YELLOW DOG
BY MARTIN AMIS
Vintage, £7.99
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Divided into four narrative strands, Yellow Dog touches on violence in a civilised society; the British monarchy; tactics of the gutter press, the spurs to, and checks on, incest; extinction level events; and plane crashes.

That’s a lot for an averagely long novel to cover, but I did not use the phrase “touches on” lightly, as lightly touch these subjects is, more or less, all that Amis does.

The narrative whips along enjoyably enough, moving from the savage beating of actor and writer Xan Meo to the blackmailing of Henry IX with a film of his daughter not quite alone in the bath.

Then there’s Clint Smoker, a virulently pustulant tabloid journalist who churns out effluvial op-ed pieces for the “wankers” (as they call their readers) of the largely pictographic Daily Lark.

But for all Amis’s marked insightfulness of Western culture’s quotidian and more uncommon quirks, and his robust and often hilarious prose, one reaches the end of Yellow Dog as if alighting from a carousel: somewhat enlivened, but essentially unmoved.

BUNKER 13
BY ANIRUDDHA BAHAL
Faber, £7.99
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Minty Mehta, ex-army cadet turned investigative reporter and drug fiend, infiltrates the Indian military and witnesses all kinds of illicitness around the line of control between Jammu and Kashmir. Bahal, obviously relishing the shift from journalism into fiction, displays a healthy contempt for genre conventions, flitting between sophistication and schlock at such a feverish pace that a book that should by rights implode or careen off into incomprehensibility becomes highly enjoyable.

THE KITE RUNNER
BY KHALED HOSSEINI
Bloomsbury, £6.99
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Hosseini’s debut is not short on event, comprising as it does a coming of age tale in pre-revolutionary Kabul, the refugee experience that Amir and his father suffer as they flee to California, and a fraught return to Taliban- controlled Afghanistan to atone for past sins. Unfortunately, the plodding prose, blandly inoffensive at best, doesn’t do justice to this itinerary. Amir studies creative writing in America, and much of this novel smacks of writing so learnt.

WAXWINGS
BY JONATHAN RABAN
Picador, £7.99
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Raban, who left England for America in 1990, brings a sensitive and nuanced perspective to the ceaseless glut of dissections of the US experience. Splitting his story between Tom, a Seattle-based university professor, and Chick, a Chinese who arrives in the hold of a cargo ship, he uses its characters’ crises to argue a human commonality which supercedes conceptions of national difference. Throughout, Raban’s fluent, understated prose is a thorough pleasure to read.

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