The road to utopia.(Yellow Dog)(Book Review)

Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis; Vintage, 2003, $45.

THE REVIEWS generally have not been good: "patchy", "silly", "terrible". Even in the charitable reviews there is a sense that something is wrong, embarrassingly wrong. So what fundamentally is wrong with Martin Amis's latest novel Yellow Dog, longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize but left off the shortlist?

At just over 300 pages, Yellow Dog is not a long work. Jammed into this limited space are five major characters and their tangled plot trajectories, along with a small army of minor characters and a plethora of subplots. No surprise then that the book comes across as splintery and riddled with discontinuities.

Why did Amis opt for such a crowded canvas? Here is one possible answer.

There is a single vision underlying the mirrorball surface of Yellow Dog. Put simply it is a vision of the overwhelming pathos of patriarchy. Beneath the jokes, the funny names, the relentless multi-faceted grotesquerie, Yellow Dog is saturated with pathos.

And it is a central feature of that vision that, given patriarchy's warping all-pervasiveness, everyone suffers. Under patriarchy, nobody escapes being diminished and impoverished. Hence the crowded canvas, the whole-of-society multiplicity of plots and characters.

To patriarchy's inherent pathos, Martin Amis hasn't always been so sensitive. Up until Yellow Dog, detached amusement has been his signature response to the spectacle of male anxieties and self-delusions. Coolly satirising that often sordid spectacle has constituted the core of his career as a writer of fiction.