Martin Amis's Blog, page 4

John Updike's late stories are not his best, but they are a lesson in love. By Martin Amis

The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing - one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.

... Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.

The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. This gives us a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone together without many intercessionary chaperones. And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words "his land"; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov - who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.

So, the portrait of the artist as an old man: this is a murky and glutinous vista (and one of increasingly urgent interest to the present reviewer, who is closing in on 60). My broad impression is that writers, as they age, lose energy (inspiration, musicality, imagistic serendipity) but gain in craft (the knack of knowing what goes where). Medical science has granted us a new phenomenon: the octogenarian novel. And one thinks, with respect, of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein and Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest; yet no one would seriously compare these books to Humboldt's Gift and Harlot's Ghost. Updike was 76 when he died. And for many years he suffered from partial deafness. I don't know (perhaps nobody knows) whether the two afflictions are connected, but the fact is that Updike, in My Father's Tears and Other Stories, is in the process of losing his ear.

This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive. In the last three decades I have published about 15,000 words of more or less unqualified praise of John Updike, and his achievement remains immortal. The most astonishing page in the new collection is the one headed "Books by John Updike": 62 volumes, many of them enormously long. His productivity was preternatural: it made you think of a berserk IVF pregnancy, or a physiological condition (pressure on the cortex?), or - more realistically, given his Depression-shadowed childhood - a Protestant work ethic taken to the point of outright fanaticism. My Father's Tears is Updike's last book, and perhaps his least distinguished. But it ends, all the same, with the glimmer, the thwarted promise, of a happier ending.

Readers must now prepare themselves for quotation, and a blizzard of false quantities - by which I mean those rhymes and chimes and inadvertent repetitions, those toe-stubs, those excrescences and asperities that all writers hope to expunge from their work (or at least radically minimise: you never get them all). Updike's prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass. Formerly, you used to reread Updike's sentences in a spirit of incredulous admiration. Here, too often, you reread them wondering a) what they mean, or b) why they're there, or c) how they survived composition, routine reappraisal, and proof-checking without causing a spasm of horrified self-correction.

Consider:

ants make mounds like coffee grounds ...
polished bright by sliding anthracite ...
my bride became allied in my mind ...
except for her bust, abruptly outthrust ...

This quatrain is not an example of Updike's light verse; the lines consist of four separate examples of wantonly careless prose. Similarly: "alone on a lonely afternoon", "Lee's way of getting away from her", " his rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women", and "a soft round arm wrapped around her face". One sentence contains "walking" and "sidewalk"; another contains "knowing" and "knew"; another contains "year", "yearbook", and "year".

"For what is more intimate even than sex but death?" Well, you know what he means (after a moment or two), but shouldn't that "but" be another "than" (which, I agree, wouldn't be any good either). "Fleischer had attained, in private, to licking her feet." Attained? And we surely don't need to be told that Fleischer isn't licking her feet in public. Or take this (from the title story) as an example of a sentence that audibly whimpers for a return to the drawing board: "He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realised, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I."

This isn't much of a realisation; and by the time you get to the repeated "than I", the one-letter first-person pronoun (which chimes with "realised" and "mine" and "tried" and "smile") is as hypnotically conspicuous as, say, "antidisestablishmentarianism". Let us end these painful quotes with what may be the most indolent period ever committed to paper by a major pen (and one so easy to fix: change the first "fall" to "autumn", or change the second "fall" to "drop"): "The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall." The most ridiculous thing about this sentence, somehow, is its stately semi-colon.

Considered as mere narratives, the stories are as quietly inconclusive as Updike's stories usually are; but now, denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, they sometimes seem to be neither here nor there - products of nothing more than professional habit. Then, too, you notice a loss of organisational control and, in one case, a loss of any sense of propriety. This is "Varieties of Religious Experience", which concerns itself with September 11. First we get a strongish eyewitness account of the falling towers; then Mohammed Atta ordering his fourth scotch in a Floridan gogo bar; then an executive in the North Tower minutes after impact; then United 93 and the passengers' (weirdly telescoped) revolt. This story appeared in November 2002: fatally premature, and fatally unearned. Death, elsewhere appropriately seen as infinitely mysterious, august and royal - as "the distinguished thing", in Henry James's last words - is treated here without decorum and without taste.

I said earlier that My Father's Tears contains the rumour of a happier ending. These stories are presented in chronological order, and after a while the reader feels a disquieting suspense. How far will the degeneration advance? Will the last few pages be unadorned gibberish? This doesn't happen; and the lost trust in the author begins to be partly restored. The prose takes on solidity and balance; Updike, here, is attempting less, and successfully evokes the "inner dwindling", the ever-narrower horizon imposed by time. This perhaps would have been Updike's very last phase. And the reader closes the book with a restive sadness that death has deprived us of it.

"The Full Glass", the final story, seems to me to be quietly innovative, like the ending of "The Walk with Elizanne" (where the literary imagination boldly rescues a failing memory). VS Pritchett, on his 90th birthday, said to me in an interview: "As one gets older one becomes very boring and long-winded to oneself. One's thoughts are long-winded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel ... Travelling through minds and situations which reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel."

I suggest without irony that Updike's last challenge might have been to turn long-windedness into art - and to make boredom interesting.

Age waters the writer down. The most terrible fate of all is to lose the ability to impart life to your creations (your creations, in other words, are dead on arrival). Other novelists simply fall out of love with the reader; this was true of James, and also of Joyce (who never much cared for the reader in the first place: what he cared for was words). Not so with Updike, even in these loose and straitened pages. As you might see on a signpost in his beloved American countryside (while approaching some stoical little township), the stories here are "Thickly Settled". Updike's creations live, and authorial love is what sustains them. He put it very plainly in his memoir, Self-Consciousness: "Imitation is praise. Description expresses love." That love, at least, never began to weaken.

• Martin Amis's novel The Pregnant Widow will be published by Cape next year. To order My Father's Tears and Other Stories for £17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.

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JG Ballard, who died this week, asked what effect the modern world - concrete highways, shopping malls, pornography, technology - has on our psyches. The answer was perversity in various forms, all of them extreme. Martin Amis remembers a savage, sinister writer who was also an unusually lovable man

I first came across Ballard when I was a teenager. He was a friend of my father's, and my father championed his early work, calling him "the brightest star in postwar SF" (all purists call science fiction SF, and have nothing but contempt for "sci fi"). Ballard was a beautiful man, with a marvellously full, resonant face and hot eyes, and talked in the cadences of extreme sarcasm with very heavy stresses - he wasn't being sarcastic, merely expressive. The friendship between the two did not survive Ballard's increasing interest in experimentalism, which my father always characterised as "buggering about with the reader". But I was always delighted to see Jim later on. Funnily enough, he was an unusually lovable man, despite the extraordinary weirdness of his imagination.

His imagination was formed by his wartime experience in Shanghai, where he was interned by the Japanese. He was 13 at the time and took to the life in the camp as he would "to a huge slum family". But it wasn't just the camp that formed him - it was the very low value attached to human life, something he saw throughout his childhood. He told me that he'd seen coolies beaten to death at a distance of five yards from where he was standing, and every morning as he was driven to school in an American limousine there were always fresh bodies lying in the street. Then came the Japanese. He said "people in the social democracies have no idea of the daily brutality of parts of the east. No they don't, actually. And it's as well that they don't."

It is interesting that his two most famous novels were both filmed: Empire of the Sun by Steven Spielberg (an essentially optimistic artist who is never afraid of dark historical themes), and Crash by David Cronenberg (a much darker artist himself, and one who specialises in filming unfilmable novels). Crash is the more typical of Ballard's novels. It is animated by an obsession with the sexuality of the road accident and reminds you that the word obsession derives from the Latin obsidere, which means "to lay siege to". Ballard is beleaguered by his obsessions. Mood and setting are identical in him. He had very little interest in human beings in the conventional sense (and no ear for dialogue); he is remorselessly visual.

Empire of the Sun - his greatest success - came as a kind of blow to his faithful admirers. This novel, which is utterly realistic, despite the bizarre settings and incidents, seemed a betrayal of the Ballard cult. The cultists felt that Empire (as he used to call it) showed how Ballard's imagination had been warped into such a funny shape. The novel was a naturalistic explanation of how his imagination got that way. For the cultists (not very logically), again, it was like the witch doctor revealing how he faked his magic.

Ballard began as a hardcore SF writer. His very early short stories, on familiar themes such as overpopulation, societal decay and so on, are as good as anything in the genre. But the genre couldn't hold him. There followed four novels of glazed apocalypse - The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), The Crystal World (1966) - where the world was destroyed by wind, by water, by heat and by mineralisation. Then came his brutalist period, beginning in 1970 with The Atrocity Exhibition. Two stories from that book give the tone of the collection: "The Facelift of Princess Margaret" and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan". Then the concrete-and-steel period extends itself with Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975). The next period can again be evoked by another title: Myths of the Near Future (1982). He was still in this period when he died (despite the moving and beautiful memoir Miracles of Life, published last year). The last novels - including Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes - were about the violent atavism of corporate and ultra-priviledged enclaves in a different kind of near future.

Ballard brought to this all his shamanistic skills. He kept asking: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches - the motion sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography and technology? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme. When he broke away from rigid SF, Ballard said that he was rejecting outer space for "inner space". This has always been his arena. Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century. He used to like saying that writers were "one-man teams" and needed the encouragement of the crowd (ie, their readers). But he will also be remembered as a one-man genre; no one else is remotely like him. He was a talisman. Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. He was sui generis. What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery.

Ballard was a great exponent of the Flaubertian line - that writers should be orderly and predictable in their lives, so that they can be savage and sinister in their work. He lived in a semi-detached in Shepperton, which might as well have been called "Dunroamin", and there was the tomato-red Ford Escort parked in its slot in the front garden. When I wrote a long profile of him in 1984, I arrived at 11 in the morning and his first words were "Whisky! Gin! Vodka!" He told me that "Crash freaks" from, say, the Sorbonne would visit him expecting to find a miasma of lysergic-acid and child abuse. But, in fact, what they found was a robustly rounded and amazingly cheerful, positively sunny - suburbanite. In 1964 his wife Mary died suddenly, on a family holiday, so Ballard raised their three children himself. To begin with he could only manage to do this by drinking a scotch every hour, starting at nine in the morning. It took him quite a while to push this back to six o'clock in the evening. I asked him was that difficult, and he said: "Difficult? It was like the Battle of Stalingrad." But everything suggests that he was an impeccable and adoring father.

The last time I saw Ballard, three or four years ago, was when my wife and I, together with Will Self and Deborah Orr, had dinner with him and his partner of 40 years, Claire Walsh. He revealed in the restaurant that he probably had "about two years to live". This was said with instinctive courage, but with all the melancholy to be expected from a man who loved life so passionately.

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Of the great postwar American writers, John Updike, who died last week, was the most controversial, for his sexual candour and unblinking portrayal of adultery in middle-class suburbia. In 1987 Martin Amis travelled to Boston for this paper to meet his hero - then near to completing his acclaimed series of 'Rabbit' novels - to talk about wives, literature ... and mortality. Here we reprint the interview in full

I met up with Updike at Mass General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9.30 that morning.

It was 10.30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. "You know what I look like," he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, "storklike," distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban.

"How are you?" I said, with some urgency.

"They didn't take it out: it's still here. He raised his hand to the light. It seemed a flattering intimacy, after 10 seconds' acquaintance. John Updike, warts and all. Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual. Updike's is called psoriasis, "skin disease marked by red scaly patches," as my COD unfeelingly puts it. He has written about the condition himself, rather more feelingly, in the New Yorker. Actually the growth seemed quite inoffensive, like a sizeable and resolute freckle.

"How frustrating. You must be ..."

"Yes, I'm very sad," he said, and looked - as he would continue to look for the next two hours - like a man barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. This generalised twinkliness has been much remarked. It is almost the demure expression a child has when gratified to the point of outright embarrassment - but with an extra positive charge, flowing from hyperactive senses. "No, apparently it's more complicated than I thought. They're going to do it later in the year. The incision will go from there to there. I'll have to wear a support for a while. I won't be able to play golf. I won't be able to type! But listen. How are you?'

This, too, was said with unusual concern. Updike ducked and briefly grappled with the Boston Globe. He pointed to a piece that I had read, with quivering fingers, half an hour earlier. The previous evening I had flown in from Provincetown: 15 minutes in a Wright-Brothers seven-seater. That same day, according to the Globe, one of these little aeroplanes had lost height and come skimming in over Boston Bay. Sunbathers had dived into the sea from their rafts.

The article ended with a reassuring review of the airline's safety record; it was grounded, quite recently, after a series of accidents, all of them rich in fatalities.

"You flew! I warned you not to."

"Yes, and I'm flying back. After I've done you."

And he said to me what I had been planning to say to him: "You're very brave."

The hospital cafeteria was bright, airy, oceanic; there was foliage, a sun-trapping terrace, a smoking section: it seemed positively fashionable. The atmosphere differed from its British equivalent in many ways - most crucially in that its patrons were, of necessity, on some kind of spree, pushing the boat out, spending big. We joined the queue with our tray. I had coffee, while Updike bemusedly dithered over the half-dozen kinds of tea on offer.

"The ordeal of choice," I said, suavely enough - though one should stress that these occasions are not suave at all. However genial, they are always anxious and exhausting, with the interviewer fielding about 80 per cent of the nerves. "Have you read Saul Bellow's new novel?" I went on. "He says that in the East the ordeal is one of privation, in the West one of choice."

"Yes, I keep meaning to get it. There's just something about forking out the 20 bucks. Why don't I carry that?" he said, and accepted the trembling tray. The gesture was protective, courteous, very, able, above all. "So, the Observer is paying for my tea? How nice."

The tea cost 50 cents. Nor was this the extent of the monies I would disperse on Updike's account. Later, when we drove to Harvard, I gave the novelist a quarter for the parking meter. He fanned a handful of change at me, but I told him that Tiny Rowland [then owner of the Observer] would pick up the tab. Throughout he showed, not a sensitivity, but an awareness about money. "I was raised in the Depression," he has said, "when there was a great sense of dog eat dog and people fighting over scraps." This feeling has partly survived two decades of book-a-year bestsellerdom and the fact that "Reagan has turned America into a tax haven". Nowadays Updike could probably hold his own with the other Midases of the age: the arbitrageur, the greenmail raider, the arms dealer, the video vicar.

"My God," he enthused as we sat, "we're surrounded by all kinds of sick Americans." The breakfast crowd in the Wang Centre were wary in step and gesture. They were trussed in trusses, braced in braces, coated in powerful lotions, creams, elixirs. "Bending and bowing in a variety of friezes", to quote from The Poorhouse Fair (1959), John Hoyer Updike's youthfully solemn first novel.

All the illness on view had a tonic effect on me. After three weeks of holiday "parenting" (Updike's word: his speech and prose are permissively sprinkled with modernisms like "frontal", "focusing", "conflicted" and "judgmental"), I felt like checking into Mass General myself.

"It makes a change," I said, "from the triumphalism of the beach."

"My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. Look at that woman's glasses!" A lady groped by in what could have been a pair of welder's goggles. "I guess she really doesn't want any light in her eyes. My God, look at him!"

As Updike feasted his senses on the scene, I reached grimly for the tape- recorder. He hesitated. "We're not really going to do this, are we? We're just going to have a nice chat," he said, prophetically enough, "and then you're going to go home and write a long piece about me and my work."

Lauded, harassed, honoured, micro-inspected, Updike is by now simply stoical about the "attention" his work attracts. And he is a gentleman, and a good old pro. The enemies of promise - or of reasonable productivity - used to be Hollywood, fancy journalism, alcohol, and so on. These days the main enemy is being interviewed. Updike, if he isn't careful, could spend his time doing little else. In a recent New Yorker he published a story (and it is a full-time job keeping up with Updike: everywhere you look he is blurting out essays, poems, memoirs, reviews) in which a dissident Czech poet yearns to be rearrested and put back in jail, so that he can write some verse and stop being interviewed.

"A Korean professor might come and torment me for an hour. German TV keeps thinking it wants to stop by. A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. Once a year or so I rise early and do Good Morning America. It's kind of a raffish experience. You go in all groggy and sit in the green room with Mel Torme or the father of 17 girls or some such celebrity of the moment.

"Writers can get over-interviewed. The whole performance indicates that you are quite a swell fellow just by being you, whereas we know that what merit we have, if any, resides elsewhere. It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician."

Updike can hardly complain - and he doesn't complain - about the abrasions of self-exposure, because he has taken care of all that in his stories and novels. For some reason (won't anyone tell us why?), modern fiction tends towards the autobiographical, and American fiction more than most, and John Updike more than any. The tendency is still regarded as a "flaw", in Updike and in general; but one might as usefully accuse Shakespeare of having, in his tragedies, a "weakness" for kings and noblemen and warriors. The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are now.

Yet the case of John Updike is unquestionably extreme. The textural contrasts between your first and second wife's pubic hair, for instance, is something that most writers feel their readers can get along without. The novelists of yesteryear would gallantly take leave of their creations at the bedroom door. Updike tags along, not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom. Indeed, he sends a little Japanese camera crew in there after them. And so it is with all the other intimacies of thought and feeling. "It's all in Couples," he will concede. Or: "The novels are a fair record of what I felt." Or: "It's all in the books."

It is all also in the New Yorker. When I was a student, living on the Iffley Road, Oxford, I sometimes wished that E B White would call by, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to offer me a job on the New Yorker. It never happened. But it happened to Updike. He was at the Ruskin College of Art; the call came on the strength of early stories and proven versatility on the Harvard Lampoon. He was already married ("hand in hand, smaller than Hansel and Gretel"), already a father. Pictured with his first child, he looks to me like an oddjobbing babysitter, willing and gentle enough, no doubt, but far too young to be of much use. He was 23.

"I left New York after only two years there. The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect. The literary atmosphere struck me as ugly, and still does. Resentful, poisonous, a squeezed feeling. I came up here to be out of harm's way: inaccessibility is the best way of saying no. But Boston is becoming an honorary borough of New York."

Under the enlightened patronage of the magazine - an unbroken relationship - Updike established himself in Ipswich, Mass. "There was space here. We raised the children - or they seemed to raise themselves." And so did the poems, stories and novels: earnest, gawky, forgiving, celebratory. He did his "secluded and primitive" Pennsylvania childhood in Olinger Stories and elsewhere, his dad in The Centaur, and his mum in Of the Farm. Fame, sophistication, modernity and wealth arrived with Couples (1968), when Updike did Ipswich.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. Couples struck enough people this way, and was soon labelled "the anatomy of a generation". Its broad success also depended on a combination of the intensely literary and the near-pornographic. A cat's-cradle of vigorous adultery, as filtered through the sensibility of a modern James - or a modern Joyce. What Joyce did for the residents of Dublin, Updike recklessly offered to do for the dreamy dentists and Byronic building contractors of Tarbox:

... the neighbours' boy linked to her by a handkerchief, lithe. Lower classes have that litheness. Generations of hunger. Give me your poor. Marcia brittle. Janet fat. Angela drifty and that Whitman gawky, resisting something, air. Eddie's Vespa but no Ford, Carol's car. He home and she shopping. Buying back liniment. I ache afterwards... Death. Hamster. Shattered glass. He eased up on the accelerator.

Didn't ease up. Pressed on. 500 pages like this. Couples is littered with brilliancies; but the smiles and the flinch alternate too rapidly for the reader's comfort. The book seemed to be Updike's pinnacle at the time. Now it looks more like a shimmering false summit.

Meanwhile as New Yorker readers must have been only too aware, all was not well with the Updike marriage. The annual damage-checks were arriving in the form of the Maples Stories, worldly comedies of disintegration with titles like "Waiting Up", "Sublimating", "Separating" and "Divorcing: A Fragment". Sample home truth, sample gallantry (their subject here is "guilt-avoidance"):

"I've decided to kick you out. I'm going to ask you to leave town."

Abruptly full, his heart thumped; it was what he wanted. "OK," he said carefully. "If you think you can manage."

..."Things are stagnant," she explained, "stuck; we're not going anywhere."

"I will not give her up," he interposed.

"Don't tell me, you've told me."

"Nor do I see you giving him up."

"I would if you asked. Are you asking ?"

"No. Horrors. He's all I've got."

Soon, young David Updike was publishing his account of the divorce, in the New Yorker. Then Updike's mother ("I'm in a writer sandwich," says Updike warily) weighed in with her version, in the New Yorker. "I've gotten used to being written about," says his ex-wife Mary, quoted (for a change) in the New York Times. Open marriages are not often as open as this. The loop, I mean to suggest, the circuit or the food chain, is shockingly brief. There is something predatory or vampiric in it - a hint of domestic cannibalism. It represents a kind of love to set these things down, as Updike has always claimed ("loving if not flattering"), and a kind of fidelity too. But a writer's kind, and therefore quite ruthless.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview. A personality is more palatable than a body of work, so all the faceting and detail of the life and writing is subsumed into thumbnail approximation. Who is John Updike? A garrulous adulterer who lives near the sea? By rights, he should have turned up at Mass General with lipstick on his collar, and then disappeared every 10 minutes to supervise abortions for Mabel and Missy and Charity and Hope. For the record, he was charm incarnate. But as for what Updike is like - in his head, in his private culture - I knew all that already.

In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity. The brain itself is serendipitous and horrendously encyclopaedic; he knows about home-improvement ("20 feet of 2 inch pine quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1½inch finishing nails"), music, cars ("padded tilt steering wheel, lumbar support lever for adjustable driver comfort, factory-installed AM/FM/ MPX'"), trees, computers, painting ("she halts in the pose of Michelangelo's slave, of Munch's madonna, of Ingres' urn-bearer"), boats ("Arthur's newly bought gaff-rigged Herreshof 12½"), photosynthesis ("the 5/6 of the triosephosphate"), pornography, theology, nuclear physics, linotyping, gold futures, aerodynamics, Africa, cookery, cosmogony and I don't know what-all else.

The unblinkingness of his eye is opposed by the mighty wooziness of his heart. He is a romantic, an Arcadian, a tremendous (and not always a tasteful) yearner for purity, innocence, the cadences of goodness. He is greedy, androgynous, devout, determined, intolerably sentimental and unforgiveably bright.

What makes this chaos meaningful, and what lifts the work from the merely phenomenal, is the way time is acting on it. Countervailingly, and increasingly, Updike is sour, withering, crafty, painfully comic. Such an immersion in the physical world, it seems, will tend not towards nostalgia but towards an invigorating and majestic cynicism. Mortality and its terrors were the fount of much of the early mawkishness; now they form the backing for a new robustness, a humorous pessimism that Updike has grudgingly embraced.

"Yes, it's another part of me, isn't it?" he says. "Maybe it's the best part of me. It's strange that I can be so sour when I'm such a sunny, cheerful individual. But when I get going on it...""

"It comes."

"It comes. It comes."

It comes in the form of a revitalised Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, the vulgar bohunk he left behind in Pennsylvania. Rabbit is not the "Updike who never went to Harvard", as some commentators claim; he is part of Updike's mind and always has been, part of our minds, the material man who sulks and gloats about sex and money. With Rabbit is Rich (1982), the third novel in the sequence, the hitherto fruitless homage to Joyce finds a truly modern application; at last Updike is elaborating and not just annotating Ulysses, urging it further and deeper into the 20th century.

It comes in the form of Henry Bech, the eponym of Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech is Back (1983). "I keep meaning to kill Bech," says Updike, viciously, "but he won't go away." Rabbit differs from Updike the man. Bech differs from Updike the writer: he is highbrow, cosmopolitan, single and Jewish, thus allowing Updike, through a feat of empathic daring, to arrogate a culture that has "kept the secret of [its] laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of the literary world." Updike echoes Malamud: "By developing a Jewish persona I was saying something like: 'Look, I'm really Jewish too. We're all Jewish here.'" But he was also challenging that domination, typically demanding more than his fair share. Another voice, another "third person", witty, wounded and historically central.

Then there is mainstream Updike, the fiction from the horse's mouth. Or (it must be said) from the horse's backside, in the case of The Witches of Eastwick (1984), which has just been filmed. The movie is so preposterous that critics have been protective about its source, forgetting that the book is preposterous too: crammed with beauties, but winsome, whimsical, haloed in a seamless futility. It would appear, though, that Updike is the better for the occasional holiday from merit (or therapeutic indulgence), because his most recent novel is the near-masterpiece Roger's Version. A meditation on death and creation in the pale light of a modern city, it is the richest, funniest and gloomiest book that Updike has yet written. To him, the future may not look as bright as it once did, but it has never looked brighter to his readers.

"Shit," said Updike. It was his one profanity of the morning. He had just led me into the wrong car-park. We were leaving Mass General and proceeding to Harvard, where Updike had a lunch.

"You once wrote a novel, or a romance, called Marry Me," I said. "Your new book of stories is called Trust Me. But maybe you should have called it Divorce Me."

For the book is riven with divorce and its aftermath. Brave ex-wives and their watchful replacements, half-grown children seldom seen, possessions divided, houses scoured and then abandoned. "They don't call them orphanages any more, do they?" asks one character. "They call them normal American homes." I put this to Updike, and quoted the line: "In the pattern of his generation he had married young, had four children, and eventually got a divorce."

"A pattern, that's right. Marriage was very erotic when I was growing up. You got married in college and had kids when you were still kids yourselves. Four children in two-year notches. It was the same for everybody we knew. The marginal couples stayed together. The ones who were any fun all broke up. In my case we'd just had enough of each other. It was terrible for the children, having to become grown-ups overnight."

This turned out to be the third time Updike and I had met. He couldn't remember the second time, when I had shaken his hand at a London publishing party. And I couldn't remember the first time, when I was a nine-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. "I spent an evening with your mother and father and some other people. Were you there? You might have been in bed. We played cards. We were all drunk but no one, I think, was as drunk as your father."

"Those were wild times. Everyone was at it."

"So I've read," said Updike. "So I've read. It was a revolution for all of us - not just for Abbie Hoffman. Kind of a dark carnival. We were all wearing love-beads, in a way."

Three years later, my parents duly divorced. Divorce, in those days, was like a dreadful disease that everyone's parents kept catching. It occurred to me for the first time that this had determined the pattern of my generation. The children of these divorcees, we married late, had children late - too late, perhaps, for the body's good. Updike was delighted to hear about our strained backs and spongy knees, our pleading ankles.

We left the hospital grounds and drove to Cambridge in Updike's powerful Audi. We drove from American sickness to American health - Harvard Yard, in July sunshine - and the student body, muscular and tanktop, yelling, jogging, frisbeeing, cartwheeling, and necking and quarrelling and breaking up. Updike's kids passed through here some time ago. Whereas my first-born will be three in November.

Sprawled here on the lawns, this particular batch seem to be oddly poised. Seventy-five per cent of them think that they will die in a nuclear war. Probably even more of them believe that they will meet their fate in a singles' bar. Marriage has been re-eroticised for them, whether they like it or not. "Nature is hard to outsmart," as Updike said. "It's always one jump ahead. Nature doesn't really care about us at all."

He was dropping off some paperwork at the Widener Library: correspondence, the galleys of Trust Me - no sooner published than cleared away, the decks cleared for the next thing. We parted, and then he called me back, telling me to give his best to my parents. Watching him strut away, head in the air, I felt - suddenly and ridiculously - what it was to have been one of his children, and how I would have hated to see him go.

I sat on the grass and looked again at one of the new stories. The passage verges on the sentimental (the weakness for the word "little", the cutely agrammatical "that" towards the end); but then I was verging on the sentimental myself.

Though Foster was taller, the boy was broader in the shoulders, and growing. "Want to ride with me to the dump?" Tommy asked.

"I would, but I better go." He, too, had a new life to lead. By being on this forsaken property at all, Foster was in a sense on the wrong square, if not en prise. He remembered how once he had begun to teach this boy chess, but in the sadness of watching him lose - the little furry bowed head frowning above his trapped king - the lessons had stopped ...

Seeing his father waver, he added, "It'll only take 20 minutes." Though broad of build, Tommy had beardless cheeks and, between thickening eyebrows, a trace of that rounded, faintly baffled blankness babies have, that wrinkles before they cry.

"OK," Foster said. "You win. I'll come along. I'll protect you."

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He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems. John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence.

I've seen it suggested that such prodigies suffer from an enviable condition called 'pressure on the cortex'. It's as if they have within them an underground spring which is always on the point of eruption. He has produced an enormous body of work. He is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.

He alone could hold his head up with the great Jews - Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Singer - it was entirely typical of him that, as a sideline, he became a great Jewish novelist too, in the person of Henry Bech, the hero of several of his books. That seems to me to be an essential Updike trait, never being satisfied with any limitations always demanding far more than his fair share.

There aren't supposed to be extremes of uniqueness - either you are or you're not - but he was exceptionally sui generis. He himself was too much under the spell of Joyce, and in a novel like Couples you can see that he set himself the task of bringing Joyce to America. I don't think he could see this - the great stylists are the ones you shouldn't be influenced by, but it was a noble attempt and with a treasury as deep as Updike's he could afford to have a few near misses.

Joyce himself said that certain things were too embarrassing to be written down in black and white. Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom. It's as if nothing human seemed closed to his eye. I think he was probably of the pattern of his generation. As he said, 'My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.' The wild oats period came in early middle age.

For me, his greatest novels were the last two Rabbit books - Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. With that fourth novel in the tetralogy, he had the homerun with all the bases loaded. His style was one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality. Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself 'How would Updike have done it?" This is a very cold day for literature.

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Last week in the Guardian Ronan Bennett accused Martin Amis of racism. Here the writer rejects the charge, insisting his views on Islam are a question of ideology, not ethnicity

I want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers - and I know I have a few - the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT "ADVOCATE" ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.

On November 19 the arrival of "the new racism" was eagerly heralded on the cover of G2 - tricked out, for the occasion, to resemble some scabrous, illiterate hate-sheet of the 1930s (Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, for example). Well, this is what's new about the new racism: it isn't racist. Ronan Bennett writhes and toils in the coarsest of category errors. The question before the house is not about race. It is about ideology.

When I was five or six years old, my father took me to meet a black man. To be more accurate, my father (at that point, incidentally, a communist and universalist) made a call on a visiting academic from, I think, Nigeria, and he brought me with him. "He's a black man," said my father on the way. "With a black face." We went there by bus, and my sensorium was entirely immersed in the savage joy of riding on the red doubledecker (upstairs, in the smoking section). "He'll be black. He'll have a black face." And I remember thinking, Whew, Dad's going on about this a bit, isn't he? On arrival, I entered the room - and there was the black man, who had a black face.

"You've got a black face!" I said, and burst out crying.

"Of course I have! I'm black!" he said, and burst out laughing.

And when my father comforted me, I already felt that I had failed to deserve his consolation.

That was in Swansea in the mid-1950s. I had never seen a black man before (not even on television: we had no television). And now I feel that this was the only serious deprivation of my childhood - the awful human colourlessness of South Wales, the dully flickering whites and grays, like a Pathe newsreel, like an ethnic Great Depression. In common with all novelists, I live for and am addicted to physical variety; and my one quarrel with the rainbow is that its spectrum isn't wide enough. I would like London to be full of upstanding Martians and Neptunians, of reputable citizens who came, originally, from Krypton and Tralfamadore. It makes me uneasy to quote myself, but I must use the weapon others use. Here are three gobbets from the Independent (January 2007):

"The form that Islamophobia is now taking - the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street - disgusts me. It is mortifying to be part of a society in which a minority feels under threat."

"The difficulty has to do with the nature of national identity; and the American model is the one we ... should attempt to plagiarise. A Pakistani immigrant, in Boston, can say "I am an American", and all he is doing is stating the obvious. Can his equivalent, in Bradford, say the equivalent thing in the equivalent way? Britain needs to become what America has always been - an immigrant society. That is in any case our future."

"The best thing [about returning to the UK after a 30-month absence] has been to find myself living in what, despite its faults (despite a million ills), is an extraordinarily successful multiracial society. This is a beautiful idea, with a good chance of becoming a beautiful reality, too."

Can Ronan Bennett really be so hard-up for racists that he is reduced to excoriating the author of those lines? My observations were made in response to questions posed by the newspaper's readers, and they were sent in by email. So: somewhere between an interview and an essay. And can we hang on to that distinction for just a little while longer? What you say about something is never your last word on any subject. But what you write should aspire to be just that: your last word. To paraphrase and slightly adapt Vladimir Nabokov (Strong Opinions): I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letters, I talk like an idiot.

Ronan Bennett thinks like an idiot. An extraterrestrial just off the ship, reading him, would assume that nothing unusual has happened since September 10, 2001 - except for a dismaying increase in what he (uselessly) blankets as "Islamophobia". My inflammatory remarks, made in a newspaper interview, inflamed no one at the time, because the time (August 2006) was also the context. August 2006, and the revelation of a third jihadist conspiracy, in the space of 13 months, to massacre a random sample of British citizens: in this case 3,000 people. The comments I made, in addition, were prefaced by the following: "There's a definite urge to say..." When Bennett wonders why I don't "recant", what does he expect me to do? Pretend that I didn't in fact experience this transient impulse (which was not racist but simply retaliatory)? Does he want - do you want - novelists to sound like politicians, or like the pious post-historical automata that Bennett and Eagleton claim to be? Do you want the voice of the individual, or the aggressive purity of the ideologue?

"Islamophobia is racist": this is Bennett's single contribution. But before he can clamber on to his Medusa's Raft, he first has to put it about that I make no distinction between Islam and Islamism: "[He] is talking about Islam, not Islamism, Muslims, not Islamists". All right. Here's another quote (from the essay of 2006 originally and hereafter entitled Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind):

"We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being... Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived... To repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind ... But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination ... Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta."

Now comes Bennett's dialectical leap. He writes that I am hostile to Islam on racial grounds - a self-evident absurdity. Consider what a vast project of antagonism he sets before me. Racial hatred directed at over a quarter of humanity; racial hatred directed at pretty well every ethnicity on earth. (And what does he imagine I make of someone like David Myatt, the neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denier who now calls himself Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt? Do I crinkle my nose in indulgence, because this fierce jihadist is white?) It ought to be a rule of the discourse, of any discourse, that one novelist should give another novelist the basic credit of not being a maniac.

I must have seen Bennett coming when, in April of this year, I reviewed Mark Steyn's alarmist but broadly pertinent book, America Alone (and here I quote myself for the last time):

"Any acknowledgment of the fear of being out-bred inevitably reminds us of eugenics and forced sterilisation and the like; and many good modern westerners, reading Mr Steyn, will feel the warm glow of righteousness that normally precedes an accusation of 'racism'."

But it's not about race. It's about ideology.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are. If, on the other hand, some of them believe in Sharia and the Caliphate (and believe, too, that slaughtering the attendees of ladies' night at the Tiger Tiger discotheque is a good way of bringing that about), the numbers start to matter.

When I interviewed Tony Blair earlier this year I asked him if continental demographics had yet become "a European conversation". He said: "It's a subterranean conversation." And we know what that means. The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable. As a multiculturist ideologue, Bennett cannot engage with the fact that a) the indigenous populations of Spain and Italy are due to halve every 35 years, and b) this entails certain consequences. He reaches, like a flustered commissar, for the polemical violence of "white supremacism"; he reaches for the race card - that silver hand-grenade of the virtuous.

Terry Eagleton started this ragged furore, with an attack in the Guardian that contained three factual errors in its first sentence [one of these, concerning the publication date of Amis's essay, was the Guardian's mistake, not Eagleton's]. Bennett, who is rather more scrupulous, now comes in at the scavenger end of it. Anyway, it is a miserable chore even to imagine these writers at work, dourly assembling their diatribes, hopscotching and cherrypicking from a press interview here, a TV interview there, an essay, a short story, some gout of alphabet soup in the Daily Mail, distorting this, suppressing that, and fudging the other. They are not interested in arguments and ideas, but in staking out "positions", in sending "signals", and in flirtatiously seeking the approval of the likeminded. This isn't the first time I have been accused of racism ("anti-Semitism" in 1991 for the novel Time's Arrow); and it is a calumny like no other. It paints a cross on your front door.

Let us as close as Bennett closes. It is a little epiphany, a little poem, of pharisaical self-congratulation: Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

Well, shame on me, right enough, and shame on everyone else - but not on you, Mr Bennett. Read that last sentence again. You didn't tolerate it, did you? No, you come out of this uncommonly well. Your disgrace isn't social; your disgrace is moral, intellectual and artistic - but no one's going to bother you about that. I will just say, in parting, that the ideology you appease (let's follow Francis Fukuyama and call it jihadism) is irrationalist, misogynist, homophobic, inquisitional, totalitarian and imperialist. And it isn't merely "racist". It is genocidal.

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The Downing Street door has nearly closed on Tony Blair. Martin Amis has been shadowing the prime minister on his farewell tour, watching him preen in Belfast, share bonbons with the Bush administration - and get it badly wrong in Basra. And all the while the Iraq protesters are hovering ...

Watch our video and pictures of Blair's last days, narrated by Martin Amis here

No 1, London

It isn't bad, driving through town with Tony. The car's steel cladding, as the PM points out, is almost comically thick - so thick, indeed, that the interior has the feel of something like a Ford Fiesta rather than a Jaguar; and it takes nearly all your strength to tug shut the slab-like door behind you. But then we're away. The crouched policemen, in their Day-Glo yellow strip, buzz past like purposeful hornets to liberate the road ahead. We barely brake once between Downing Street and the Westway. The power is ebbing from him now; but for a little while longer we can luxuriate in the present tense. And, yes, it's a bit of all right, driving through town with Tony.

The best moment comes as we approach Hyde Park Corner. Instead of toiling around it, like all the other fools and losers, we sail across it, diagonally, and then curve right past that far from unfashionable address - No 1, London.

Now I notice that the PM wears no seatbelt. When I tenderly point this out to him, he gives an unemphatic shrug. He is, he says, "embarrassed by the bikes". I am wondering if that's why Tony looks so young - 10 years without any traffic. But it wasn't always like this. The police escort, like so much else, is a consequence of September 11.

Edinburgh

We were at the Corn Exchange, where Tony would soon denounce the Scots Nats. During the pre-speech lull he strolled over and said, "I had a shock this morning."

Yes, I thought: I bet. I should just about say you did have a shock this morning. There it was on the front page of the Independent: the shadowy photograph (making him look haunted, hunted - isolated, above all) and the banner headline, BLAIRAQ. "An exclusive poll reveals that 69% of Britons believe that, when he leaves office, his enduring legacy will be ... " But it was, of course, laughably inexperienced of me to think that this was the shock Tony hoped to discuss. He's not about to raise the subject. Everyone else on earth can be relied upon to do that. It is impossible to exaggerate it: the white-lipped and bloody-minded persistence of the question of Iraq.

"I went on GMTV," he continued, moving his head about stiffly in mock indignation, "and Kate Moss's models were on it, too. Five or six of them. And all of them amazingly beautiful."

"Wearing?"

"Not much. They were about six foot three. In incredibly short skirts. And someone said, 'Did you notice how short their skirts were?' And I said, 'No! No!'"

"Bit early in the day," grumbled a journalist.

"No," said the PM, "it wasn't too early in the day. It never is too early in the day."

That morning, after a long speech (and Q and A) on the NHS, and then the appearance on GMTV, Tony showed up for a raucous bash at Labour HQ - and it was still barely 8.30am. Disco music on the turquoise boombox! The coffees! The teas! That exclusive Independent poll also revealed, much more quietly, that 61% of Britons believe Blair to have been a good PM, including 89% of Labour supporters. This was evident. The warm-up act came courtesy of Old Labour, in the person of that battered sensualist John Prescott ("a decade of delivery!"); then the crowd, gurgling with adoration, feasted its senses on the PM.

The one-floor offices are a further concretisation of what Blair has done for the party. Until 1995, Labour was stationed in Walworth Road, SW17, a facility described at the time as "crap" by Blair and as "fuck-awful" by Alastair Campbell. From the old HQ - remote, poky, dank with lumpen defeat - the foot soldiers got their upgrade: to Millbank Tower, just across the river from Parliament. Then came the mighty computer, "Excalibur", primed for light-speed rebuttal of all Tory boasts and smears. The symbolism was unambiguous: here was electoral modernity, and the party machine.

Blair "chose" Labour, but reinvented himself as its antithesis. A mutant: something like a middle-class German-American Christian Democrat. Compared with him, Gordon Brown is all fish and chips and Woodbine. But the apparatchiks loves him: he is their redeemer, their awakener, their landslider.

At the Point Conference Centre in Edinburgh, during another lull, Tony strolled over once again and said, "What have you been up to today?"

"I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask." For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious. "You've had reverses in the midterms before. And in the European parliament. But this will probably be your first ... rejection."

"This won't be my first rejection. 2003."

"And Cheriegate? That was bullshit, right?"

"Oh, complete bullshit. But what about you?" he typically asks. "If your books get attacked, you don't let it throw you."

The PM had earlier confessed that it wasn't just the miniskirts that gave him a turn on GMTV. There was also the contrast between his face on the monitor and all that bright and breezy footage from 1997: "The ageing process on screen," he said. It wasn't a before-and-after such as Abe Lincoln's - the handsome frontiersman completely desiccated by the Civil War. Whatever way you look at it, though, 10 years is a long time in politics.

"There's also an ageing process within," I said. "You don't get tougher. You get tenderer. And certain phrases come into your head. Like life's work." Yes, or like legacy. "But you've got steel. Like your car."

"Mm. Armour-plated."

The Den

Number 10, broad, tall and deep, has the appearance of a country hotel, with the furnishings of a Harley Street waiting room; and there is a mid-stairs feel to it. You go past the discreetly burping doorman, and for every striding or trotting secretary ("Is the PM still in his office?"), for every spin doctor and dreamily cruising technocrat, there's a bloke trundling past with a trash barrel or a porter's trolley.

You feel at once that the atmosphere is also palpably genial and tolerant and quasi-egalitarian. "Tony," a staffer told me, "is a great non-belittler." Downing Street, after all, is presided over by a man who answers to a diminutive. This may have been notionally true under Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, but not under (say) Dai Lloyd George, Andy Bonar Law, Stan Baldwin, Nev Chamberlain, Winnie Churchill, Hal Wilson or, for that matter, Tony Eden.

The Tony administration, some say, deploys a "sofa style" of governance: the normal channels of influence are largely bypassed, and the PM relies on his inner circle of brainstormers and media-wise myrmidons. In May/June 1997 it was decided that the regulation of interest rates should become the responsibility of the Bank of England; when Tony was advised that such a momentous change should be discussed with Cabinet, he said, "Oh, they won't mind. We'll ring round."

Today I was allowed into the Den to witness "Denocracy" in action. The subject was climate change and exploratory talks on the creation of a "carbon market". Tony listened to six or seven voices ("Those two are still slagging each other off... Chancellor Merkel wants a deal ... The meeting with the Indians was positive ... The Japanese was extremely touchy ... The American was extremely difficult"), before weighing in with his conclusion: "We need to make it clear what it means for American business - that they won't leach contracts to the Chinese. I will work it through with him. With Bush."

Then it was upstairs to the White Room for a podcast with Bob Geldof on Africa - Africa, a quarter-century compulsion of Bob's and a solid 10-year enthusiasm of Tony's. Then it was downstairs to the long table and a multinational convocation of bishops. Power has been described as a drug, an aphrodisiac, a "filthy venom" (in the words of Maxim Gorky); it is also, for much of the time, carcinogenically boring. Like all politicians, Tony has seven or eight kinds of smile. Smiles two and three would do for the bishops. When he is making the rounds of a crowded room, his smile, towards the end, is a rictus, and his eyes are as hard as jewels.

All the boredom is what the world doesn't see - the hidden, humble toil of dosing and humouring, of giving face and jollying along. It is this that keeps politics halfway honest, and impedes the process that Bob Geldof alluded to, up in the White Room: "It's a bit naff, isn't it? What happened? The politicisation of celebrity or the celebritisation of politics?" And the question arose: what will Tony be when he quits? An ex-politician?

"No," he said. "I'll be a former celebrity."

Belfast

From George Best City Airport to Stormont. And the Castle is a thrillingly emotive sight on this day - the great dripping edifice of intransigence. Within, Blair knocked off some interviews before the historic addresses in the Great Hall. And I spent the time trying to parse the anarchy of his accent, a dog's breakfast of Durham, public school Edinburgh, Australia (years one to four) and estuary Essex. "Wanted" is wantud and "destructive" is destructuv. The terminal t is regularly swallowed ("It's nok clear") and there is a candid glottal stop in his wha'ever. Blair was reminiscing about his childhood holidays in Donegal and his first "half" of Guinnuss when, ineluctably, the interviewer said, "One last question, Prime Minister. This is a huge achievement, but it seems your main legacy will be ..." And Blair's blue eyes minutely flinch, and seem to cancel themselves.

I watched the swearing-in at the Assembly by TV link, and it was something to see. The old zealot, Paisley, still cake-in-the-rain handsome in his 82nd year, and the affectless Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, a ringer for Conrad's Professor, the meagre megalomaniac in The Secret Agent, whose "thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction". But there we had it, the convergence of the twain, in an atmosphere of long-compressed agitation and near-hilarity, the hilarity of the unreal. It was almost a Mexican wave.

Meanwhile, outside, a reminder of local concerns: NO SHRINE AT THE MAZE and JUSTICE FOR PROTESTANTS. But the big banner, and all the energy, proclaimed: BLAIR LEGACY 60,000 DEAD IN IRAQ. And at the next stop, a courtesy call at the venerable daily the News Letter, there was a raggedly thrashing figure on the street with a policeman sitting on it and a police dog barking at it, and BLIAR. WANTED. WAR CRIMINAL.

We are witnesses to the triumphal speeches and we hear the applause, but we don't usually see the moments of fierce political relish, the deep and durable gloat of vindication: I was right all along! At another castle, Hillsborough (the Queen's Belfast bolthole), there was one such, when Blair had a quiet half-hour with the tottering Teddy Kennedy and the redoubtable Peter Hain. History - the remorseless unforeseen - had for once in its life colluded with their desire, and it was all very understated, the tacit satisfaction, all very hushed and husky and hard-won.

Kennedy said that he had been involved in the process since Bloody Sunday in 1972 (Blair's gap year: he was a velvet-looned Bee Gee with a guitar called Clarence). Thirteen died on Bloody Sunday; and the toll for the whole period stands at about 3,500 - or the equivalent of one bad month in Iraq. Later, in Basra, Blair would tell the troops that the struggle they were engaged in was "infinitely more important than Northern Ireland", for the simple reason that it would shape "the future of the world".

On the plane, in a brief audience with the PM, I said that the events of the day were of course exhilarating but also intimidating. How long does it take to evolve from terror to politics? Could he imagine, in the Iraqi parliament of the future, the ghosts of Muqtada al-Sadr and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi gazing at each other with smiling eyes?

"It must happen," he said. "Something like that must eventually happen."

Washington

"Sit Room" is not an American contraction along the lines of fry pan, sleep pill or shave cream. Far from being the sitting room, the Sit Room is the Situation Room where, this morning, Bush and Blair and Condi and Cheney are having a video teleconference with their commanders and ambassadors in Iraq. Any moment now, there will be an elaborately staged, side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder double-premier advance to the Oval Office for talks, with other participants, about Africa, Iran and "energy security". The atmosphere in these corridors, the aides, the secret servicemen, the odd wandering pol with hair as rigid as caramel or marzipan, doesn't remind you of anything else. A futuristic academy, perhaps, of pure power.

The style is not prime ministerial but presidential: at every moment the office itself is honoured and exalted. You get a sense of it at the gate on Pennsylvania Avenue where, with your press cards (plural), your staff pin and your photo ID, you confront the scowling, head-shaking jacks-in-office - incarnations of disgusted scepticism. Inside, the whole place fizzes with zero tolerance, with the prideful tension of high protocol. Its peculiarly American flavour is evident in the sustained choreography and the dread of the spontaneous. This does remind you of something: a film set. After prodigious delays and innumerable false alarms, and bungled rehearsals (with stand-ins), Harrison Ford and Jeremy Irons give us their 15 seconds, then it's back to the delays and the false alarms and the bungled rehearsals.

Pretty well everyone, from the semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere ("So! The poddle of Downing Street once again hear's his masters whissel") to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (who has started defying the Americans because he "doesn't want to be known as the Arab Tony Blair"): pretty well everyone agrees that the PM has vitiated his premiership by sticking too close to George Bush - an association described as "tragic" by Neil Kinnock and as "abominable" by Jimmy Carter. And Blair himself, I thought, was arrestingly forthright when he said, in a recent interview on NBC, that "at one level ... it is the job of the British prime minister to get on with the American president". This is a tradition that goes back, with certain fluctuations, to Churchill and the termination of Britain's imperial weight. One should not pretend it is a frictionless business, saying no to America. It is one thing to be "a leading member of the EU". It is quite another to be what Clinton called "the world's indispensable nation".

I was given a clandestine glimpse of this disparity in the Roosevelt Room, while chewing on a bonbon graciously offered me by a passing Karl Rove ("I think we need some glucose here"), and waiting for Harrison and Jeremy to make their next move. A few prime ministerial staffers were comparing notes with a presidential equivalent on the question of foreign travel. When Blair goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of 30 (and five bodyguards). When Bush goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of 800 (and 100 bodyguards); if he visits two countries on the same trip, the figure is 1,600; three countries, and the figure is 2,400. At the other end, Blair will settle for whatever transport is made available. Using freight aircraft, Bush takes along his own limousine, his own back-up limousine, his own refuelling trucks and his own helicopters. "Mm," murmured a chastened Brit. "You make our lives seem very simple." This was, shall we say, the diplomatic way of putting it.

Bush and Blair exchanged their political farewells at a press conference in the Rose Garden. The president, by now, fancies himself as a great wit (among other things), having spent six years surrounded by people who double up at his feeblest crack. But it has to be said that Bush was at his very best that day, generous and affectionate, and quick to acknowledge the political pain he had inflicted on his (necessarily) junior partner. Then, too, there were the coded salutes to Blairean "influence" in his mention of global warming ("a serious issue") and his tolerant reference to the two-state solution in the Middle East.

The PM, for his part, gave a passionate restatement of his crystallised rationale: after September 11, the west had no choice but to unite against a planetary enemy; and he did what he did because he believed it was right. While the two men spoke, you could hear the distant bawling of the protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was as if an incensed but microscopic goblin was off in the bushes somewhere, down by the ornamental lake, his voice strained to the maximum yet barely louder than the endless miaows of the cameras.

After a celebratory session at the British Embassy (Northern Ireland), we were given the full totalitarian motorcade from Massachusetts Avenue to Andrews Air Force Base. At every crossroads, junction and side turning there was a squad car keeping the lid on a half-mile Tony tailback. And on we sped - our limousines, our Rolls-Royce, our Swat truck - across the flyover above a Beltway shorn of all traffic, and on to the tarmac from where our plane would take us, via Heathrow, to Kuwait.

Iraq

My support for the war, nonexistent until it actually began, received no noticeable fillip as I donned my 10-kilo combat vest and flak helmet, and trudged up into the rump of the Hercules C-130.

I had earlier been roused by a 4.30am wake-up call, and then extracted a) two bottles of water from a minibar childishly infested with 7Up and Orangina, and b) a full toilet roll from the adjacent bathroom (what I really wanted was a Depend undergarment). My breakfast, too, was untypically light on the All-Bran and black coffee. We advanced to the airport through the almost artistic cheerlessness of Kuwait City - a conurbation seemingly put together without a woman's touch, its only colours commercial, its only curves devotional, under a sinister mist of damp dust.

The interior of the Hercules was without surfaces; it was all innards - sacking, wiring, tubing, webbing. DANGER, WARNING, EMERGENCY GROUND AND DITCH. A soldier hollered out our survival instructions, not a word of which I caught, and of course there were no tranquil updates from the captain, and no accessible portholes, so the only progress reports were acoustical: fantastic snortings and screechings.

Tony rode in the cockpit, and spiffily disembarked, at Baghdad International, in suit and tie. At no point, so far as I saw, did he encumber himself with the neck-ricking headgear or the snarling Velcro of the flak jacket. And I remembered that first journey when, in rather more agreeable surroundings, he disdained the use of the seatbelt in his armour-plated Jag. What is this prime ministerial trait? The rest of us, by this stage, were carapaced in sweat and grit. But Tony crossed the runway like a true exceptionalist - one of the chosen, the saved, the elect.

Needless to say, there would be no eye-catching motorcade for "the Highway of Death" to Baghdad. Tony climbed into his helicopter; I climbed into another and watched, with fatalistic detachment, as the tawny teenager fed the cartridge belt into the tripod-mounted machine gun. We steered low, just above the telegraph wires. At this height (I was told), no missile would have time to arm itself before impact. The helicopter would take the hit, but it wouldn't actually explode. We also fired off flares as we flew, so that the more credulous projectiles would seek their heat rather than ours. If you closed your eyes you could hear music, military but atonal, like tinnitus.

Mortar fire had just savaged a Toyota Land Cruiser in the parking lot of the British Embassy, our first stop in the Green Zone. While Tony took his rictus from face to face, I got talking to Jackie, a member of the managerial staff. "Every day now we have an incoming," she said. "If you're inside, you're all right, and if you're outside there are these duck-and-cover units. They're like boxes, and you're supposed to scrabble into them when you hear the five-second warning. It's the hot metal - the shrapnel. For five or six weeks we've been getting it. You don't bother if you've got a clean white skirt on."

We bustled on, to a press conference at "the Palace", or the prime minister's residence: heavy sofas, gilt-trimmed chandeliers, artificial roses, artificial light. Al-Maliki shuffled along the damp red carpet to greet and kiss President Talabani, and they disappeared behind the stockade of TV cameras. There were hostile questions, and you could hear Blair's weak protesting treble and Talabani's didactic baritone: progress, improvement, the Iraqi security forces, the dialogue with the tribes, the channel to Iran, constructive talks, the way forward ...

We shunted on to Maude House, HQ of the British Support Unit, just in time for another alert. The other guest of honour, General David Petraeus - soon to deliver his ominous, all-deciding verdict on the Surge - barely blinked as the sirens squawked.

"It's Apocalypse Now meets Disneyland": this was the twinkly verdict of a British staff colonel. And there came an interlude, on the helipad (like a drained swimming pool of grey concrete, the size of a city block), where you could find some shade and try to bring order to the tangle of miserable impressions. The Green Zone resembles the embassy district of a minor South American capital after a period of immiseration and collapse, where the powers that be are exhaustedly girding themselves for the chaos and carnage of revolution. I found myself staring at a discarded ornamental armchair (its symbolism all too cooperative), which grimily presided over a heap of rubbish. Then it was wheels up and we clattered over Baghdad, the apartment blocks like little low-rise car parks, with trash everywhere, and green-mantled standing pools.

Something happened to Blair in Basra - at the airport base, which is pretty well all that's left of the operation in the south, the city having been abandoned to the general atomisation: Shia factions, tribal militias, armed gangs. There had been several hundred handshakes in the Coffee Bar (the old VIP room), and several hundred 10-second conversations; there had been a reasonably good speech, reasonably well received. Blair then repaired to a side room, for a closed session with the padre, several officers and about 25 young soldiers. And something happened.

There was talk from the senior men about "the hard and dark side" of recent events at the camp (losses of life and limb), about transformative experiences, about the way "these young people have had to grow up very quickly". And when it came to Blair, all the oxygen went out of him. It wasn't just that he seemed acutely underbriefed (on munitions, projects, tactics). He was quite unable to find weight of voice, to find decorum, the appropriate words for the appropriate mood. "So we kill more of them than they kill us ... You're getting back out there and after them. It's brilliant, actually ..." The PM, it has to be said, appeared to be the least articulate man in the room. The least articulate - and also the youngest

I stayed on after the PM took his leave. Two minutes later there was a room-jarring whump. "Sit on the floor, everyone," said the officer. As we hunkered down, the corporal I was talking to, without a second's pause (so routine was the interruption), went on telling me about the firepower of the Tomahawk anti-tank guided missile. I said goodbye, after the all-clear, to those earnestly frowning faces, and our party filed out, leaving them there in a desert both spiritual and actual, under the thick, dirty-white medium of sand and dust, like soiled medical gauze.

Person to person

"This is Downing Street and there's nobody home," runs the joke. "Please leave a message after the high moral tone." The high moral tone - such an infuriant to his detractors - is not something that Blair has co-opted. Like his religion, it is entirely innate: if that wasn't there, nothing else would be there. He has been called a Manichee, seeing only light and darkness; and he has been called an antinomian, a self-angeliser who holds that what he does is right by virtue of the fact that he does it. This is the mechanism Blair is reduced to, I think, in his rationale for Iraq. The forces of darkness are arrayed against the forces of light; and we cannot afford to lose. Both propositions, in my opinion, are perfectly true. We cannot afford to lose, but lose it we will, in this theatre of the coalition's choosing.

I had an hour on Iraq, person to person. Except at odd moments, though, you never are one-on-one with Tony Blair. There is always the photographer, the documentarist, the aide with the tape recorder. There is also the professionalised super-ego of the PM, schooled in caution, incessantly aware that his airiest word can double back on him and loom like a Saturn. It is not the case, as the dulled phrase has it, that what you see is what you get: he is more physically impressive, more sensitive and much more playful than the man on your TV screen. But it remains true, with Blair, that what you hear is what you hear.

"Have you seen The Queen?" I asked him. We were flying to Germany on one of the old, slow Hawker-Siddeleys, borrowed from the royal fleet. She's the head of state, remember, and just completing her 11th term.

"Uh - no."

Well, I said, it's a case of everyone getting everything wrong. Helen Mirren is as usual a joy to watch. But she's a hopeless Elizabeth. All that wryness and irony. I've met the Queen, for about 10 seconds, and she's a heifer. Don't you think?

"I'm not going along with that," he said, twisting in his seat.

"But you, you. The actor gets you to the life. The sheen of youth. The sheen of power. What's it like, power? Is it heady?"

Yes, he said, but you're steadied by the responsibility. I like to think I can do without it. You have to be able to risk it, and leave some room for instinctive judgment. You have to face the possibility of losing it. In order to use it.

"So how does it feel," I said, much later, in the den at Downing Street, "now that it's ebbing from you?"

"All right so far. When the day comes, I'll probably be clinging to the doorknocker, but so far I think I can just ... let it go."

Watch our video and pictures of Blair's last days, narrated by Martin Amis here

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An exclusive essay by Martin Amis, continued.

Click here to read part one, and here to read part two

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma - the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War - a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.

So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-

liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:

'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise...' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.

For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history - a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance - of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.

Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave - the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the 20th century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-oestrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting 12 years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.

It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too - with a difference. In 'old' Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad - the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush's 'I want to kick ass' to his 'Bring it on' - a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.

Contemplating this, one's aversion was very far from being confined to the aesthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of prewar triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, 'going into this period', 'was praying for strength to do the Lord's will'. A power rush blessed by God - no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. At that time, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a 'self-financing' preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime change. Three and a half years later, it is an adventurist and proselytising war, and its remaining goal is the promotion of democracy.

The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room - did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in Harris's trope, democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.

Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd - a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq - or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.

Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond - in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.

There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq - because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden's eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that perspective, 11 September was a provocation. The 'slam dunk', the 'cakewalk' into Iraq amounted to a feint, and a trap. We now know, from various 500-page bestsellers like Cobra II and Fiasco, that the invasion of Iraq was truly incredibly blithe (there was no plan, no plan at all, for the occupation); still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable. This is a familiar kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. We must hope that something can be salvaged from it, and that our ethical standing can be reconsolidated. Iraq was a divagation in what is being ominously called the Long War. To our futile losses in blood, treasure and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.

An idea presents itself about a better direction to take. And funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the disaster in Iraq: she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.

The 'belt' ending of The Unknown Known came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed's belt, purchased by mail-order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a 'RodeoMaMa', and consists of a 'weight strap' and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the 'RodeoMaMa' is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.

Looking in at the longhouse called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his 'RodeoMaMa'. He goes back to the house and summons his wives - for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.

I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned The Unknown Known. The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take - might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.

In Twentieth Century the late historian JM Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:

'More than 2,000 years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind [it], which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe's assault on the world in early modern times.'

The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography, amounted, perhaps, to 70 million lives in the Mao period alone. Yet this has to be balanced against 'the weight of the past' - nowhere heavier than in China:

'Deliberate attacks on family authority... were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond 'progressive' feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.'

There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution - the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through its villages.

In 2002 the aggregate GDP of all the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the UAE, listed in 33rd place, between Reunion and Macau.) Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society. We may wonder how the Islamists feel when they compare India to Pakistan, one a burgeoning democratic superpower, the other barely distinguishable from a failed state. What Went Wrong? asked Bernard Lewis, at book length. The broad answer would be institutionalised irrationalism; and the particular focus would be the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people. No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male. But we can dwell on the memory of those images from Afghanistan: the great waves of women hurrying to school.

The connection between manifest failure and the suppression of women is unignorable. And you sometimes feel that the current crux, with its welter of insecurities and nostalgias, is little more than a pre-emptive tantrum - to ward off the evacuation of the last sanctum of power. What would happen if we spent some of the next 300 billion dollars (this is Liz Cheney's thrust) on the raising of consciousness in the Islamic world? The effect would be inherently explosive, because the dominion of the male is Koranic - the unfalsifiable word of God, as dictated to the Prophet:

'Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme' (4:34).

Can we imagine seeing men on the march in defence of their right to beat their wives? And if we do see it, then what? Would that win hearts and minds? The martyrs of this revolution would be sustained by two obvious truths: the binding authority of scripture, all over the world, is very seriously questioned; and women, by definition, are not a minority. They would know, too, that their struggle is a heroic assault on the weight of the past - the alpweight of 14 centuries.

Attentive readers may have asked themselves what it is, this ridiculous category, the unknown known. The unknown known is paradise, scriptural inerrancy, God. The unknown known is religious belief.

All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so impeccably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone. When challenged, or affronted, the believer's response is hormonal; and the subsequent collision will be one between a brain and a cat's cradle of glands. 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.

In Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' (1977), the poet, on waking, contemplates 'unresting death, a whole day nearer now':

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die...

Much earlier, in 'Church Going' (1954), examining his habit of visiting country churches and the feelings they arouse in him (chiefly bafflement and boredom), he was able to frame a more expansive response:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

This is beautifully arrived at. It contains everything that can be decently and rationally said.

We allow that, in the case of religion, or the belief in supernatural beings, the past weighs in, not at 2,000 years, but at approximately five million. Even so, the time has come for a measure of impatience in our dealings with those who would take an innocent personal pronoun, which was just minding its own business, and exalt it with a capital letter. Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally. People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too. We should be with Joseph Conrad:

'The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

'Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness.' ('Author's Note' to The Shadow-Line, 1920.)

© Martin Amis

· Martin Amis's latest novel, House of Meetings (Jonathan Cape), is published on 28 September at £15.99. To order for £13.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885

· Click here to read part one, and here to read part twoSeptember 11 2001United StatesMartin AmisMartin Amis
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An exclusive essay by Martin Amis, continued.

Click here to read part three

In The Unknown Known my diminutive terrorist, Ayed, is not a virgin (or a Joseph, as Christians say), unlike Sayyid, on whom he is tangentially based. He is, rather, a polygamist, confining himself to the sanctioned maximum of four. On top of this, he indulges himself, whenever he has enough spare cash, with a succession of 'temporary wives'. The practice is called mutah. In her justly celebrated book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells us that a temporary marriage can endure for 99 years; it can also be over in half an hour. The Islamic Republic is very attentive to what it calls 'men's needs'. Before the Revolution, a girl could get married at the age of 18. After 1979 the age requirement was halved.

In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.

As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.

There is almost an entire literary genre given over to sensibilities such as Sayyid Qutb's. It is the genre of the unreliable narrator - or, more exactly, the transparent narrator, with his helpless giveaways. Typically, a patina of haughty fastidiousness strives confidently but in vain to conceal an underworld of incurable murk. In The Unknown Known I added to this genre, and with enthusiasm. I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of nettles and poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruellingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman 'quite openly' undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins 'the "Prism"', and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.

As Ayed keeps telling all his temporary wives, 'My wives don't understand me.' And they don't; indeed, they all want divorces, and for the same embarrassing reason. With his paradigm-shift attack on America now in ruins, and facing professional and social disgrace, Ayed suddenly sees how, in one swoop, he can redeem himself - and secure his place in history with an unknown unknown which is sure to succeed. For this he will be needing a belt

Two years ago I came across a striking photograph in a news magazine: it looked like a crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half-submerged in the crimson pulp. It was in fact the bravely circularised photograph of the face of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband. In an attempted murder, it seems: at the time of his arrest he had her in the trunk of his car, and was evidently taking her into the desert for interment. What had she done to bring this on herself? In the marital home, that night, the telephone rang and the newscaster, a prosperous celebrity in her own right, answered it. She had answered the telephone. Male Westerners will be struck, here, by a dramatic cultural contrast. I know that I, for one, would be far more likely to beat my wife to death if she hadn't answered the telephone. But customs and mores vary from country to country, and you cannot reasonably claim that one ethos is 'better' than any other.

In 1949 Greeley was dry... It has been seriously suggested, by serious commentators, that suicide-mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is, in death, no shortage of either. As well as the Koranic virgins, 'as chaste', for the time being, 'as the sheltered eggs of ostriches', there is also a 'gushing fountain' of white wine (wine 'that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason'). The suicide-mass murderer can now raise his brimming 'goblet' to an additional reward: he has the power, post mortem, to secure paradisal immortality for a host of relations (the number is a round 70, two fewer, curiously, than the traditional allotment of houris). Nor is this his only service to the clan, which, until recently, could expect an honorarium of $20,000 from Iraq, plus $5,000 from Saudi Arabia - as well as the vast prestige automatically accorded to the family of a martyr. And then there is the enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige.

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' - and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.

After the failure of Oslo, and the attendant consolidation of Hamas, the second intifada ('earthquake') got under way in 2001, not with stonings and stabbings, like the first, but with a steady campaign of suicide-mass murder. 'All over the world,' writes Berman, 'the popularity of the Palestinian cause did not collapse. It increased.' The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'. And when Sharon replaced Barak, and the expected crackdown began, and the Israeli army, with 23 casualties of its own, killed 52 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, the attack 'was seen as a veritable Holocaust, an Auschwitz, or, in an alternative image, as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Wehrmacht's assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. These tropes were massively accepted, around the world. Typing in the combined names of "Jenin" and "Auschwitz"... I came up with 2,890 references; and, typing in "Jenin" and "Nazi", I came up with 8,100 references. There were 63,100 references to the combined names of "Sharon" and "Hitler".' Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.

This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult. Berman assembles many voices. And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate - the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. Again erring on the side of indulgence, Berman is unnecessarily daunted by the pedigree of Saramago's prose, which is in fact the purest and snootiest bombast (you might call it Nobelese). Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:

'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'

Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' - to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. It is not like looking down the barrel of a gun. We can tell this is so, because we see what happens, sometimes, when the suicide-mass murderer isn't even there - as in the amazingly summary injustice meted out to the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. An even more startling example was the rumour-ignited bridge stampede in Baghdad (31 August 2005). This is the superterror inspired by suicide-mass murder: just whisper the words, and you fatally trample a thousand people. And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists' contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable 'cause', brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is 'saved'. Which would you prefer, given belief?

'... martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's garden...'

Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the 'Arab Afghans' played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh, if he'd been there, and if he'd been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.

Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They'll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it's religious, and they're always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you'll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It'll take them years to come up with the word they want - and Islamismophobia clearly isn't any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.

By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with entirely secular aims - to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:

'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'

I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing - and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems.

Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:

'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation... Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right - about anything - seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".'

The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation - it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame - indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: 'join', and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 towards its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners, in Aleppo, would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden - he is ever-living.

In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York - and from winter to summer - with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran's Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn't like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack - staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.

There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, 'Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East.' The revelations of 10 August 2006 were 13 months away. And despite the exposure and prevention of their remarkably ambitious bloodbath of the innocent (the majority of them women and children), the (alleged) Walthamstow jihadis did not quite strive in vain. The failed to promote terror, but they won a great symbolic victory for boredom: the banning of books on the seven-hour flight from England to America.

My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism - thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren't searching all the passengers. And I couldn't defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric 'pollution' of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient programme. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York. But there was the solace given us by the Mayor. No, we should not be surprised by the use of this sempiternal ruse de guerre. Using their bodies is what people do.

The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind - that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else - a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband. (Continues)

· Click here to read part threeSeptember 11 2001United StatesMartin AmisMartin Amis
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On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, one of Britain's most celebrated and original writers analyses - and abhors - the rise of extreme Islamism. In a penetrating and wide-ranging essay he offers a trenchant critique of the grotesque creed and questions the West's faltering response to this eruption of evil.

Click here to read part two

It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend - a reporter and political man of letters - approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama's lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another's apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan's pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires - fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

'Why you want these? You like Osama?'

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given - reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: 'Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.' No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

'You like Osama?'

'Of course. He is my brother.'

'He is your brother?'

'All men are my brothers.'

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.

Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' - recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' - is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.

Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.

Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

So, to repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.

I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead - as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom - to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known

Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:

'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'

Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known - Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.

Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs - to shifts in the paradigm.

Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm - the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.

I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation - these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project - his 'baby', if you will - was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.

Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan - an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.

As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.

Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible - but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.

Since then the world has undergone a moral crash - the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.

Things started to go wrong for poor Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, 'a drunken, semi-naked woman' tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned 43. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early - and routinely baffling - admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women 'dishonourable', and confessed to unhappiness about 'their current level of freedom'. A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was Thorns. Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten'.But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of 'sufficient' moral cleanliness, he resolved to stick to virginity.

Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalised him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine - another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the moderniser and secularist, Nasser, in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested - and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.

Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.

He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalised, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with 'thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs' and a coquettish manner ('the calling eye, the provocative laugh'), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But 'the father of Islamism', as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron - to the pullulating hellhouse - of Greeley, Colorado.

During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies - their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club - where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry

'And the air is full of lust.' 'Lust' is Bernard Lewis's translation, but several other writers prefer the word 'love'. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love. Qutb:

'A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh.'

In his excellent book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman has many sharp things to say about the corpus of Sayyid Qutb; but he manages to goad himself into receptivity, and ends up, in my view, sounding almost absurdly respectful - 'rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt'. Qutb, who would go on to write a 30-volume gloss on it, spent his childhood memorising the Koran. He was 10 by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him; and so it proves. On the last of the 46 pages he devotes to Qutb, Berman wraps things up with a long quotation. This is its repetitive first paragraph:

'The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet] tells the Muslims that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed. Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God, are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.'

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia - barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam - and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam

'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).

Lewis might have added that these are the closing words of the Koran. So they echo.

The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism. We think again of Qutb's buxom, smooth-legged nurse, supposedly smacking her thirsty lips at the news of the death of Hasan al-Banna. Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before 11 September 2001. Of course, views were then formulated, and very soon the bestseller list was a column of primers on Islam. Some things take longer to sink in than others, true; but now we know. In the West we had brought into being a society whose main purpose, whose raison d'etre, was the tantalisation of good Muslims.

The theme of the 'tempter' can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonoured him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.

Qutb has perhaps a single parallel in world history. Another shambling invert, another sexual truant (not a virgin but a career cuckold), another marginal quack and dabbler (talentless but not philistine), he too wrote a book, in prison, that fell into the worst possible hands. His name was Nikolai Chernyshevsky; and his novel (What Is To Be Done?) was read five times by Vladimir Lenin in the course of a single summer. It was Chernyshevsky who determined, not the content, but the emotional dynamic of the Soviet experiment. The centennial of his birth was celebrated with much pomp in the USSR. That was in 1928. But Russia was too sad, and too busy, to do much about the centennial of his death, which passed quietly in 1989. (Continues)

· Click here to read part twoSeptember 11 2001United StatesMartin AmisMartin Amis
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He rose from the slums of Buenos Aires to become the world's greatest footballer - then spectacularly self-destructed. Now, from his Cuban hospital bed, Maradona has published a remarkably frank autobiography, serialised exclusively in the Guardian from tomorrow. Martin Amis reads between the lines

There is a truly terrifying photograph of Diego Armando Maradona, dating from 2000, the year of his first heart attack. He is wearing: a reversed baseball cap which reveals a squirt of hair, dyed the punk colour of baby shit; dark glasses; a drummer's sleeveless T-shirt, giving full play to the tattoo of Che Guevara on his right shoulder; and a defiant, slack-mouthed sneer. Then you come to the massive emplacement of the gut.

It would be hard to exaggerate the ubiquity of the diminutive (-ito, -ita) in Latin American Spanish, which originates from the extreme reverence and indulgence accorded to the young. You are always coming across grown men with nursery names - strapping Sergitos, hefty Hugitos (and I'm friends with a 60-year-old called, simply, Ito). But it would choke you, these days, to call Maradona "Dieguito". The figure still frequently seen, on television, wobbling through airports or wedged into golfcarts, has his old hair-colour back, and is more soberly dressed; yet his bulk remains prodigious and unignorable. It visibly tortures him. And you can still glimpse Dieguito, walled up in his new carapace, pining, suffering - but unresisting. Inside every fat man, they say, there is a thin man trying to get out. In the case of Maradona, it seems, there is an even fatter man trying to get in.

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