The most sustained attempt he offers to comprehend the forces ranged against the west comes in his story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta. Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the towers, comes across in part as a familiar Amis type, the hopeless male, plagued by his bowels and by his repressed sexuality; he believes he will be relieved in the moment of death. "This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with the beasts, when you flew with the flies ... Now even the need to shit felt right and good as his destination surged towards him." In the context of this story - and the other bleakly comic fictional monologue of a psychotic dictator's body double - it is curious how, elsewhere, Amis is so much concerned with propriety of tone. There is a long argument about the inappropriateness of the contraction "9/11" to describe the enormity of that day. Paul Greengrass' film United 93 is rebuked at one point for departing from the documentary record, for becoming "artistic." And in the best of the pieces here, Amis' eyewitness account of the valediction tour of Tony Blair, he finds the Prime Minister floundering as he addresses the troops in Baghdad: "So we kill more of them than they kill us."
"He was quite unable," Amis writes of Blair, "to find weight of voice, to find decorum, the appropriate words for the appropriate mood." In placing these pieces side by side, shifting as they do from apocalyptic solemnity to cultural in-joking, Amis sometimes invites against himself the same censure. His writing remains capable of anything, except perhaps humility.
RSS