Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

In the decade after 1985, the novels of Martin Amis began to swell the Rainy Day library: Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow and The Information... all were eagerly read because they mirrored the era's obsession with wealth, sex, media and dentistry, and they were filled with irony, sharp observation and bitter wit. Oh, and the writing was often sublime.

Martin Amis then disappeared from our radar, but he's back and he's very welcome. On Sunday, readers of two British quality newspapers were treated to Amis in very different formats. In The Observer it was fiction, in The Sunday Times it was fact. First The Observer. "The last days of Muhammad Atta" is a fictional attempt to get inside the mind of a mass murderer driven by an ideology beyond our powers of comprehension. In places, Martin Amis delivers some extraordinary imaginary feats:

The core reason was, of course, all the killing — all the putting to death. Not the crew, not the passengers, not the office-workers in the Twin Towers, not the cleaners and the caterers, not the men of the NYPD and the FDNY. He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war-cycles that would flow from this day. He didn't believe in the devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run. Here was the primordial secret. No longer closely guarded — no longer well kept. Killing was divine delight. And your suicide was just a part of the contribution you made — the massive contribution to death. All your frigidities and futilities were rewritten, becoming swollen with meaning. This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with beasts, when you flew with the flies.

In the Sunday Times, Martin Amis was in factual mode reviewing The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Clearly the years have not dimmed his ability to cut to bone. When assessing "the triumvirate of developed Islamism: Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden", Amis asks: "should we be solaced or additionally galled by the poverty of the human material now so ferociously ranged against us?" He answers, stressing a word Rainy Day emphasized yesterday, "reality", saying: "...the consistent profile is marked by intellectual vacuity, by a fanaticism that simply thirsts for the longest possible penal code, and, most basically, by a chaotically adolescent — or even juvenile — indifference to reality. These men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; reality for them is just something you have to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it."

Regarding Sayyid Qutb, "the first framer of Islamism", Amis writes: "And you wonder about the condition of the Muslim imagination, in that it was so easily 'captured' by this almost endearingly comical figure: an entanglement of drives and urges, draped in piety and hauteur... At any rate, Islamism owes to him the twin dreams of planetary domination and theocratic genocide."

When it comes to the fanatic mentioned here yesterday, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deployer of the "heresy (or tinkertoy sophistry) of takfir", Amis is memorable. He first quotes Lawrence Wright: "The takfiris convinced themselves that salvation for all of humanity lay on the other side of moral territory that had always been the certain province of the damned. They would shoulder the risks to their eternal souls by assuming the divine authority of deciding who was a real Muslim and who was not, who should live and who should die." And then Amis adds, brilliantly: "This greatly expanded the population of the killable."

On the subject of the "Hamburg contingent (Atta et al)", Amis rightly notes: "these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity." His conclusion is that there was indeed a 9/11 conspiracy, but it's not the one the amoral makers of Loose Change flog to the gullible, rather: "...it is the state of mind of the armed fabulist. The conspiracy detected here is the infidel campaign to obliterate the faith. It all began with the retreat of the Turkish armies from Vienna and the confirmation of Islamic decline: the year was 1683 and the day was September 11."

For fans of Martin Amis, September is a month of good news. First comes House of Meetings, featuring the title novella and two stories, The Last Days of Mohammad Atta and In the Palace of the End, about a double for one of Saddam Hussein's sons. Next year, Amis will also publish The Pregnant Widow which marks the beginning of a new four book deal.