In the 2003 novel Yellow Dog, Xan Meo is set upon by two men in a pub who cosh him over the head: “Like the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.” Meo is a writer and actor whose late father was a dangerous gangster; the attack is in revenge for Meo naming an old associate of his father in print. Meo survives, though the injury leaves him with an altered personality. Where he was previously a conscientious husband and father, now he is a chip off the old block.
While Meo languishes in hospital, King Henry IX – who is struggling to conceal his boredom with the job – is informed that images of his 15-year-old daughter in the bath are in circulation. And Clint Smoker, star reporter and gossip peddler at the tabloid newspaper the Morning Lark, gets an unexpected tipoff.
Yellow Dog is the Booker-nominated satirical novel by Martin Amis which, through a trio of interconnected comic narratives, explores the baser instincts of men. It is one of several Amis titles being released on audio this year; others include Money, London Fields, Night Train and The Rachel Papers.
Bill Nighy is The Yellow Dog’s narrator, and he has a ball voicing Amis’s larger-than-life protagonists. Along with Meo, Smoker and King Henry, a suitably eccentric supporting cast includes Russia, Xan’s long-suffering wife; gruff bodyguard Mal Bale; pornography tycoon Cora Susan; and mercurial football striker and tabloid darling Ainsley Car. Though some of these characters veer into caricature on the page, Nighy succeeds not only in making them believable but great fun to be around.
Available via Vintage Digital, 11hr 54min
Further listening
Love Lane
Patrick Gale, Tinder, 7hr 53min
Gale’s follow-up to his 2015 novel A Place in Winter finds his elderly protagonist Harry Cane sailing home to a radically different England and trying to reconnect with the family he abandoned. Read by the author.
Honoured
Naz Shah, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 7hr 13min
The Labour MP for Bradford West narrates her memoir recalling her traumatic childhood and teen years – she witnessed domestic violence against her mother and was forced into marriage at the age of 15 – and her eventual path into politics.
