The Second Plane Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 224pp, £12.99

Writing in the Guardian in June 2002, Martin Amis claimed to know why a large number of novelists had written journalism about the 11 September 2001 attacks: whatever work they had in progress - indeed, their entire corpus - had been infected by "a feeling of gangrenous futility". Though he includes himself in this outbreak of irrelevance, you can trace continuities between Amis's writing before and after that date. Jet planes and impending doom were tangled up as far back as Money (1984); in London Fields (1989), the hopelessly posh Guy Clinch is sent zipping around the globe on a fool's errand even as nuclear war looms.

There are even verbal continuities. The essay that gives this collection its title, written a week after the September 11 attacks, begins: "It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment." Compare and contrast John Self's opening gambit in Money: "As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast right across our bows." Far from striking out for fresh language to describe the fresh state of affairs, Amis was clinging to words that had already served him well.

With that in mind, as well as the self-conscious world-historical seriousness of Einstein's Monsters (1987) and Time's Arrow (1991), I would argue that September 11 was something Amis had been, if not waiting for, prepared for. With the debatable exceptions of John Updike and Don DeLillo, no serious writer has been so willing to shoulder the responsibility, or seize the opportunity, presented by what used to be called the war on terror. He comes close to saying this himself in the introduction to The Second Plane, which brings together all his writings - essays, reviews, short stories - on the subject: "If September 11 had to happen, I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime."

The results of this readiness to confront history have, as you will know, not been universally well received: I can imagine an H M Bateman cartoon in which a sea of dropped jaws and popping eyes surrounds The Man Who Thought Martin Amis Was Spot On About Islam - it could be part of a series, along with The Man Who Thought Yellow Dog Was A Jolly Good Read. As it happens, I think the awfulness of Yellow Dog (it really was as bad as Tibor Fischer made out) is closely related to the opprobrium Amis has drawn down on himself in recent months (a "British National Party thug" - T Eagleton). Both stem from the sad fact that this most brilliantly attuned of prose writers is going tone-deaf: he no longer knows how people talk, or how bad he sounds.

This conjecture is confirmed at several points in The Second Plane, most blatantly in "On the Move With Tony Blair", an expanded version of an article that appeared in the Guardian last year. Granted unprecedented, almost Bob Woodward-like access to the prime ministerial retinue as it travelled to Belfast, Washington and Baghdad, Amis comes up with some entertaining, modestly revealing observations on the trappings of power; but his conversations with the outgoing prime minister are excruciating. Amis cosies up, lectures, instructs him on the spelling of his daughters' names for autographs (one of the little Amises is called Clio - "the muse of history", her daddy cleverly points out); but he doesn't get a single useful answer to any of the questions we are burning to ask.

Elsewhere, Amis has been thumbing through his thesaurus for intensifiers, and sometimes just for the heck of it (Osama Bin Laden is "an enormous stirrer - a titanic mixer"). His patchily brilliant review of the film United 93 contains the peculiar assertion that the director "spared" the viewer the sight of children on board the doomed plane: it is not hard to discover the passenger list, and to ascertain that the youngest was 20 years old. It is also true that if you wanted to construct a case for Amis as Islamophobe, you could find the material here, notably in his presumptuous reading of the expression worn by a gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an expression that supposedly showed, without ambiguity, a readiness to slaughter the entire Amis family.

A more balanced reading would find, however, that it is not Islam but religion in general that he disdains: "Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful." It is worth being reminded that Amis has consistently condemned the invasion of Iraq: in March 2003, in a piece called "The Wrong War", he was pointing out that if North Korea was being permitted to carry on acquiring nuclear capability, "it crucially follows that we are going to war with Iraq because it doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Or not many." And in places - for instance, the short story "In the Palace of the End", narrated by a double of the son of a Saddam-like dictator; the sections of "Terror and Boredom" describing the life of Sayyid Qutb, the founder of modern Islamism - he seems to have found a theme to which his sarcasm and garish precision are well suited.

Amis's by now legion detractors are not going to be converted by this book; but those fans still clinging on may find cause for hope.

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