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Amis has always been interested in anatomising hatred – the Jew-hating of Time’s Arrow (1991), the class loathing of London Fields (1989), the self-loathing of Money (1984) – but in trying to address Islamofascism his resources fail him. He hates so much that he can’t begin to see what it is that the haters hate...... One benefit of the Amisian lightly ironising put-down was to deny a hatred the fuel it gains from being taken seriously. But recently Amis has lost his lightness, has become deadly serious. It’s possible to watch the transition in action. In Experience, he tells an anecdote about a visit to Jerusalem:
Once, in the Arab Quarter, I had a mild altercation with one of the gatekeepers of the Holy Mosque, and I saw in his eyes the assertion that he could do anything to me, to my wife, to my children, to my mother, and that this would only validate his rectitude. Humankind, or I myself, cannot bear very much religion.
He might be reading too much in the eyes of the gatekeeper but at least he does it amusingly. That emphatic ‘anything’ is another ellipsis: Amis doesn’t care to imagine the tortures his gatekeeper might inflict because that would be to give his thinking more weight than he can presently bear. In ‘The Age of Horrorism’, though, he revisits the same scene:
I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife and my children was something for which he now had warrant. I knew then that the phrase ‘deeply religious’ was a grave abuse of that adverb. Something isn’t deep just because it’s all that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion – illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.
Amis’s mother has disappeared from the list of intended targets – mentions of mothers can be comic – and the threat has become specific: this is killing we’re talking. In Experience Amis told us nothing about the gatekeeper, or why he might think the way he does (if he does); now he is denying the possibility of there being any reason at all for the gatekeeper’s hatred: his ‘mask’ is an effect without a cause. Amis’s ‘varnish on a vacuum’ is a way of sealing an absence of explanation, wrapping it up. Once it has been so packaged – a handy, pocket-sized, neatly labelled black hole – he can make it his subject, or make it his message. The trouble is that without taking cause and effect into account, a novelist can’t write a novel.
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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/soar01_.html