a brilliant robot you switch on and stand back and admire as it does all the hard work." Would it be too bold for one to presuppose that Mr. Amis sees the Germans as a somewhat linear, robotic race (reminiscent of the German national football team)? Amis also discusses how Odilo and his friends were infuriated with the Jews before the fascists took over because they were "walking into all the plum jobs, in the medical profession especially." Parallels could be drawn between the German distaste for Jews and the American distaste for the Japanese ("we really hated the Japanese."). And of course, the book ends in Germany, with the Nazi doctor exterminated by birth, concurrent with the restoration of health and prosperity of the Jews in pre-Nazi Germany.Amis is at his most entertaining when he talks about sex. "Suddenly, to Tod's glands, the world is a woman," proclaims Amis triumphantly, the observation being that Tod would "tip forward onto his feet" and look over any outline across the road, just in case it is a woman. As for John Young, the "younger" version of Tod Friendly, his main hobby is women's bodies, and to him, the fact that a woman's body has a head on top "isn't much more of a detail". And this is Amis on homosexuality: "The homosexual man is fineso long as he knows he's homosexual. It's when he is, and thinks he isn't: then there's confusion." Mr. Amis is indeed typically modern English.Given Amis' apparent admiration for American culture in real life - he has an American agent, an American lover and is currently thinking of emigrating - he does not give much away in terms of his take on the Big Apple. Of the very little that we can focus on, he describes New York as a city that contains "a fire-tinge of violence", and he uses predictable adjectives like "affable", "primary colour" (compared to Germany's ashen grey), and "You're-okay-I'm-okay" to characterise America.Since his arrival in the mid-seventies, Martin...
