstrate precisely how funny he could be - and is. Those raucous little gems were followed by Money in 1984, still his finest novel and almost 20 years on, an enduring achievement of British comic fiction and proof that at his best, Amis the novelist is suspended between London low-life humour and US comic energy.

Yet there was always a darker side to Amis as another of his best books, the mysterious and mature thriller, Other People (1981) demonstrated. Predating Money by almost three years, it remains an underrated novel destined to be unfairly overshadowed. It shows his early mastery of a grasp of terror, self-doubt and fear as a physical sensation. London Fields (1989), although claiming some of the comic flourish of Money, revealed a sinister fascination with violence, sexual power struggles and that fear theme. Some critics directed what would become a famous feminist attack on it.

More mainstream readers, such as myself, merely saw it as scary. Before its publication, Amis had already indicated that with parenthood he had acquired a deeper moral response to the world about him. Einstein's Monsters (1987), five polemical stories, share the theme of fear for the future and confirmed that he was developing polemical intent. With Time's Arrow in 1991, Amis the satirist angered some critics and impressed many others with a previously concealed technical skill and narrative courage.

Whatever about the familiar themes, devices and voices, he has always been keen to diversify. All of which makes the failure of this book almost as interesting as it is disappointing. It could be suggested that the presiding centre, the inert heart of Yellow Dog is the corpse of Royce Traynor, taking its final trip on the doomed flight: " . . . his mahogany coffin was hard and heavy. Like the past, he was dead and gone. But Royce was still hard and heavy with it: hard and heavy with the past." Seldom has an Amis novel been so short of imagery.

Yellow Dog is neither clever satire nor morality play. It is a chaotic cartoon of flashes, hit-and-miss shots fired by a gifted writer under pressure whose intentions here are uncharacteristically sketchy and haphazard with a grab bag of digressions, including father/daughterincest. Somewhere, somehow, amid the vulgarity, Meo experiences a moment of terror that could have come directly from the pages of The Information, while looking at his small sleeping daughters, he realises "something's coming for them and I can't protect them, I can't protect them". Long-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize, its inclusion seems little more than a gesture to a writer who to date has only been short-listed once for the daring Holocaust novel, Time's Arrow. Better to read and re-read Money or The Information - two novels that should have won this literary lottery of lotteries but didn't - than to attempt engagement with this shadowy reflection of the real Martin Amis.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Yellow Dog, By Martin Amis Cape, 340pp, £16.99