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Amis's first novel since The Information: a post 9/11 comedy When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog. Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a readi… (more)
User reviews
The main character is Xan Meo, an actor turned author, and father of two young girls, who on a night out in London to
Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist, writes for a sex-obsessed paper which appears to be based on the UK's Daily Sport called the Morning Lark and whose journalists routinely refers to its readers as "wankers". Smoker is the author of a column called "Yellow Dog", in which he states that raping 14-year-olds is fine if you've had a few drinks or they look 16, and that they're wearing school uniform counts as "provocation". When Smoker takes a trip to the US to visit the centre of the country's Californian sex industry the reader is given a long description of the evolution of various genres of sex films.
Henri IX is on the throne in Britain and despite being lazy is generally popular with his subjects. One day he receives a still of his 15 year-old daughter naked in a bath taken without her knowledge, as images and a DVD are released we learn that the princess was joined in the bath by the king's Chinese concubine. The images of the naked princess are widely circulated in the Morning Lark and the king along with his closest ally, nicknamed Bugger, (the Queen being on a life support machine in a Scottish hospital after a horse riding accident) try to find the source of the footage and to protect the young princess from the fallout.
There are several other smaller sub-plots, including a gangster narrative and a doomed flight, but they add little to the whole.
There is some humour within this book I found if it often more cringe-worthy than funny. However what is most dislikeable is that there seems to be a suggestion that father-daughter incest is quite normal and it is what leads many women to become involved in pornography industry both of which any right-minded person would find repugnant. Whilst the Royal Family are often a favourite target for satirists this felt over-egged as is Amis's representation of the class divide. Put simply other authors have done a far better job of it.
This is my third Amis novel, after Money and London Fields, and the one I disliked most. Whilst this may idea may have been OK the execution was poor.