Amis's Hate Grounds 'Plane'

Martin Amis is a cold-hearted bastard.

I don’t know that for certain, of course, but I can’t see how anyone with any true emotion or sensitivity could produce the 14 pieces collected in “The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom.” He attacks his subject with precisely the level of extreme rationality that he professes to value, and the resulting analyses are shocking both for their lucidity and their ruthlessness.

The roughly 200-page volume contains pieces the Englishman published in American and British periodicals between September 18, 2001 and September 11, 2007, arranged in chronological order, and they get predictably more circumspect as the volume progresses. What each of them shares, however, is the express desire to annihilate the ideology that begat the events of 9/11: namely, Islamism.

Ideology, Amis says, “is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality.” Religion, he continues, “is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.” Islamism is then the ideology of Islam, or rather a belief system with an inadequate basis in a belief system with no basis in reality. So you can see why someone who prizes rationality would have a problem with that. And Amis minces no words.

Islamism, that deranged mania, is the fuel to terrorism’s apparently unstoppable machine. “It is not merely violent in tendency,” Amis writes. “Violence is all that is there.” It is a despicable yet undeniably powerful state of mind, one that swallows up all other thought.

In the volume’s longest essay, “Terror and Boredom: the Dependent Mind,” Amis interweaves his analytical plot of the development and effects of radical Islamism with the personal story of a novella he had abandoned, called “The Unknown Known,” in reference to Donald Rumsfeld’s taxonomy of terrorist threats. He abandoned the satirical work not because he had lost his inspiration, he says, but rather because in the face of “total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.”

More than an essayist, Amis considers himself a writer of fiction. One of his only positive beliefs is in the value of literature to a rational society. “A novel is a rational undertaking; it is reason at play, perhaps, but it is still reason.”

Two of Amis’s own works of fiction make it into the volume: “In the Palace of the End,” told from the perspective of one of a Middle Eastern prince’s many “doubles,” and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” an imagining of the terrorist mastermind’s final hours. Perhaps more than the non-fiction, the stories illustrate the author’s sociopathic lack of empathy. In “Last Days,” for instance, Atta is constipated. Because Atta was actually constipated in the days and hours before steering American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center? No. Because Amis wanted to make a point. In the story, Atta’s inability to shit stands in for his inability to attain spiritual satisfaction. It is only when he boards the plane and begins to feel the satisfaction of a martyr that Atta can finally feel his bowels start to move. Religion is shit, Amis is saying, and yet he is doing it in the most insensitive way—exploiting an event that should be treated with the utmost respect and seriousness.

For the depth of his understanding of the problems facing the post-9/11 world, Amis has very little to offer by way of solution. “Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,” he says. “People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too.” And in a similar vein: “Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength.” But what does any of that mean?

America has yet to comprehend the power that is Islamism, distinct from Islam. In a battle that is fought as much in the mind as on the ground or in the air, terminology is important, and Islamophobe is still hurled as an insult against those who speak out against the ideology that is related to the religion only as a matter of convenience.

There is no objective correlation between the behavior of the Islamists and the religion of Islam, just as there is no objective correlation between the events of September 11 and America’s supposed misdeeds. There is no clear causal reason for either relationship. Amis explains this lack of causality quite succinctly by saying that “we are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.”

Amis knows reason, and that is all. He may be able to recognize, where America cannot, that we have yet to fully grasp the significance of Islamism to the 21st century, but he is not so different from the Americans in not knowing how to stop it. While “The Second Plane” is a bracing and thought-provoking read, it is ultimately irritating in its unsubstantiated smugness. Being a cold-hearted bastard isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but against such blind hate, mere hate won’t solve anything.

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.