Tom Lynch

A master satirist is at work in "Yellow Dog," British author Martin Amis' first venture into the book world in five years, one who keeps his characters comically fumbling through their private lives in a London in a perpetual state of confusion.

The reader is first introduced to Xan Meo, an actor who after a bad beating in a pub leaves the hospital a different man, indifferent to his wife and haunting to his children. Then comes none other than the King of England, Henry IX, who, with the direct help of some underlings and the indirect help of a Chinese mistress, attempts to prevent revealing photos of his fifteen-year-old daughter from hitting computer screens across the world. And finally there's Clint Smoker, a raunchy Larry-Flynt-like tabloid auteur, and his ambiguous connection to both the King and Meo.

Amis delivers more than fifty tangential glances into the quarrels of each life, weaving and intersecting a variety of lively characters with ironic names that lead to occasionally funny puns. (The Chinese mistress is named He, prompting the line "He touched He and He touched he.")

The big and comic "Yellow Dog" mocks the entire world, but especially the British upper-crust. Amis shreds the Internet, from the aforementioned threat of having your daughter creepily revealed to the new digital lingo ("They're overr8ed! I h8 them! What an un4tun8 effect it has on the ego!"), levels the monarchy, explores a pornographic society, and finds crime in all the right places. Anxiety looms through the pages; Amis builds tension into the narrative that intersects with a doomed flight involving a corpse in baggage and the corpse's wife in first class. The novel is evidence of a wonderfully articulate writer--a writer with an overanxious tendency to bicker--but still a prize nonetheless.

Yellow Dog

By Martin Amis

Miramax Books, 338 pages, $24.95

(2003-11-05)

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