I tried to ignore Martin Amis’ bugbears that mar The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Knopf, 224 pages, $29.95). Besides brief pokes at overwrought political correctness (always too easy) and our cultural obsession with unearned “baseless fame” and the “illiterate internet” (common rich boy boilerplate gripes), the writing in this shaggy dog collection of Sept. 11–themed journalism is a reminder that Amis wrote two of the best novels of the late 20th century. Even when he’s wrong, as he often is, Amis is a seductive writer without peer.

Yet, Amis’ political analysis is thin. He admits as much in the collection’s introduction when he understatedly writes, “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject.” Ranging in dates from Sept. 18, 2001 to Sept. 11, 2007, none of the reviews and essays have been revisited and we’re left with an honest, rough map of Amis toiling to find a cohesive story in six years of CNN blur and BBC sidebars. The cost, however, is re-slogging through early, credulous, use of the term WMD — which has aged less well than the first Strokes album — and the curiously apolitical cloak Amis throws over politics. His moral analysis of fanaticism plays to his strengths and obsessions and he is again chasing down a “big idea.” Looking for a big idea is refreshingly old-fashioned when it works (as it did for Koba the Dread, Amis’ book on Stalinist terrors), and it’s embarrassing and shallow when it doesn’t (as in his nukes-themed collection, Einstein’s Monsters). Crudely stated, The Second Plane coasts somewhere between.   
While Amis is no hawk, the object of his critique superficially places him next to pundit and former colleague Christopher Hitchens at the limey neocon table. Hitchens’ swill may be more popular by the pound — booze-soaked impotent bloodlust always plays better to the rubes, and by “rubes” I mean “editors” — but Amis comparatively says more, better, in any given sentence. “The American politician” Amis writes, “who Mahmoud Ahmadinejad most closely resembles — in one crucial aspect — is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn’t live on a ranch with a former starlet. As a young Republican, Reagan wasn’t involved in the murder of prominent Democrats. Ahmadinejad doesn’t use Grecian 2000. But what they have in common is this: both men are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.”
The “boredom” in the subtitle refers to the bureaucracy of security that slows the post-9/11 world down to interminability. It also describes the effect after reading two profiles in The Second Plane: Tony Blair and Muhammad Atta. Amis could have easily invested either with the literary heft of a Richard Tull or a Keith Talent. Instead, the former prime minister and the hijacker remain static subjects. Amis seems uncharacteristically submissive to veracity here, hiding his hand and letting two banal ideologues be banal. I don’t think it’s a writerly effect and it feels wrong, like a wasted opportunity for literature’s Beelzebub to spin something more than truth or fiction.

The last six years are owed, if not bigger, certainly better ideas than these microwaved op-eds offer.