Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

Satire, at its best, is a demonic genre, propelled by the darkest and nastiest of a writer's impulses: destructiveness, contempt, anger. This surely makes Martin Amis, Britain's uncrowned emperor of loathing and unofficial poet laureate of human self-disgust, the perfect man to deliver a timely, coruscating satire on the post- 11 September world we inhabit, the writer best equipped to target the moral atrocities of our age and shoot them down in flames with the mighty Kalashnikov of his English prose.

Satire, at its best, is a demonic genre, propelled by the darkest and nastiest of a writer's impulses: destructiveness, contempt, anger. This surely makes Martin Amis, Britain's uncrowned emperor of loathing and unofficial poet laureate of human self-disgust, the perfect man to deliver a timely, coruscating satire on the post- 11 September world we inhabit, the writer best equipped to target the moral atrocities of our age and shoot them down in flames with the mighty Kalashnikov of his English prose.

The only problem is that in his new novel, Yellow Dog, he hasn't done it. Instead, he has fired off an exquisitely written, 100-carat dud, a piece of work so unfocused, so militantly chaotic, sprawling, and garbled that I had to read it one and a half times in order to fathom what in the name of Crikey was going on. And even now I am not sure.

Within the first few pages, we flashback to extreme violence. Now head injuries are fun, from a writer's point of view. Get an underworld thug to cosh your hero in a pub in Chapter One ("you'll remember this in pain, boy") and you can transform him at a stroke into the interesting phenomenon of a man who is not himself. Such is the initially promising flight path mapped out for Xan Meo, morally demoted with one blow of a blunt instrument from politically correct New Man to foul-mouthed, foul-minded sinner. Overnight, his personality alters. Violence, satyriasis, world-class rudeness and the sexual fetishisation of his own infant daughter - hitherto unthinkable in Xan's life - become standard features of his psychopathology: "With its mood-swings, its motor-failures (its slurrings and staggerings), its weepiness, its vaulting lechery, its encouragement of words and actions that sowed the seeds of regret, Xan's post-traumatic condition reminded him of something: drunkenness."

It's a promising take-off, but the flight soon runs into turbulence. While Amis's prose is busy contemplating the predicament of Postmodern Man in the urban world, his hero's muddled state is busy transferring itself, as though by osmosis, to the reader, whose confusion is exacerbated by a multi-stranded plot divided into 60 mini-chapters, like a series of endlessly rotating snacks brought on by a beleaguered air hostess suffering from corns. I have to confess that I was reaching for my oxygen mask and life-vest by page 100, thrown into deep bewilderment by what Amis might term a category-error which led me to believe that because of his Chinese name, Xan Meo was Chinese. Not so. Instead he's a native Cockney who has left his roots far enough behind to use words like epithalamium, and he's married to an American called Russia. No sooner was my head round this, than a new plot trajectory (and I use the term loosely) was being proposed: the story of Henry England, Britain's ineffectual monarch, and how his double-barrelled entourage will deal with blackmail threats over footage of the nubile Princess Victoria starkers in the bath. Cue the next storyline, which concerns an aeroplane ("Flight 101 Heavy") carrying a corpse, the corpse's wife, and a load of hazardous chemicals. The cockpit conversations assure you that the crash, when it comes, will be an ugly one - though how it connects to the rest of the plot you cannot figure. (Might it be a Metaphor, you wonder queasily? But if so, for what?) By this point you're getting a bit travel-sick, but there's no time for self-pity because Air Traffic control has waved another Big Theme off the runway. Cue scenes from saddo-saturated Tit-and-Bum land, where sleazy hack Clint Smoker, who has a microscopically small dick and works for a rag called the Morning Lark, is pursuing the story of a wife-beating football pro who ...

Yes, it really is as unimaginative and un-entertaining as it sounds. Eventually, when you're done with the obligatory Amis Trip-to-America, which features Xan's visit to the porn-movie HQ known as Sextown, it becomes clear that Amis is gearing up for climax time, because he's splicing scenes together at a faster and faster rate: the doomy plane is finally and predictably about to crash, the King has finally and predictably decided to abdicate, Xan Meo is finally and predictably raising the Big Questions, and Clint's online squeeze has finally and predictably made That Revelation we expected all along. But frankly, by now, you're past caring.

The fact is that no amount of artful writing (and who dare fault the national treasure that is Amis's prose? Every phrase so painstakingly hand-tooled! Every sentence a literary festival in its own right!) can make up for gaping lack of focus and narrative drive. Lazily conceived and apparently inspired only by a manic desire to write Great Sentences, Yellow Dog is a book which fails to deliver anything other than a few lethargic half-swipes at some well-worn and deflated Aunt Sallys. Monarchy, the porn industry, the criminal underworld and gutter journalism are all worthy, if unoriginal targets for literary attack. But it's postmodern contempt, rather than Swiftian rage, that fuels Amis's narrative and there isn't even enough of that to keep the machine airborne.

Over-written, overcrowded and underpowered, Yellow Dog is a joyless, boring long-haul flight to nowhere, and a book that leaves you wondering why, if Martin Amis can't be bothered to care about his narrative, or feel any genuine anger about the targets of his satire, then anyone else should. Yellow Dog heralds itself as "An Everyday Comedy of 21st Century Sleaze", but you'll find more humour - and sophistication - in a single issue of The Beano.

Liz Jensen's most recent novel 'War Crimes for the Home' is published by Bloomsbury