Reporter for The Sunday Times Will Lloyd sits down with Jack Aldane on this ninth episode to discuss The Second Plane, a collection of twelve pieces of nonfiction and two short stories by Amis published in 2008, covering 9/11, the age of terrorism, Islamism and the follies of the Blair-Bush coalition.
Will says Amis should be remembered as one of the greatest comic novelists ever to write in English. However, he adds that had the author remembered this himself when it counted, The Second Plane would probably never have been written.
The Second Plane shows what can happen to a writer when seismic events combine with the weight of expectation to explain them in real time. When the World Trade Center is attacked on 11 September 2001, Amis does not report from the ground, nor speak to those who witness the event firsthand. Instead, he along with other members of the literary elite are conscripted to tell the Anglophone world what it all means.
Some confess in their columns to being poleaxed by what they’ve seen. Amis instead uses his adrenaline to tame and name the collective moment with signature bombast. But this is not John Self’s New York, and Amis is unusually way off the mark.
Will explains why The Second Plane is arguably a literary parallel of the Iraq War. For one thing, the same errors of conjecture and righteous zeal are noticeable throughout.
Like so many cultural and political thought leaders of his time, Amis went over the top only to discover that he was woefully out of his depth.
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"When he died, I was distraught. Only Amis could have that effect on me." Will Lloyd