By the time he published Gulliver's Travels in 1726, Jonathan Swift was presumed by many to be a misanthrope, a hater of his own species. Shortly thereafter, he began recommending that starving peasants be employed as food and writing poems with rhymes such as "repeating in his amorous fits/ Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!" Those provocations got his status elevated to outright lunatic. In a story that is likely apocryphal, the demented scribe was found wandering his house in the twilight of his days. Spying his own image in a mirror, he sighed: "Poor old man."

From the 1720s into the early 1730s, Swift was at both the height of his creative powers and the end of his tether. The combination proved volatile. Indignation fuelled outrageousness; shock at corruption and venality compelled him to, in turn, shock and offend. At some point, there was a disconnect between what a great writer needed to express and what the majority of his readers could abide.

Whether or not he died murmuring woeful self-laments, Swift may have departed unsure whether the morality of his work would survive the infamy of his reputation. Time, of course, has sorted that out.

Martin Amis, it must be stressed, is neither infirm nor rumoured to be mad. Of late, however, England's chosen literary son has come under heavy fire for indulgence and waywardness. Recent books, especially Koba the Dread, his 2002 study of Stalinism, have found few admirers, and Yellow Dog, his ninth novel, has already been greeted by more hawks than doves in his homeland.

For those who believe Amis to be one of a handful of essential writers presently working the English language, this is perplexing. Yellow Dog shows him to be once again operating his craft at the level of his 1980s work, Money and London Fields. The problem may be that the craft in question is literary satire of the variety still dubbed "Swiftian." It is a form fewer and fewer recognize, let alone appreciate.

There is no mistaking Yellow Dog for any other kind of literary beast. Choose a page at random, and the satirical teeth immediately reveal their glint and snap. In one glancing scene, a father and his sons sit in a seaside restaurant discussing the formula for producing porn-star names. At a nearby table, a "baby-bottle full of Pepsi" is being served to an infant. Out on the pier, a pigeon has a "petrol prism on its neck" and the sea is "confused and distraught."

The conversation turns to football. "Car's crap," one son says. "So's Charlton. He's crap and they're crap." "Car's crap," his brother agrees. "But Charlton aren't that crap." The father, recognizing a teaching moment, wades in. "Boys, boys: you've got to learn some new swearwords. Take crap, say. I mean, bullshit actually means something.... But crap? Crap just means crap. As a word, crap is so crap."

Back outside in the "last of England," the father pauses before the squalor. "This was all that was left of his childhood culture." The man is Xan Meo, and his assault in a bar triggers the novel's bristling plot. Three separate story lines roll out in clipped chapters with elaborate titles and wonky character names. The method is the cinematic slow reveal, and the pathway connecting the dots is strewn with Amis's usual gags and language riffs. It is also marked by a gathering ferocity, a desire to genuinely disturb, that feels new.

Thus, there is Xan, beaten up for mentioning the name of master criminal Joseph Andrews (in a nod to Fielding) in a book. There is Cora Susan, a porn legend who shares a dark secret with Xan Meo and Joseph Andrews. There is also Clint Smoker, a tabloid hack with tiny equipment whose Yellow Dog column in The Daily Lark sings the praises of gang rapes and deflowering under-aged princesses.

There is, for that matter, a 15-year-old princess named Victoria, a possible future queen of England. The gutter press have a photo of her naked in a tub; her father, Henry IX, the actual king, a gentle dimwit who is stymied for months by crossword puzzles, has been sent a tape that may feature his own daughter cavorting with his mistress, the courtesan He Zhezun. A jet with "CigAir" containing 399 desperately smoking passengers is ready to crash. A woman who writes e-mails in the short form of cyber chat rooms sort-of stalks Clint. And so on.

In Yellow Dog, the "obscenification of everyday life" finds its nadir in the mainstreaming of pornography. If any one thing has "tipped" Amis into the sphere of indignation that can get a writer condemned as lunatic or even depraved, it may be the rise of porn. The hilarious criminal argot of Joseph Andrews is familiar from his earlier work. Likewise, the patter about male violence. "The violence hormones still squirreling around in him," he writes of Xan Meo, who has suffered a "de-enlightenment" from the assault, "voluptuous killers of pain and reality."

Less familiar ground is Xan's creeping sexual interest in his own young daughter, or Cora Susan's egging him on to commit incest. "We get over it," the porn star says. "No you don't," he says. "No we don't," she agrees. "Obviously."

Is this the material that might cause a Swiftian breach between Amis and his readers? He has been thinking about pornography as an industry, and an obsession of our age, for several years now. Yellow Dog marks a tentative, but still courageous, extension of that thinking. Like a diver who plunges into foul waters without an oxygen tank, Amis resurfaces with the awkward gasps of a man desperate for clean air. Those salvaging breaths take the form of sentimental musings about children, for which he can perhaps be forgiven.

If certain readers can't stick with Amis right now, they should still hang on to their copies of Yellow Dog. Within a couple of decades it may be considered a pioneering foray, notable for its modesty.

Other faults to the novel, especially related to its manic pacing, can be attributable in part to the artistic pressure Amis has put himself under to address this subject in fiction. His comic impulses can't really do justice to his deepening moral vigilance or his aspirations towards emotional intimacy. As a novelist, his authorial voice has always run roughshod over characters and plot. This doesn't lend itself to stories that easily move or even agitate in the way he may now wish for.

Yellow Dog, it is true, arcs back to the major novels. But it wouldn't have been possible without those problematic recent books. If he is indeed consolidating his thematic concerns around moral degradation, it stands to reason that he would want to understand why he has come to fit so squarely into the small-c conservative tradition of almost all great satirists.

Koba the Dread explores his dismay at extremism. The essays and reviews in The War Against Cliché make plain his views on the decline of the language. Even the autobiographical meanderings of Experience suddenly seem toward a point. One way or the other, we all become our parents in the end. If your father happens to be Kingsley Amis, your fate may be especially vexatious and noisy. Your fate may be to write books like Yellow Dog, or fiction even more distressing.