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London Fields
This is an alternative cover edition. The main entry for ISBN 9780099748618 can be found here.
London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?
London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?
526 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
Martin Amis
85 books2,794 followersMartin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.
The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 969 reviews
January 16, 2024
Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he is telling, a story involving a host of memorable and very human characters, not to mention a couple of super-human characters: an Incredible Hulk-like toddler and one doozy of a MAN MAGNET, and, yes, indeed, that’s spelled with all capital letters. Meet the lady at the center of the novel’s vortex, Ms. Nicola Six – modern day Helen of Troy, X-rated femme fatale and manifestation of goddess Kali all rolled up into one – everything you always wanted and everything you never wanted, your most cherished dream and your most dreaded nightmare, complete with Eastern European accent, mysterious Middle Eastern origins, Ms. World face and figure, shiny dark hair and even shinier dark eyes. Oh, my goodness, what a gal.
London Fields is a loose, baggy monster if you are looking for a tight-knit murder mystery; but if you enjoy your novels with many characters finely portrayed in gritty, grimy detail along with generous portions of philosophical musing thrown in along the way, then you will enjoy taking your time with its 470 pages. Now, on one level, the men and women are stereotypes representing a particular social and cultural class, but on another level Amis fills out his characters with such vivid, visceral descriptions, their eccentricities, their passions, their intense emotions and desires, in a way, I almost had the feeling I was reading an epic with the streets of London standing in for the walls of Troy – modern city life as the ultimate human blood sport.
One major character – Keith Talent, low-class grunge par excellence, a 29-year old addicted to liquor, pornography and sex, has made a life-long career out of cheating and steeling. Any time Keith opens his mouth we hear an open sewer of words – thick, coarse, vulgar and garbled. If there was ever an example of Wittgenstein’s “The limits of your language are the limits of your world.”, Keith is our man. From what I’ve said, you might think Keith would be totally despicable, a character incapable of our empathy, yet, through the magic of Amis’ fiction, we feel Keith’s pain.
By way of example, here is a scene after Nicola, posing as a social worker, barged uninvited into his cramped, dirty, pint-sized home and accused Keith’s wife and Keith of being too poor and too ignorant to properly care for their baby girl. Shortly thereafter, Keith is at Nicola’s apartment and he looks at her and in his look he says: “Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there had been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probations officers – but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.”
Words are exchanged. Keith tells Nicola repeatedly she “shouldn’t’ve fucking done it”. Nicola replies “You didn’t want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.”. Keith says, “That’s so . . . That’s so out of order.” We understand the humanness of Keith’s plight – no matter how crappy and filthy his living conditions, to have his private space violated and be called a pig by such a woman.
Second major character – Guy Clinch, a wealthy, refined, well-educated gentleman with the heart of a love poet reminds me of the 1950-60s British actor Terry-Thomas. Here is Guy in Nicola’s apartment, letting her know how rude men can be about women and sex: “Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, and with his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, some previous exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? what about?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement.” Guy explaining the sexual dynamics of men and women to Nicola is like a university student explaining Machiavelli to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Talk about black humor.
Among the many other characters, one of my personal favorites is Marmaduke, Guy Clinch’s son who needs an army of nannies to keep him from tearing the house apart and wreaking havoc on adults, especially his mother and most especially his father. When his wife Hope was pregnant, Guy was worried about protecting his son from the world; after colossal Marmaduke’s birth, he’s worried about protecting the world from his son. Here is a taste of what our first-person narrator Samson has to say about the child: “Turn your back for ten seconds and he’s in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he’s the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you’ll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva.”
Lastly, a word about the novel’s structure: Samson Young is in the process of writing a novel about the very novel we hold in our hands, offering ongoing critique and color commentary on the art of his telling and the act of our reading. Metafiction, anyone? Nothing like heaping another layer (or two or three) on top of an already many-layered work of literary fiction.
August 15, 2009
What a fun fucking book. I blew off everything today (and, well, most of the week) just to read this book, because it was that fucking fun. God, I loved this book. I just read it nonstop, and when the recurring irritation that is my life did tear me away, I kept thinking about what I'd read, and just ached to go back to read it some more.... I went at this book hard, folks, and now that I'm finished, I feel like I barely can walk across the room. Maybe this qualifies as Too Much Information, but I think reading London Fields might have given me a urinary tract infection.
Okay, so I've never read anything by Martin Amis, probably for the same reasons most of us haven't: yeah, remember that guy you knew who liked Martin Amis so much? Yeah. Ughhhh.... yeah, he was disgusting, really repulsive, I know. That arrogant prick. I know, I know.... Well, Martin Amis is that guy, you definitely can tell by his author photo. Last night I was out with friends and trying to convince them to give this book a shot. They both did sound interested, despite misgivings ("I always associate him with this guy I knew in high school, ugh...") until the book came out and got passed around, and unfortunately opened to the author photo. "Sick," Meg said, shuddering, and shoved the book back into my hands. "Sorry," April murmured, shaking her head. "Sorry, but no. Ugh. Look at that guy."
That guy: Martin Amis. Martin Amis: that guy.
So yeah, and it turns out London Fields is also that guy. You know the guy I mean, that close friend of yours -- every time you meet for dinner he shows up forty-five minutes late, he invariably, embarrassingly, and with appalling success hits on the waitress, and after dinner at drinks he smokes all your cigarettes and keeps interrupting you, and somehow runs out of cash so you have to buy the drinks, even though he makes like six times more money than you ever will. When you hang out London Fields regales you with stories about his job in advertising, about the child idiot label whores he's currently dating; he's constantly demonstrating his immense cleverness, and often uses words you have sneak off to look up on your iphone OED. Many of his screamingly hilarious anecdotes are about going to nightclubs or whorehouses with his old friends from Princeton. There are always some difficult moments on these evenings with London Fields: the cringe-inducing narcissism, that inevitable rape joke. London Fields is not a guy you'd ever bring around most of your other friends, especially the hot female ones, or the highly moral ones who'd stop talking to you for consorting with someone so clearly distasteful and, they'd be sure, purely evil to boot.
But you love this guy. You really do. Honestly you consider him one of your greatest friends. London Fields isn't someone you'd call for comfort during a 4am crisis, and you wouldn't talk about politics with him, or probably even about books, even though you both read. You and London Fields talk about Love, and about Sex and Death. You talk about The World. You talk just to Talk. You love London Fields even though he's an asshole -- you love London Fields, maybe, because he's an asshole, because secretly, deep down, you're an asshole too. LF's sort of a bad friend, even, you know, sort of a bad guy. He's That Guy, but you love him. Because he's hilarious. He's made a Manhattan spray out your nose before -- it hurt -- the things that he says are so hysterical. Plus, even if he's always getting up and running out to the bathroom and therefore missing vast and crucial sections of the movie that's Reality, on certain vital points LF is absolutely dead on. And, let's be honest here, he's got amazing style. He's got style like crazy, and sometimes that's all you care about. And maybe most nights you get dinner with respectable people, with other social workers and teachers, who are honest and kind. But that shit can get boring, and boring's what you can't stand. There are better books out there than your friend London Fields. There are libraries full of them. But there are not many books that are this much fucking fun.
London Fields is a self-conscious fin de millénaire novel that takes place in London as the world seems to be ending. The story is a sort of inverted murder mystery following the intersection of four central characters: Nicola Six, sexed-out trainwreck femme fatale rushed direct via SST from Central Casting; psychopathic pre-chav-era dart hooligan and anti-villain Keith Talent; moneyed nothingburger father and husband Guy Clinch; and Samson Young, an ailing, unsuccessful writer from New York who's done an apartment swap and who narrates the action as everything unfolds. The plot, such as it is, is mostly stupid, and really sort of beside the point. Who cares? Reading this book made me realize something, which is that the world is really ending; it's ending all the time, all around us, just like in the book! I do appreciate fiction that helps me figure out something useful like that, but really what I appreciate is being entertained. Despite some obvious flaws, this book is FUN. To me it was a page turner, and would be perfect reading for a transatlantic flight! This is the first book I've read by Martin Amis, and I've heard that his stuff varies a lot, but based on this one I think of him as a sort of Sidney Sheldon figure for people who are pretty pretentious. If that sounds good to you, I would say give it a go!
Well, I might say that. But maybe I shouldn't. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who's easily offended. And by "easily offended" I mean offended by sex, sexism, classism, violence, rape, child abuse, predictable and often lame plotting, stereotypes, sociopathy, gross humor, or pretty much anything else. There are jokes in here about dog- and babyfucking, for example, so if you don't find that sort of thing hilarious, you might stay away. If you're not easily offended, though, and not too snobby, then you might love this book. It really was a lot more fun than I'd expected it to be -- I'd thought MA was better known for being "smart" than "fun," but his priorities seemed the opposite. And like all good fun, or funniness, it was very dark. It was dark and did get at things that are Serious Concerns, but it did it right, not all ponderous, truly did stay a blast. Every few pages there was a line that would actually make me emit a little scream of laughter, or else get dangerously depressed about not being able to come up with shit like that with my own feeble brain. A book isn't good if it doesn't make you insanely jealous of its author at least part of the time. There was stuff in here that made me want to hunt down Martin Amis and pry out portions of his brain with a screwdriver, for future grafting to my own somewhat sludgier, less linguistically and comically flexible organ.
I'd hang out with Martin again, if I ever find myself in a certain mood. He's not the kind of guy you want to spend every waking moment with, but there are certain times when you're really glad you know someone like him. Please don't get me wrong: there was some dumb shit in this book, but I'm not going to criticize it, because the thing was that I just didn't care. The dumb shit didn't get in the way of my enjoying the book immensely. So Martin can come on over, interrupt me, show off his vocabulary, smoke all my cigarettes, and tell me about the new 20-year-old girlfriend and her $600 shoes; I'd be happy to have him, as long as no one else is around.
Recommended! (With caveats, like all responsible recommendations.)
Okay, so I've never read anything by Martin Amis, probably for the same reasons most of us haven't: yeah, remember that guy you knew who liked Martin Amis so much? Yeah. Ughhhh.... yeah, he was disgusting, really repulsive, I know. That arrogant prick. I know, I know.... Well, Martin Amis is that guy, you definitely can tell by his author photo. Last night I was out with friends and trying to convince them to give this book a shot. They both did sound interested, despite misgivings ("I always associate him with this guy I knew in high school, ugh...") until the book came out and got passed around, and unfortunately opened to the author photo. "Sick," Meg said, shuddering, and shoved the book back into my hands. "Sorry," April murmured, shaking her head. "Sorry, but no. Ugh. Look at that guy."
That guy: Martin Amis. Martin Amis: that guy.
So yeah, and it turns out London Fields is also that guy. You know the guy I mean, that close friend of yours -- every time you meet for dinner he shows up forty-five minutes late, he invariably, embarrassingly, and with appalling success hits on the waitress, and after dinner at drinks he smokes all your cigarettes and keeps interrupting you, and somehow runs out of cash so you have to buy the drinks, even though he makes like six times more money than you ever will. When you hang out London Fields regales you with stories about his job in advertising, about the child idiot label whores he's currently dating; he's constantly demonstrating his immense cleverness, and often uses words you have sneak off to look up on your iphone OED. Many of his screamingly hilarious anecdotes are about going to nightclubs or whorehouses with his old friends from Princeton. There are always some difficult moments on these evenings with London Fields: the cringe-inducing narcissism, that inevitable rape joke. London Fields is not a guy you'd ever bring around most of your other friends, especially the hot female ones, or the highly moral ones who'd stop talking to you for consorting with someone so clearly distasteful and, they'd be sure, purely evil to boot.
But you love this guy. You really do. Honestly you consider him one of your greatest friends. London Fields isn't someone you'd call for comfort during a 4am crisis, and you wouldn't talk about politics with him, or probably even about books, even though you both read. You and London Fields talk about Love, and about Sex and Death. You talk about The World. You talk just to Talk. You love London Fields even though he's an asshole -- you love London Fields, maybe, because he's an asshole, because secretly, deep down, you're an asshole too. LF's sort of a bad friend, even, you know, sort of a bad guy. He's That Guy, but you love him. Because he's hilarious. He's made a Manhattan spray out your nose before -- it hurt -- the things that he says are so hysterical. Plus, even if he's always getting up and running out to the bathroom and therefore missing vast and crucial sections of the movie that's Reality, on certain vital points LF is absolutely dead on. And, let's be honest here, he's got amazing style. He's got style like crazy, and sometimes that's all you care about. And maybe most nights you get dinner with respectable people, with other social workers and teachers, who are honest and kind. But that shit can get boring, and boring's what you can't stand. There are better books out there than your friend London Fields. There are libraries full of them. But there are not many books that are this much fucking fun.
London Fields is a self-conscious fin de millénaire novel that takes place in London as the world seems to be ending. The story is a sort of inverted murder mystery following the intersection of four central characters: Nicola Six, sexed-out trainwreck femme fatale rushed direct via SST from Central Casting; psychopathic pre-chav-era dart hooligan and anti-villain Keith Talent; moneyed nothingburger father and husband Guy Clinch; and Samson Young, an ailing, unsuccessful writer from New York who's done an apartment swap and who narrates the action as everything unfolds. The plot, such as it is, is mostly stupid, and really sort of beside the point. Who cares? Reading this book made me realize something, which is that the world is really ending; it's ending all the time, all around us, just like in the book! I do appreciate fiction that helps me figure out something useful like that, but really what I appreciate is being entertained. Despite some obvious flaws, this book is FUN. To me it was a page turner, and would be perfect reading for a transatlantic flight! This is the first book I've read by Martin Amis, and I've heard that his stuff varies a lot, but based on this one I think of him as a sort of Sidney Sheldon figure for people who are pretty pretentious. If that sounds good to you, I would say give it a go!
Well, I might say that. But maybe I shouldn't. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who's easily offended. And by "easily offended" I mean offended by sex, sexism, classism, violence, rape, child abuse, predictable and often lame plotting, stereotypes, sociopathy, gross humor, or pretty much anything else. There are jokes in here about dog- and babyfucking, for example, so if you don't find that sort of thing hilarious, you might stay away. If you're not easily offended, though, and not too snobby, then you might love this book. It really was a lot more fun than I'd expected it to be -- I'd thought MA was better known for being "smart" than "fun," but his priorities seemed the opposite. And like all good fun, or funniness, it was very dark. It was dark and did get at things that are Serious Concerns, but it did it right, not all ponderous, truly did stay a blast. Every few pages there was a line that would actually make me emit a little scream of laughter, or else get dangerously depressed about not being able to come up with shit like that with my own feeble brain. A book isn't good if it doesn't make you insanely jealous of its author at least part of the time. There was stuff in here that made me want to hunt down Martin Amis and pry out portions of his brain with a screwdriver, for future grafting to my own somewhat sludgier, less linguistically and comically flexible organ.
I'd hang out with Martin again, if I ever find myself in a certain mood. He's not the kind of guy you want to spend every waking moment with, but there are certain times when you're really glad you know someone like him. Please don't get me wrong: there was some dumb shit in this book, but I'm not going to criticize it, because the thing was that I just didn't care. The dumb shit didn't get in the way of my enjoying the book immensely. So Martin can come on over, interrupt me, show off his vocabulary, smoke all my cigarettes, and tell me about the new 20-year-old girlfriend and her $600 shoes; I'd be happy to have him, as long as no one else is around.
Recommended! (With caveats, like all responsible recommendations.)
July 16, 2019
Ha!
I did it.
I finished London Fields, after a week or so on a roller coaster, up and down, loving it, hating it, being annoyed, bored, laughing out loud, bored again. In the end, I actually caught myself crying as well, which was the last thing I expected, having worked up a genuine distaste for the book somewhere in the middle.
I don't think I have ever read a book that I could easily give either one star or five stars, and feel perfectly justified to do so. I rarely change my mind so completely several times over the course of 500 pages either.
How to sum it up? No clue. The author (as opposed to the narrator) knows how stories are made, and he can write them. He can create interesting, funny, sad, dangerous characters, and make the reader laugh out loud at the humour of his descriptions. Yes! He can do that. But he can also spin a web of betrayal and deception, telling the story from different angles, over and over again, driving the same reader that just laughed out loud to the brink of insanity.
So, it is a story of a murder. Actually, since we know all the protagonists from the start, and know that the murder will occur in the last act, I would say rather than a crime novel, it is a wordy, rambling Greek tragedy. As everyone knows the plot, the outcome and the story, the charm (if there is such a thing!) lies in the psychological development of the characters.
The murderee takes on the role of guiding us through the different acts, and in a way we witness her suicide, as she thoroughly plans her murder herself. Maybe she is the MURDERER as well, even though she is not the one actually holding the lethal weapon. But she destroyed Keith, and Guy, and Sam, and the novel, so she certainly is the femme fatale of the story, in the most literal sense of the word.
There is only one hero in the book. I did not realise what a hero he was until his heart was broken by a weak man and he lost his herculean power and completely changed his character. That's when I started crying. The hero's name is Marmaduke. The childhood of Hercules!
How am I going to rate this book?
As Martin Amis managed to quote my favourite poem from The Poems Of Wilfred Owen on the very last pages: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend", I can't give the book one star even though I was mad at it for at least 300 pages. I can't give it five stars either, because that might make other people think I'd recommend it. I don't. If you read it, it has to be on your own responsibility. I only read it because I randomly decided this summer to read three books by authors I didn't know before which featured London in the title. I did not like the first one I chose, The Lambs of London, and the jury in my head is still (passing) out on this one, so I am more than worried about the third in the chosen trio: London Orbital, which I will start when I have recovered strength from this one.
To be fair, this one is incredibly fascinating as a concept, and I AM happy that I read it (and that it is over now)! I won't forget it! And I know more about the tactics of darts (there are none), than I did before.
Here's the sinus curve of my reading itinerary:
Starting to read: Perfect first paragraph for a tired evening, after discarding any books looking remotely like intellectual struggle:
"This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening. It's a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.
And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in the century, so late in the goddamned day.
This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. (It had better.)""
page 6
"I don't claim to make fast progress on this, but here we are, quote on page 6:
"He never had what it took to be a murderer, not on his own. He needed his murderee."
This is a VERY weird perspective, even for trained Humanities teachers who teach different angles, and personal biases for a living??"
page 34
"If the author chooses a confusing narrator, the characters can't really be blamed for their strange appearance, right? This feels like a wordy novel version of Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore - but the narrator, or author, admits to having been conned by the bad character." 1 comment
page 37
"I feel like I might be reading this book backwards, as I make so slow progress. I also vaguely suspect that I will start hating it soon, so I better write down some things I like before that:
"As for the two pigs, they were yahoos even by the standards of the yard."
Pigs as yahoos? What would the humans be then, in the universe of Gulliver's Travels? Above or below on the class ladder?"
page 41
"The poor foil Guy must be totally lost in London, if it really is a pub pretending to be a city, for he has something I did not know existed, but that I think I have always known to exist anyway (Lord, this book makes your brain spin!): he has PUB ANTICHARISMA. Is there a cure?
Does it mean London is allergic to him? Would it help if we gave London antihistamins?"
page 86
"I have discovered a major flaw in London Fields:
To enjoy the confusing story, you need a glass of dry Riesling. However, if you have a glass of Riesling, you can't follow the confusing story anymore. (Why does this make me want to reread Catch 22 all of a sudden?)
You might for example miss the fact that two consecutive chapters describe exactly the same situation, but from different characters' point of view!"
page 127
"I take back the comment that the narrator does not know what he is doing. In fact, he knows so well what he is doing that he is mingling with the murderer, murderee and foil BEFORE the murder has happened, in order to collect the materials for his murder story a priori. In fact, he is a bit impatient and wants to start chapter 7 before it has actually happened. I wonder if that makes London Fields a futuristic novel?"
page 178
"I am starting to worry about this novel. The narrator needs one of the main characters to guide the story, and discusses cutting out other characters with her. He is also seriously ill and has pressure from his publisher, who can't see how he is going to fill the middle of the novel. I agree: we all know the end, and the beginning was strong, but to go on for several hundred pages with silly cheats and darts? Really?"
page 180
"And I don't like it when the book catches me being condescending. Literally two pages after I complain about the darts storyline going on forever, I read this:
"But don't you be snooty about the darts. They matter in all this."
Well, we'll see about that. Maybe it is not a good idea to update progress on London Fields. I might be trapped in a fake plot. Should just read the whole thing and do the Caesar thumb sign."
page 237
"I am thoroughly annoyed with the work distribution in this novel by now: the narrator has dumped the whole plot development on the murderee, who has to work incredibly hard to get the other characters to move towards some kind of climax, and the murder itself is threatened by the fact, revealed very late in the day, that KEITH IS NOT EVEN GOOD AT DARTS!"
page 308
"The murderee rocks! She has decided to force the lazy narrator, murderer and foil to move forwards with the plot. Very much appreciated by the suffering reader! The fact that almost all scenes are retold several times from different perspectives to show EVERY POSSIBLE angle of the "not-yet-existing" murder story made me want to scream for about 100 pages. Now I am back where I started: I suspect a shadow of genius..."
page 400
"The world according to Keith, or maybe The Dart Gospel According To Keith:
"The trouble with darts they are no good when you are pist." (sic!)
That is a catch-22 if there ever was one! Things undoubtedly speed up a bit, thanks to the heroine who can't wait to get murdered. As a means to achieve her goal, she is now involved with everyone, playing all the available parts at the same time: virgin, whore..."
After this, I stopped updating, because the final act was such a whirlwind of emotions!
I did it.
I finished London Fields, after a week or so on a roller coaster, up and down, loving it, hating it, being annoyed, bored, laughing out loud, bored again. In the end, I actually caught myself crying as well, which was the last thing I expected, having worked up a genuine distaste for the book somewhere in the middle.
I don't think I have ever read a book that I could easily give either one star or five stars, and feel perfectly justified to do so. I rarely change my mind so completely several times over the course of 500 pages either.
How to sum it up? No clue. The author (as opposed to the narrator) knows how stories are made, and he can write them. He can create interesting, funny, sad, dangerous characters, and make the reader laugh out loud at the humour of his descriptions. Yes! He can do that. But he can also spin a web of betrayal and deception, telling the story from different angles, over and over again, driving the same reader that just laughed out loud to the brink of insanity.
So, it is a story of a murder. Actually, since we know all the protagonists from the start, and know that the murder will occur in the last act, I would say rather than a crime novel, it is a wordy, rambling Greek tragedy. As everyone knows the plot, the outcome and the story, the charm (if there is such a thing!) lies in the psychological development of the characters.
The murderee takes on the role of guiding us through the different acts, and in a way we witness her suicide, as she thoroughly plans her murder herself. Maybe she is the MURDERER as well, even though she is not the one actually holding the lethal weapon. But she destroyed Keith, and Guy, and Sam, and the novel, so she certainly is the femme fatale of the story, in the most literal sense of the word.
There is only one hero in the book. I did not realise what a hero he was until his heart was broken by a weak man and he lost his herculean power and completely changed his character. That's when I started crying. The hero's name is Marmaduke. The childhood of Hercules!
How am I going to rate this book?
As Martin Amis managed to quote my favourite poem from The Poems Of Wilfred Owen on the very last pages: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend", I can't give the book one star even though I was mad at it for at least 300 pages. I can't give it five stars either, because that might make other people think I'd recommend it. I don't. If you read it, it has to be on your own responsibility. I only read it because I randomly decided this summer to read three books by authors I didn't know before which featured London in the title. I did not like the first one I chose, The Lambs of London, and the jury in my head is still (passing) out on this one, so I am more than worried about the third in the chosen trio: London Orbital, which I will start when I have recovered strength from this one.
To be fair, this one is incredibly fascinating as a concept, and I AM happy that I read it (and that it is over now)! I won't forget it! And I know more about the tactics of darts (there are none), than I did before.
Here's the sinus curve of my reading itinerary:
Starting to read: Perfect first paragraph for a tired evening, after discarding any books looking remotely like intellectual struggle:
"This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening. It's a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.
And a love story (I think), of all strange things, so late in the century, so late in the goddamned day.
This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. (It had better.)""
page 6
"I don't claim to make fast progress on this, but here we are, quote on page 6:
"He never had what it took to be a murderer, not on his own. He needed his murderee."
This is a VERY weird perspective, even for trained Humanities teachers who teach different angles, and personal biases for a living??"
page 34
"If the author chooses a confusing narrator, the characters can't really be blamed for their strange appearance, right? This feels like a wordy novel version of Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore - but the narrator, or author, admits to having been conned by the bad character." 1 comment
page 37
"I feel like I might be reading this book backwards, as I make so slow progress. I also vaguely suspect that I will start hating it soon, so I better write down some things I like before that:
"As for the two pigs, they were yahoos even by the standards of the yard."
Pigs as yahoos? What would the humans be then, in the universe of Gulliver's Travels? Above or below on the class ladder?"
page 41
"The poor foil Guy must be totally lost in London, if it really is a pub pretending to be a city, for he has something I did not know existed, but that I think I have always known to exist anyway (Lord, this book makes your brain spin!): he has PUB ANTICHARISMA. Is there a cure?
Does it mean London is allergic to him? Would it help if we gave London antihistamins?"
page 86
"I have discovered a major flaw in London Fields:
To enjoy the confusing story, you need a glass of dry Riesling. However, if you have a glass of Riesling, you can't follow the confusing story anymore. (Why does this make me want to reread Catch 22 all of a sudden?)
You might for example miss the fact that two consecutive chapters describe exactly the same situation, but from different characters' point of view!"
page 127
"I take back the comment that the narrator does not know what he is doing. In fact, he knows so well what he is doing that he is mingling with the murderer, murderee and foil BEFORE the murder has happened, in order to collect the materials for his murder story a priori. In fact, he is a bit impatient and wants to start chapter 7 before it has actually happened. I wonder if that makes London Fields a futuristic novel?"
page 178
"I am starting to worry about this novel. The narrator needs one of the main characters to guide the story, and discusses cutting out other characters with her. He is also seriously ill and has pressure from his publisher, who can't see how he is going to fill the middle of the novel. I agree: we all know the end, and the beginning was strong, but to go on for several hundred pages with silly cheats and darts? Really?"
page 180
"And I don't like it when the book catches me being condescending. Literally two pages after I complain about the darts storyline going on forever, I read this:
"But don't you be snooty about the darts. They matter in all this."
Well, we'll see about that. Maybe it is not a good idea to update progress on London Fields. I might be trapped in a fake plot. Should just read the whole thing and do the Caesar thumb sign."
page 237
"I am thoroughly annoyed with the work distribution in this novel by now: the narrator has dumped the whole plot development on the murderee, who has to work incredibly hard to get the other characters to move towards some kind of climax, and the murder itself is threatened by the fact, revealed very late in the day, that KEITH IS NOT EVEN GOOD AT DARTS!"
page 308
"The murderee rocks! She has decided to force the lazy narrator, murderer and foil to move forwards with the plot. Very much appreciated by the suffering reader! The fact that almost all scenes are retold several times from different perspectives to show EVERY POSSIBLE angle of the "not-yet-existing" murder story made me want to scream for about 100 pages. Now I am back where I started: I suspect a shadow of genius..."
page 400
"The world according to Keith, or maybe The Dart Gospel According To Keith:
"The trouble with darts they are no good when you are pist." (sic!)
That is a catch-22 if there ever was one! Things undoubtedly speed up a bit, thanks to the heroine who can't wait to get murdered. As a means to achieve her goal, she is now involved with everyone, playing all the available parts at the same time: virgin, whore..."
After this, I stopped updating, because the final act was such a whirlwind of emotions!
January 18, 2013
THE BRITISH CLASS SYSTEM
At the top there is the Monarchy and the aristocracy. They're all still there, no one has gone away. The 14th Duke of Banffshire and all the scurvy crew. The only good news is - they're not allowed to hunt foxes any more ! Yay - one and a half cheers for democracy! So that's the Upper Class.
Next step down is the complicated Middle Class which is divided into three :
Upper middle : these are your professions, of course. Judges, lawyers, bankers, etc. There was a radio interview I heard recently, with a Member of Parliament. He was talking anonymously about the need to increase MPs' pay. The trouble is, you can't talk about MPs' pay in public because the public hate us, and think we are paid a lot. But really, he said, you don't want Members of Parliament who think that £65,000 ($104,000) is a lot of money. Well, of course you don't. (So that's me out!)
The upper middle class are toffs and go to public (= private) schools. They're all in the Tory party except a few who thought they'd take over the Labour Party too.
The middle middle class is people with careers. The women in the middle middle go crazy trying to "have it all" without the nannies that the upper middle get automatically.
The lower middle are teachers and librarians and policemen and other lowly types who just do a job, it couldn't be called a career. It's the middle middles who have careers. There's an annoying political cliche constantly used here which is "the squeezed middle". Here they are, in the middle.
Next step down is the Working Class - ah, let's celebrate working class values, like getting drunk and and abusing people and playing darts and hating foreigners. (A reference to London Fields!) This class is divided into two :
The Respectable Working Class. These have got jobs and get up at ungodly hours to go to them, even when it's really cold. They all love sport and telly but they don't go to the pub so much any more. Pubs are closing right left and centre. They all go to Spain for their summer holiday. They have such a laugh.
The Unrespectable Working Class, also known as The Underclass. Oh what problem they are! They don't have jobs. They could if they wanted to, but they don't want to, thangyewveryfookinmuch. So all the immigrants from Eastern Europe do those jobs (the worst jobs). They like to take giant amounts of drugs and sling mattresses into the front yard. They wheel and deal and commit wholesale benefit fraud. They are our trailer trash, except they don't live in trailers. They don't have families. They have weird accidental tribal aggregations - so in one house there will be a woman, her step dad, his girlfriend, that girlfriend's kids, three of the actual woman's kids, the others being in care, an occasional boyfriend, two half brothers, their girlfriends, you get the picture.
Now, this is the British class system, but I think it is very similar everywhere you go, with the exception of the Upper Class. Most countries sliced off the heads of their aristocracy in a rush of joyful democratic emotion some centuries ago.
So, my problem with London Fields, which was exactly the same problem as I had with White Teeth, which I also gave up, even though both novels are very well written, is that I don't like what happens when upper middle class writers write about working class characters. They write about them as comedy. They can't help it. It's always comedy. Often very black comedy, as here. To upper middle class writers, the working class is always funny.
***
Postscript : they tell me class mobility has practically ground to a halt in the last decade, and I can believe it. It was always impossible to ascend to the Upper Class, you had to shoe King Henry II's horse in 1311 or something. You can rise up the middle class if you're mighty smart and ambitious. And you can go to university and lurch from the respectable working class to the lower middle class, as I did. That's about it.
At the top there is the Monarchy and the aristocracy. They're all still there, no one has gone away. The 14th Duke of Banffshire and all the scurvy crew. The only good news is - they're not allowed to hunt foxes any more ! Yay - one and a half cheers for democracy! So that's the Upper Class.
Next step down is the complicated Middle Class which is divided into three :
Upper middle : these are your professions, of course. Judges, lawyers, bankers, etc. There was a radio interview I heard recently, with a Member of Parliament. He was talking anonymously about the need to increase MPs' pay. The trouble is, you can't talk about MPs' pay in public because the public hate us, and think we are paid a lot. But really, he said, you don't want Members of Parliament who think that £65,000 ($104,000) is a lot of money. Well, of course you don't. (So that's me out!)
The upper middle class are toffs and go to public (= private) schools. They're all in the Tory party except a few who thought they'd take over the Labour Party too.
The middle middle class is people with careers. The women in the middle middle go crazy trying to "have it all" without the nannies that the upper middle get automatically.
The lower middle are teachers and librarians and policemen and other lowly types who just do a job, it couldn't be called a career. It's the middle middles who have careers. There's an annoying political cliche constantly used here which is "the squeezed middle". Here they are, in the middle.
Next step down is the Working Class - ah, let's celebrate working class values, like getting drunk and and abusing people and playing darts and hating foreigners. (A reference to London Fields!) This class is divided into two :
The Respectable Working Class. These have got jobs and get up at ungodly hours to go to them, even when it's really cold. They all love sport and telly but they don't go to the pub so much any more. Pubs are closing right left and centre. They all go to Spain for their summer holiday. They have such a laugh.
The Unrespectable Working Class, also known as The Underclass. Oh what problem they are! They don't have jobs. They could if they wanted to, but they don't want to, thangyewveryfookinmuch. So all the immigrants from Eastern Europe do those jobs (the worst jobs). They like to take giant amounts of drugs and sling mattresses into the front yard. They wheel and deal and commit wholesale benefit fraud. They are our trailer trash, except they don't live in trailers. They don't have families. They have weird accidental tribal aggregations - so in one house there will be a woman, her step dad, his girlfriend, that girlfriend's kids, three of the actual woman's kids, the others being in care, an occasional boyfriend, two half brothers, their girlfriends, you get the picture.
Now, this is the British class system, but I think it is very similar everywhere you go, with the exception of the Upper Class. Most countries sliced off the heads of their aristocracy in a rush of joyful democratic emotion some centuries ago.
So, my problem with London Fields, which was exactly the same problem as I had with White Teeth, which I also gave up, even though both novels are very well written, is that I don't like what happens when upper middle class writers write about working class characters. They write about them as comedy. They can't help it. It's always comedy. Often very black comedy, as here. To upper middle class writers, the working class is always funny.
***
Postscript : they tell me class mobility has practically ground to a halt in the last decade, and I can believe it. It was always impossible to ascend to the Upper Class, you had to shoe King Henry II's horse in 1311 or something. You can rise up the middle class if you're mighty smart and ambitious. And you can go to university and lurch from the respectable working class to the lower middle class, as I did. That's about it.
December 9, 2018
A mumbo-jumbo of words trying desperately to congeal into a plot. And failing at it, miserably. A case of when the book is way worse than the bad film. I have a feeling that some promiscuos dictionary had a love affair with the Holy Bible and a bunch of pop-sci lit and quite a bit of erotica and this is their collective offspring. It should come with a warning: Careful! Words hijacked this book!
The style is ridiculous. Pompous and sleep-inducing. An example of what I mean by this: there is a piece where in the space of just one page the author discusses femininity briefly, then switches the topic to black holes, then to a bunch of escape velocities, and right after that progresses to a discourse on sodomy and masturbation and just how sodomy pains and 'solaces' Nicola... I sort of liked that one, actually, even though it's basically disjointed ramblings. Black holes and sodomy, I get it, of course, I just don't think all thisteenage wanking deserves being in a book I'm reading and all the gross overthinking. This whole novel is like that, labirintine, and the result is striking, all right, but not in the best way.
All the objectification of the female, it's all pretty much just literary pin up. Mentally, I'm going to refer to this one as 'the dirty toilet bowl novel', due to a half-page devoted to this subject of utmost importance.
Q:
But I am trying to ignore the world situation. I am hoping it will go away. Not the world. The situation. I want time to get on with this little piece of harmless escapism. I want time to go to London Fields. (c)
Q:
Happiness writes white: it doesn’t show up on the page.(c)Koan?
Q:
Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, the media, and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorary degrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin. I must look at his books, of which there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Japanese.(c)
Q:
On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Asprey stands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or bathtubs or abandoned pantechnicons, just selected refuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle.(c)What is this about, really?
Q:
Then the sound of what I can only describe as intense mutual difficulty.(c)Quite a way to describe sex.
Q:
In fact I've had to watch it with my characters' ages. I thought Guy Clinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought Keith Talent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought Nicola Six . . . No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit. (c)
Q:
Sitting in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as they dragged through Swiss Cottage to the motorway, or through the curling systems of Clapham and Brixton and beyond (where London seems unwilling ever to relinquish the land, wants to squat on those fields right up to the rocks and the cliffs and the water), Nicola would feel a pressure in those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of sex, like the stirring of a new hymen being pinkly formed. By the time they reached Totteridge or Tooting, Nicola was a virgin again. With what perplexity would she turn to the voluble disappointment, the babbling mistake, at her side with his hands on the wheel. After a glimpse of the trees in the dusk, a church, a dumbfounded sheep, Nicola would drink little at the hotel or the borrowed cottage and would sleep inviolate with her hands crossed over her heart like a saint. Sulky in slumber, the man of the moment would nevertheless awake to find that practically half his entire torso was inside Nicola's mouth; and Saturday lunchtime was always a debauch on every front. She hardly ever made it to Sunday. (c)Now, that's some unhealthy sexual imagery.
Q:
But let us be clear about this: she had great powers — great powers. All women whose faces and bodies more or less neatly fill the contemporary mould have some notion of these privileges and magics. During their pomp and optimum, however brief and relative, they occupy the erotic centre. Some feel lost, some surrounded or crowded, but there they are, in a China-sized woodland of teak-hard worship. And with Nicola Six the gender yearning was translated, was fantastically heightened: it came at her in the form of human love. She had the power of inspiring love, almost anywhere. Forget about making strong men weep. Seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way through street riots to be home in case she called. Family men abandoned sick children to wait in the rain outside her flat. Semi-literate builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences. She pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers. They were never the same again, they lost their heads. And the thing with her (what was it with her?), the thing with her was that she had to receive this love and send it back in opposite form, not just cancelled but murdered. Character is destiny; and Nicola knew where her destiny lay. (c)Hmmm... One might choose to tag it a bit differently.
Q:
Two extra specialists were present. One was peering between Hope's legs, saying, 'Yes, well it's rather hard to tell what goes where.' (c)?
Q:
The happiest time of Guy's fifteen-year marriage had come during Hope's pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy had found himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talk was of home improvement, of babies' names, nursery conversions, girlish pinks, boyish blues — the tender materialism, all with a point. Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them, shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormone time. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed. She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abrupt passion for patching, for needle and thread. (c)50% what? That's quite an urban legend going with the author.
Q:
When Nicola was good she was very very good. But when she was bad . . . About her parents she had no feelings one way or the other: this was her silent, inner secret. They both died, anyway, together, as she had always known they would. (c)
Q:
Nicola's knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. The typical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat, with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousers round his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now in underwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, or else to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leave at the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse. Nicola's men, and their escape velocities . . . (c)Her interpersonal skills must have seriously sucked.
Q:
There was always a lot of shouting and fistfighting to do before bedtime. (c)
Q:
It was fixed. It was written. The murderer was not yet a murderer.
But the murderee had always been a murderee. (c)
Q:
This was always the way with Nicola's more recent jobs, of which there had, for a while, been a fair number. She did the job, and then, after an escalating and finally overlapping series of late mornings, four-hour lunches, and early departures, she was considered to have let everyone down (she wasn't there ever), and stopped going in. Nicola always knew when this moment had come, and chose that day to stop going in. The fact that Nicola knew things would end that way lent great tension to each job she took, right from the first week, the first day, the first morning ... In the more distant past she had worked as a publisher's reader, a cocktail waitress, a telephonist, a croupier, a tourist operative, a model, a librarian, a kissogram girl, an archivist, and an actress. ... But then the acting bit of her lost its moorings and drifted out into real life. (c)
Q:
Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had always said it was a whore's mouth. ... Her eyes changed colour readily, eagerly, in different lights, but their firm state was a vehement green. She had this idea about the death of love. (c)
Q:
Nicola Six, looking and sounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. (c)Looking and sounding 'very good'?
Q:
Prettily Nicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a gloved hand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. (c)
Q:
Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that day would never come) when she entered a men's room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. She walked straight to the bar, lifted her veil with both hands, like a bride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately she knew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, that she had found him, her murderer.
When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purpose and she wondered
how to dispose of them. The story wasn't over, but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon .. . Tve found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.’
I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. (c)
Q:
That light came from the elemental feminine power: propagation. If Nicola had had that light her power might have approached the infinite. But she didn't have it, and never would have it. With her, light went the other way. . . The black hole, so long predicted in theory, was now, to Nicola's glee, established astronomical fact: Cygnus X-1. It was a binary system; the black hole was orbiting a star thirty times the mass of our sun. The black hole weighed in at ten solar masses, but was no wider than London, It was nothing; it was just a hole; it had dropped out of space and time; it had collapsed into its own universe. Its very nature prevented anyone from knowing what it was: unapproachable, unilluminable. Nothing is fast enough to escape from it. For mother earth the escape velocity is seven miles per second, for Jupiter thirty-seven miles per second, for the sun 383 miles per second. For Sirius B, the first white dwarf they found, the escape velocity is 4,900 miles per second. But for Cygnus X1, the black swan, there is no escape velocity. Even light, which propagates at 186,287 miles per second, cannot escape from it. That's what I am, she used to whisper to herself after sex. A black hole. Nothing can escape from me.
Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local prevalence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. How generally prevalent was it (and an unwonted humiliation, this, to seek safety in numbers) ? It wasn't like masturbation, which everyone secretly knew everyone secretly did, apart from the odd fanatic or ostrich or liar. Masturbation was an open secret until you were thirty. Then it was a closed secret. Even modern literature shut up about it at that point, pretty much. Nicola held this silence partly responsible for the industrial dimensions of contemporary pornography - pornography, a form in which masturbation was the only subject. Everybody masturbated all their lives. On the whole, literature declined the responsibility of this truth. So pornography had to cope with it. Not elegantly or reassuringly. As best it could.
When you came to sodomy . . . Instinct declared that nowhere near everybody did it, but one could harbour one's suspicions here too. Nicola remembered reading, with a blush of pleasure, that fully seventy-five per cent of female v. male divorce suits featured sodomy under one subhead or another, anything from physical cruelty to unreasonable demands. How unreasonable was it? How cruel? What did it mean when a woman wanted it? The tempting location, so close to its better sister . . . But wherever it was (in the armpit, behind the kneecap), it would have its attractions. Be literal, and look at the human mouth. The mouth was a good distance away. And the mouth got it too.
Literature did go on about sodomy, and increasingly. This hugely solaced Nicola Six.(c)
Q:
The only other compensation was an artistic one. At least it was congruous with her larger tribulation; at least sodomy added up. Most types have their opposite numbers. Groups have groupies. There are molls for all men, and vice versa. The professional has his perkie; scowlers get scowlies; so smuggles, loudies, cruellies. So the failed suicide must find a murderer. So the murderer must find a murderee. (c)
Q:
Nicola was amazed — Nicola was consternated — by how few women really understood about underwear. It was a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shopping decision? (c)So much objectification.
Q:
In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms and cabins and boudoirs and powder parlours, and watched debutantes, predatory divorcees, young hostesses, even reasonably successful good-time girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses and ballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long Johns, Yfronts. A prosperous hooker whom she had hung out with for a while in Milan invariably wore panties that reminded Nicola, in both texture and hue, of a bunion pad. To ephemeral flatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to other under-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped the underwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months later the ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger. But they mostly got it wrong. (c) Endless misogyny...
Q:
Or look at it the other way. Nicola Six, considerably inconvenienced, is up there in her flying saucer, approaching the event horizon. ...
No, it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out because she's already there on the other side. All her life she's lived on the other side of the event horizon, treading gravity in slowing time. She's it. She's the naked singularity. She's beyond the black hole. Every fifteen minutes the telephone rings. (c)WTF
Q:
It solaced the old to see such piety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes of premonitory inquiry, and with small inner shrugs of disappointment. ...
Keith's tone was mawkishly pally, seeming to offer the commiserations due to a shared burden. ...
Here was a room, here was a set that had experienced a lot of nakedness, a lot of secretions and ablutions and reflections. (c)Beware! A drunk dictionary barfed all over this book.
Q:
You don't need much empathic talent to tell what Keith's thinking. He doesn't do that much thinking in the first place. (c)Unkind.
Q:
Nicola raised her eyes to heaven at the thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And in earnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death. (c)How original.
Q:
Babies, infants, little human beings: they're a skirt thing. The only blokes who love babies are transvestites, hormone-cases, sex-maniacs. (c)Outright nasty
Q:
Keith went at the ironing-board like the man in the deckchair joke. The tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp. After his final misadventure with the coffeegrinder plug and the screwdriver Nicola handed him a paper tissue for his gouged thumb and said in a puzzled voice,
'But you're completely hopeless. Or is it just being drunk?' (c)
Q:
'It could be the fuse.'
'Yeah. Could be.'
'Change it,'...
Chipping a yellow fingernail, swearing, dropping screws, confusing fuses, Keith accomplished this deed. He then slapped the plug into the wall, pressed the switch, and briskly actuated the coffee-grinder. Nothing happened.
'Well,' said Keith after a while. 'It's not the fuse.'
Then could you take a look at the lavatory seat at least.' (c) So. Very. Logical.
Q:
People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. (c)
Q:
Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way. (c)
Q:
The weather has a new number, or better say a new angle. And I don't mean dead clouds. Apparently it will stay like this for quite a while: for the duration, in any event. It's not a good one. It will just make everything worse. It's not a wise one. The weather really shouldn't be doing this. (c)Yes! Advice for the weather, how sophisticated!
Q:
He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don't do that. Except when we're pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake
with our fake faces.
He grinned. No he didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.
She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.
He smiled.
Not quite true.
All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write. (c)Yep. And it applies to this whole novel.
Q:
'Wobbly toilet,' Keith said to her in a gurgling voice. 'Can't have that. Might do yourself an injury. Might ruin your married life.'
Nicola stared at him. There was perhaps an infinitesimal swelling in the orbits of her eyes. Several replies offered themselves to her with urgency, like schoolboys raising their hands to please the pretty teacher. One was 'Get out of here, you unbelievable lout'; another, remarkably (and this would be delivered in a dull monotone), was 'Do you like dirty sex, Keith?' But she stayed silent. Who cared? There wasn't going to be any married life.(c)Inane.
Q:
She turned, and bent forward, and reached up into her dress with both thumbs. 'Use these. We'll put them on your head until you need them. You can watch through the legholes. Might look rather comic on anyone but you, Keith.'(c)Yes, this our sexbomb of a clairvoyant offering her panties to be used as a 'frilly gasmask'…
The style is ridiculous. Pompous and sleep-inducing. An example of what I mean by this: there is a piece where in the space of just one page the author discusses femininity briefly, then switches the topic to black holes, then to a bunch of escape velocities, and right after that progresses to a discourse on sodomy and masturbation and just how sodomy pains and 'solaces' Nicola... I sort of liked that one, actually, even though it's basically disjointed ramblings. Black holes and sodomy, I get it, of course, I just don't think all this
All the objectification of the female, it's all pretty much just literary pin up. Mentally, I'm going to refer to this one as 'the dirty toilet bowl novel', due to a half-page devoted to this subject of utmost importance.
Q:
But I am trying to ignore the world situation. I am hoping it will go away. Not the world. The situation. I want time to get on with this little piece of harmless escapism. I want time to go to London Fields. (c)
Q:
Happiness writes white: it doesn’t show up on the page.(c)Koan?
Q:
Cherished and valued alike by the critical establishment, the media, and the world of academe, Mark Asprey has honorary degrees, pasteboard hats, three separate gowns from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin. I must look at his books, of which there are a great many, in a great many editions, in a great many languages. Hungarian. Japanese.(c)
Q:
On this green patch, rather regrettably, rather disappointingly (how come Asprey stands for it?), there is also a garbage tip: nothing outrageous, no compost or bathtubs or abandoned pantechnicons, just selected refuse, magazines, old toys, a running shoe, a kettle.(c)What is this about, really?
Q:
Then the sound of what I can only describe as intense mutual difficulty.(c)Quite a way to describe sex.
Q:
In fact I've had to watch it with my characters' ages. I thought Guy Clinch was about twenty-seven. He is thirty-five. I thought Keith Talent was about forty-two. He is twenty-nine. I thought Nicola Six . . . No, I always knew what she was. Nicola Six is thirty-four. I fear for them, my youngers.
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit. (c)
Q:
Sitting in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as they dragged through Swiss Cottage to the motorway, or through the curling systems of Clapham and Brixton and beyond (where London seems unwilling ever to relinquish the land, wants to squat on those fields right up to the rocks and the cliffs and the water), Nicola would feel a pressure in those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of sex, like the stirring of a new hymen being pinkly formed. By the time they reached Totteridge or Tooting, Nicola was a virgin again. With what perplexity would she turn to the voluble disappointment, the babbling mistake, at her side with his hands on the wheel. After a glimpse of the trees in the dusk, a church, a dumbfounded sheep, Nicola would drink little at the hotel or the borrowed cottage and would sleep inviolate with her hands crossed over her heart like a saint. Sulky in slumber, the man of the moment would nevertheless awake to find that practically half his entire torso was inside Nicola's mouth; and Saturday lunchtime was always a debauch on every front. She hardly ever made it to Sunday. (c)Now, that's some unhealthy sexual imagery.
Q:
But let us be clear about this: she had great powers — great powers. All women whose faces and bodies more or less neatly fill the contemporary mould have some notion of these privileges and magics. During their pomp and optimum, however brief and relative, they occupy the erotic centre. Some feel lost, some surrounded or crowded, but there they are, in a China-sized woodland of teak-hard worship. And with Nicola Six the gender yearning was translated, was fantastically heightened: it came at her in the form of human love. She had the power of inspiring love, almost anywhere. Forget about making strong men weep. Seven-stone pacifists shouldered their way through street riots to be home in case she called. Family men abandoned sick children to wait in the rain outside her flat. Semi-literate builders and bankers sent her sonnet sequences. She pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers. They were never the same again, they lost their heads. And the thing with her (what was it with her?), the thing with her was that she had to receive this love and send it back in opposite form, not just cancelled but murdered. Character is destiny; and Nicola knew where her destiny lay. (c)Hmmm... One might choose to tag it a bit differently.
Q:
Two extra specialists were present. One was peering between Hope's legs, saying, 'Yes, well it's rather hard to tell what goes where.' (c)?
Q:
The happiest time of Guy's fifteen-year marriage had come during Hope's pregnancy, a relatively recent interlude. She had taken her fifty per cent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy had found himself dealing with an intellectual equal. Suddenly the talk was of home improvement, of babies' names, nursery conversions, girlish pinks, boyish blues — the tender materialism, all with a point. Never entirely free of builders, the house now thronged with them, shouting, swearing, staggering. Guy and Hope lived to hormone time. The curtain hormone, the carpet hormone. Her nausea passed. She craved mashed potato. Then the nesting hormone: an abrupt passion for patching, for needle and thread. (c)50% what? That's quite an urban legend going with the author.
Q:
When Nicola was good she was very very good. But when she was bad . . . About her parents she had no feelings one way or the other: this was her silent, inner secret. They both died, anyway, together, as she had always known they would. (c)
Q:
Nicola's knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. The typical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat, with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousers round his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now in underwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, or else to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leave at the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse. Nicola's men, and their escape velocities . . . (c)Her interpersonal skills must have seriously sucked.
Q:
There was always a lot of shouting and fistfighting to do before bedtime. (c)
Q:
It was fixed. It was written. The murderer was not yet a murderer.
But the murderee had always been a murderee. (c)
Q:
This was always the way with Nicola's more recent jobs, of which there had, for a while, been a fair number. She did the job, and then, after an escalating and finally overlapping series of late mornings, four-hour lunches, and early departures, she was considered to have let everyone down (she wasn't there ever), and stopped going in. Nicola always knew when this moment had come, and chose that day to stop going in. The fact that Nicola knew things would end that way lent great tension to each job she took, right from the first week, the first day, the first morning ... In the more distant past she had worked as a publisher's reader, a cocktail waitress, a telephonist, a croupier, a tourist operative, a model, a librarian, a kissogram girl, an archivist, and an actress. ... But then the acting bit of her lost its moorings and drifted out into real life. (c)
Q:
Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had always said it was a whore's mouth. ... Her eyes changed colour readily, eagerly, in different lights, but their firm state was a vehement green. She had this idea about the death of love. (c)
Q:
Nicola Six, looking and sounding very very good, explained to various interested parties who she was and what she was doing there. (c)Looking and sounding 'very good'?
Q:
Prettily Nicola said her goodbyes to him and his family, extending a gloved hand and receiving their thanks and praise for her attendance. (c)
Q:
Indeed, it would be a bad day (and that day would never come) when she entered a men's room, a teeming toilet such as this and turned no heads, caused no groans or whispers. She walked straight to the bar, lifted her veil with both hands, like a bride, surveyed the main actors of the scene, and immediately she knew, with pain, with gravid arrest, with intense recognition, that she had found him, her murderer.
When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script. . . Now they had served their purpose and she wondered
how to dispose of them. The story wasn't over, but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon .. . Tve found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.’
I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page. We all know this. The letter with the foreign postmark that tells of good weather, pleasant food and comfortable accommodation isn't nearly as much fun to read, or to write, as the letter that tells of rotting chalets, dysentery and drizzle. (c)
Q:
That light came from the elemental feminine power: propagation. If Nicola had had that light her power might have approached the infinite. But she didn't have it, and never would have it. With her, light went the other way. . . The black hole, so long predicted in theory, was now, to Nicola's glee, established astronomical fact: Cygnus X-1. It was a binary system; the black hole was orbiting a star thirty times the mass of our sun. The black hole weighed in at ten solar masses, but was no wider than London, It was nothing; it was just a hole; it had dropped out of space and time; it had collapsed into its own universe. Its very nature prevented anyone from knowing what it was: unapproachable, unilluminable. Nothing is fast enough to escape from it. For mother earth the escape velocity is seven miles per second, for Jupiter thirty-seven miles per second, for the sun 383 miles per second. For Sirius B, the first white dwarf they found, the escape velocity is 4,900 miles per second. But for Cygnus X1, the black swan, there is no escape velocity. Even light, which propagates at 186,287 miles per second, cannot escape from it. That's what I am, she used to whisper to herself after sex. A black hole. Nothing can escape from me.
Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local prevalence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. How generally prevalent was it (and an unwonted humiliation, this, to seek safety in numbers) ? It wasn't like masturbation, which everyone secretly knew everyone secretly did, apart from the odd fanatic or ostrich or liar. Masturbation was an open secret until you were thirty. Then it was a closed secret. Even modern literature shut up about it at that point, pretty much. Nicola held this silence partly responsible for the industrial dimensions of contemporary pornography - pornography, a form in which masturbation was the only subject. Everybody masturbated all their lives. On the whole, literature declined the responsibility of this truth. So pornography had to cope with it. Not elegantly or reassuringly. As best it could.
When you came to sodomy . . . Instinct declared that nowhere near everybody did it, but one could harbour one's suspicions here too. Nicola remembered reading, with a blush of pleasure, that fully seventy-five per cent of female v. male divorce suits featured sodomy under one subhead or another, anything from physical cruelty to unreasonable demands. How unreasonable was it? How cruel? What did it mean when a woman wanted it? The tempting location, so close to its better sister . . . But wherever it was (in the armpit, behind the kneecap), it would have its attractions. Be literal, and look at the human mouth. The mouth was a good distance away. And the mouth got it too.
Literature did go on about sodomy, and increasingly. This hugely solaced Nicola Six.(c)
Q:
The only other compensation was an artistic one. At least it was congruous with her larger tribulation; at least sodomy added up. Most types have their opposite numbers. Groups have groupies. There are molls for all men, and vice versa. The professional has his perkie; scowlers get scowlies; so smuggles, loudies, cruellies. So the failed suicide must find a murderer. So the murderer must find a murderee. (c)
Q:
Nicola was amazed — Nicola was consternated — by how few women really understood about underwear. It was a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shopping decision? (c)So much objectification.
Q:
In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms and cabins and boudoirs and powder parlours, and watched debutantes, predatory divorcees, young hostesses, even reasonably successful good-time girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses and ballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long Johns, Yfronts. A prosperous hooker whom she had hung out with for a while in Milan invariably wore panties that reminded Nicola, in both texture and hue, of a bunion pad. To ephemeral flatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to other under-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped the underwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months later the ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger. But they mostly got it wrong. (c) Endless misogyny...
Q:
Or look at it the other way. Nicola Six, considerably inconvenienced, is up there in her flying saucer, approaching the event horizon. ...
No, it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out because she's already there on the other side. All her life she's lived on the other side of the event horizon, treading gravity in slowing time. She's it. She's the naked singularity. She's beyond the black hole. Every fifteen minutes the telephone rings. (c)WTF
Q:
It solaced the old to see such piety in the relatively young. She reviewed the company with eyes of premonitory inquiry, and with small inner shrugs of disappointment. ...
Keith's tone was mawkishly pally, seeming to offer the commiserations due to a shared burden. ...
Here was a room, here was a set that had experienced a lot of nakedness, a lot of secretions and ablutions and reflections. (c)Beware! A drunk dictionary barfed all over this book.
Q:
You don't need much empathic talent to tell what Keith's thinking. He doesn't do that much thinking in the first place. (c)Unkind.
Q:
Nicola raised her eyes to heaven at the thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And in earnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death. (c)How original.
Q:
Babies, infants, little human beings: they're a skirt thing. The only blokes who love babies are transvestites, hormone-cases, sex-maniacs. (c)Outright nasty
Q:
Keith went at the ironing-board like the man in the deckchair joke. The tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp. After his final misadventure with the coffeegrinder plug and the screwdriver Nicola handed him a paper tissue for his gouged thumb and said in a puzzled voice,
'But you're completely hopeless. Or is it just being drunk?' (c)
Q:
'It could be the fuse.'
'Yeah. Could be.'
'Change it,'...
Chipping a yellow fingernail, swearing, dropping screws, confusing fuses, Keith accomplished this deed. He then slapped the plug into the wall, pressed the switch, and briskly actuated the coffee-grinder. Nothing happened.
'Well,' said Keith after a while. 'It's not the fuse.'
Then could you take a look at the lavatory seat at least.' (c) So. Very. Logical.
Q:
People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. (c)
Q:
Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way. (c)
Q:
The weather has a new number, or better say a new angle. And I don't mean dead clouds. Apparently it will stay like this for quite a while: for the duration, in any event. It's not a good one. It will just make everything worse. It's not a wise one. The weather really shouldn't be doing this. (c)Yes! Advice for the weather, how sophisticated!
Q:
He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don't do that. Except when we're pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake
with our fake faces.
He grinned. No he didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.
She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.
He smiled.
Not quite true.
All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write. (c)Yep. And it applies to this whole novel.
Q:
'Wobbly toilet,' Keith said to her in a gurgling voice. 'Can't have that. Might do yourself an injury. Might ruin your married life.'
Nicola stared at him. There was perhaps an infinitesimal swelling in the orbits of her eyes. Several replies offered themselves to her with urgency, like schoolboys raising their hands to please the pretty teacher. One was 'Get out of here, you unbelievable lout'; another, remarkably (and this would be delivered in a dull monotone), was 'Do you like dirty sex, Keith?' But she stayed silent. Who cared? There wasn't going to be any married life.(c)Inane.
Q:
She turned, and bent forward, and reached up into her dress with both thumbs. 'Use these. We'll put them on your head until you need them. You can watch through the legholes. Might look rather comic on anyone but you, Keith.'(c)Yes, this our sexbomb of a clairvoyant offering her panties to be used as a 'frilly gasmask'…
February 10, 2017
Back before Goodreads and the interwebz, most discussions of pop culture, for me, usually took place in bars. After work. Late. Half-sober. Some sample conversational starters/topics:
What was Marlon Brando’s best performance? Does it involve butter?
Why does Pon Farr take seven years? Does this mean the Vulcan’s don’t have porn?
Who was the greatest left handed pitcher of the seventies?
What do you mean there’s another version of Blade Runner?
How drunk is “Tom Waits drunk”?
Why can’t we meet women? This one, was of course, rhetorical.
It was a group of guys, usually about six or seven of us – oddly, there were two brothers, about a year apart: one had a Brooklyn accent, one had a British accent. I don’t remember the whole Dickensian saga about why this was so, it was just, well, odd.
We were talking about Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim, probably because it was funny and involved drinking and bad behavior, when the Brit brother mentioned that Kingsley had a son, Martin, who wrote a book called, Dead Babies and that it was terrific.
It was pretty good. And so was his book, Money.
Fast forward about a million years later and now, this one.
Amis is an uber-writer, who crams more wit and ideas into a single paragraph than a lot of writers can churn out in a lifetime. Although some critics have tried to tag this as sci-fi/end of the world, they’d be missing the point. The “crisis” is mere background - window dressing - to one of the more assiduously crafted character studies I’ve read in quite a while – it doesn’t matter that the world is going to hell in a hand basket – the baser elements of human nature still shine on.
Which is a good thing.
The story revolves around Nicola Six, she’s the planet Venus, around which the lesser moons of Guy Clinch and Keith Talent erratically revolve. She has the ability of predestination and can predict her own murder. She manipulates these two stooges into making it happen.
Clinch is the very model of the upper class stuffed shirt twit, who’s systematically bilked and painfully led around by his “little Guy”. Talent is a small time, dim witted hood who’s adrift in anything beyond darts (“Darts, innit?”) and his seamy world.
Throw in an unreliable narrator and “author” of the story, Samson Young, and you have the makings of corrosively entertaining read.
Favorite character: The baby from Hell – Marmaduke. For starters, French kissing the nanny and trying to bite her tongue…
This book isn’t a “casual” read, but it will be well worth the time a reader will invest in it.
What was Marlon Brando’s best performance? Does it involve butter?
Why does Pon Farr take seven years? Does this mean the Vulcan’s don’t have porn?
Who was the greatest left handed pitcher of the seventies?
What do you mean there’s another version of Blade Runner?
How drunk is “Tom Waits drunk”?
Why can’t we meet women? This one, was of course, rhetorical.
It was a group of guys, usually about six or seven of us – oddly, there were two brothers, about a year apart: one had a Brooklyn accent, one had a British accent. I don’t remember the whole Dickensian saga about why this was so, it was just, well, odd.
We were talking about Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim, probably because it was funny and involved drinking and bad behavior, when the Brit brother mentioned that Kingsley had a son, Martin, who wrote a book called, Dead Babies and that it was terrific.
It was pretty good. And so was his book, Money.
Fast forward about a million years later and now, this one.
Amis is an uber-writer, who crams more wit and ideas into a single paragraph than a lot of writers can churn out in a lifetime. Although some critics have tried to tag this as sci-fi/end of the world, they’d be missing the point. The “crisis” is mere background - window dressing - to one of the more assiduously crafted character studies I’ve read in quite a while – it doesn’t matter that the world is going to hell in a hand basket – the baser elements of human nature still shine on.
Which is a good thing.
The story revolves around Nicola Six, she’s the planet Venus, around which the lesser moons of Guy Clinch and Keith Talent erratically revolve. She has the ability of predestination and can predict her own murder. She manipulates these two stooges into making it happen.
Clinch is the very model of the upper class stuffed shirt twit, who’s systematically bilked and painfully led around by his “little Guy”. Talent is a small time, dim witted hood who’s adrift in anything beyond darts (“Darts, innit?”) and his seamy world.
Throw in an unreliable narrator and “author” of the story, Samson Young, and you have the makings of corrosively entertaining read.
Favorite character: The baby from Hell – Marmaduke. For starters, French kissing the nanny and trying to bite her tongue…
This book isn’t a “casual” read, but it will be well worth the time a reader will invest in it.
July 8, 2016
Many thanks to ⇨ this review⇦ for providing the inspiration!
Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh!
Gosh.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
I haven’t read a book this good in really, *really* long time.
And we’re not talking about oh-I-can’t-wait-to-get-home-so-I-can-read-this good.
We’re talking about walking-upstairs-in-my-robot-suit good. >COMMAND: MUST READ BOOK
Out of every book I’ve read this month – shit, maybe even the YEAR – this book comes along and showed me that Amis still thinks all human beings are maggots burrowing in a rotten piece of meat*. Normally I would be gagging while thinking about these characters. But they are living in such a dense and beautifully crafted novel, one so rich in detail and incident, overstuffed with gorgeous and intense prose, so full of evil wit and fascinating experiments with language and form and perspective... I just had to sit back and realize that I was loving this misanthropic, dehumanizing, scabrously vicious death-farce. It's a hearty and heavily spiced meal! I had to put away my dismay and just embrace the callous cruelty and sadistic savagery - the sheer villainy of it all. Amis is a bonafide genius.
And I loved his maggot sandwich!
* ~That rotten piece of meat is our very own earth!~
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
said the maggot sandwich. And I did!
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
A story about a girl with innocent eyes who meets the boy with a savage grin and wicked hands and the other boy with the pasty complexion and the boner that never goes away.
OUR HEROINE NICOLA SIX
Nicola was looking out, at the window, at the world. Her slender throat tautened, and her eyes filled with indignation or simple self-belief. She had about her then the thing of hers that touched me most: as if she were surrounded, on every side, by tiny multitudes of clever enemies.
OUR HERO GUY CLINCH
Guy nodded and sipped, and sipped, and nodded. His palate, his tutored papillae, continued to savour the fruit, the flowers, the full body (stout, plummy, barrelly, tart) of the examined life, the life of thought and feeling so languidly combined. He was rich in understanding. He was also, by now, a rather poorly paramour: a sick man, in fact, and thoroughly distempered.
OUR HERO KEITH TALENT
He climbed up her body until she felt the scrawny sharpness of his knees on her shoulders.
‘Shut your eyes and open your mouth.’
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
"...all kinds of terrible little creations out there, tendrilled, dumbbelled, gravity-warped; or like a preparation for the crazy scientist’s microscope, disgraceful cultures in compound opposition, the ambitious maggot with its antennae rolling like radar sweeps, the gangly moth briefly clearing the decks with its continental wing-frenzy, the no-account midges, the haunch ants and grimly ambling spiders, the occasional innocuous white butterfly fainting away from the glass, all of them seeking the atomic brightness, the nuclear sun of the lamp’s bulb. And all the wrong things prosper...
It’s happening."
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Oh.
And uhh... to you authors whose books I plan on reading after this one?
They better be maggot sandwiches.
Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh!
Gosh.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
I haven’t read a book this good in really, *really* long time.
And we’re not talking about oh-I-can’t-wait-to-get-home-so-I-can-read-this good.
We’re talking about walking-upstairs-in-my-robot-suit good. >COMMAND: MUST READ BOOK
Out of every book I’ve read this month – shit, maybe even the YEAR – this book comes along and showed me that Amis still thinks all human beings are maggots burrowing in a rotten piece of meat*. Normally I would be gagging while thinking about these characters. But they are living in such a dense and beautifully crafted novel, one so rich in detail and incident, overstuffed with gorgeous and intense prose, so full of evil wit and fascinating experiments with language and form and perspective... I just had to sit back and realize that I was loving this misanthropic, dehumanizing, scabrously vicious death-farce. It's a hearty and heavily spiced meal! I had to put away my dismay and just embrace the callous cruelty and sadistic savagery - the sheer villainy of it all. Amis is a bonafide genius.
And I loved his maggot sandwich!
* ~That rotten piece of meat is our very own earth!~
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
said the maggot sandwich. And I did!
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
A story about a girl with innocent eyes who meets the boy with a savage grin and wicked hands and the other boy with the pasty complexion and the boner that never goes away.
OUR HEROINE NICOLA SIX
Nicola was looking out, at the window, at the world. Her slender throat tautened, and her eyes filled with indignation or simple self-belief. She had about her then the thing of hers that touched me most: as if she were surrounded, on every side, by tiny multitudes of clever enemies.
OUR HERO GUY CLINCH
Guy nodded and sipped, and sipped, and nodded. His palate, his tutored papillae, continued to savour the fruit, the flowers, the full body (stout, plummy, barrelly, tart) of the examined life, the life of thought and feeling so languidly combined. He was rich in understanding. He was also, by now, a rather poorly paramour: a sick man, in fact, and thoroughly distempered.
OUR HERO KEITH TALENT
He climbed up her body until she felt the scrawny sharpness of his knees on her shoulders.
‘Shut your eyes and open your mouth.’
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
"...all kinds of terrible little creations out there, tendrilled, dumbbelled, gravity-warped; or like a preparation for the crazy scientist’s microscope, disgraceful cultures in compound opposition, the ambitious maggot with its antennae rolling like radar sweeps, the gangly moth briefly clearing the decks with its continental wing-frenzy, the no-account midges, the haunch ants and grimly ambling spiders, the occasional innocuous white butterfly fainting away from the glass, all of them seeking the atomic brightness, the nuclear sun of the lamp’s bulb. And all the wrong things prosper...
It’s happening."
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Oh.
And uhh... to you authors whose books I plan on reading after this one?
They better be maggot sandwiches.
December 21, 2012
London Fields is a book with a plot so pointless it made me angry, and a cast of blatant stereotypes. It's distinguished by some flourishes of wonderful writing, and the presence of one character who is one of my favourite creations of modern British fiction.
Initially, there is plenty to like. The narrator – a failed American writer on a house-swap in London – has an engaging line in self-doubt, a brooding sense of millennial disaster, and a neat turn of phrase. The traffic-clogged, grimy streets of London, its monotonous weather and its sweaty pubs, are perfectly evoked and give the whole novel a very effective tone of edginess, latent violence, and even what comes to feel like looming apocalypse. The plot focuses on a girl with the delightful name of Nicola Six, who, thanks to a kind of second sight, knows that she will be murdered on the night of her thirty-fifth birthday; she also knows who will do it, and, in many ways, she positively wants it to happen.
The narrator has been asked by Nicola to tell her story – and he throws himself into it with gusto, developing close relationships with her and with the putative murderer, Keith Talent, and the foil, Guy Clinch. Keith, a petty criminal and amateur darts player, is a fantastic and original character, and the book lifts to a higher level every time he's on the page. With his chain-smoking, his string of girlfriends, the long-suffering wife, and his general lager-and-sports demeanour, he can seem a bit of a type. But there's something so pleasurable about how perfectly Amis has skewered the type that it doesn't seem like a problem. His dialogue in particular is a joy, no more so than when he and his friends are discussing darts, in an endless stream of pundit's clichés:
‘You can't argue with finishing of that quality. No way.’
‘It was a stern test,’ said Thelonius deliberately, ‘of your darting character.’
Bogdan said, ‘You responded to the – to the big-match atmosphere.’
‘The choice of venue could have posed problems to a lesser player,’ said Dean. ‘You fended off the. . .’
‘You disposed of the. . .’
‘Challenge of the. . .’
‘Brixton left-hander,’ said Thelonius with a sigh.
It is the more impressive that Amis does not allow you to regard Keith simply as comic relief; he is also behind most of the disgust and anger that the reader feels. He's a nasty piece of work – a wife-beater, pornographer, and statutary rapist who makes regular trips to a fifteen-year-old prostitute.
Perhaps this is the first clue to a pervasive hatred that underlies much of Amis's writing. It shows itself in a constant low-level intolerance, sometimes in the form of bizarrely xenophobic outbreaks about "the blacks silent with unreadable hungers", and on one occasion the comment that "black people are better at fighting than white people, because, among other reasons, they all do it". How much of this is Amis and how much his narrator is, of course, difficult to say.
It all crystallises in the character of Nicola. I found her really the most pitiful example of what literary theorists like to call the "male gaze" that I've ever come across. Young, beautiful, sexually irresistible, she is described in long voyeuristic and faintly implausible passages in which she evaluates herself as a sex object:
she stood naked in the middle of the warm room. Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had always said it was a whore's mouth. It seemed to have an extra half-inch at either wing, like the mouth of the clowngirl in pornography.
Nicola prowls about this novel like a embarrassing fantasy of Amis's, endlessly peeling off pairs of stockings, mulling over what kind of underwear to put on, having long contemplative baths, or thinking about masturbation. And by the way, Martin, you can't just get out of it by including an exchange like this one:
‘I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasy figure.’
‘I am a male fantasy figure. [...] You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.’
Ah yes the sex. Nicola, you are unsurprised to learn at this point, is a bit of a goer. And wouldn't you know it, what she particularly likes is to take it up the arse.
Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local prevalence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. [...] No, not everybody did it. But Nicola did it. At a certain point (and she always vowed she wouldn't, and always knew she would) Nicola tended to redirect her lover's thrusts, down there in the binary system. . . .
I'm not saying that no women are like this. I'm just saying that Martin Amis offers the least convincing portrait of one that I've ever seen. The sex, and the dark sexual secrets, are just one aspect of what starts to seem like a frightened fascination with women in general. When Nicola is sure of something, she feels it "in her tits". We follow her into the toilet; whole scenes revolve around her urinating, menstruating, or in some other way secreting something which makes Martin Amis uncomfortable.
And when she appeared at the top of the stairs – the white dressing-gown, the hair aslant over the unpainted face – I fielded the brutal thought that she'd just had fifteen lovers all at once, or fifteen periods.
What does this seem like, if not fear and ignorance? It's a big problem, because Nicola is so pivotal to the plot and such a central character in the book. For the novel to work, you have to accept her, and understand her – that she wants to die, that she is spending so much time deliberately facilitating her own murder. But why? There is no real reason offered except for a general apocalyptic atmosphere and a few melancholy comments about how she feels that she's "come to the end of men". It's not enough.
There is a playful twist at the end, and a sort of satisfaction in how things are resolved. But I was left with a lasting irritation at how flimsy the plot was, which got in the way of my enjoyment at Keith and some of Amis's elegant sentences. Thinking back now, I still remember some wonderful passages. But I also still feel annoyed at how ridiculous Nicola was. The whole novel had the disconcerting air of being a great book, written by a twat.
Initially, there is plenty to like. The narrator – a failed American writer on a house-swap in London – has an engaging line in self-doubt, a brooding sense of millennial disaster, and a neat turn of phrase. The traffic-clogged, grimy streets of London, its monotonous weather and its sweaty pubs, are perfectly evoked and give the whole novel a very effective tone of edginess, latent violence, and even what comes to feel like looming apocalypse. The plot focuses on a girl with the delightful name of Nicola Six, who, thanks to a kind of second sight, knows that she will be murdered on the night of her thirty-fifth birthday; she also knows who will do it, and, in many ways, she positively wants it to happen.
The narrator has been asked by Nicola to tell her story – and he throws himself into it with gusto, developing close relationships with her and with the putative murderer, Keith Talent, and the foil, Guy Clinch. Keith, a petty criminal and amateur darts player, is a fantastic and original character, and the book lifts to a higher level every time he's on the page. With his chain-smoking, his string of girlfriends, the long-suffering wife, and his general lager-and-sports demeanour, he can seem a bit of a type. But there's something so pleasurable about how perfectly Amis has skewered the type that it doesn't seem like a problem. His dialogue in particular is a joy, no more so than when he and his friends are discussing darts, in an endless stream of pundit's clichés:
‘You can't argue with finishing of that quality. No way.’
‘It was a stern test,’ said Thelonius deliberately, ‘of your darting character.’
Bogdan said, ‘You responded to the – to the big-match atmosphere.’
‘The choice of venue could have posed problems to a lesser player,’ said Dean. ‘You fended off the. . .’
‘You disposed of the. . .’
‘Challenge of the. . .’
‘Brixton left-hander,’ said Thelonius with a sigh.
It is the more impressive that Amis does not allow you to regard Keith simply as comic relief; he is also behind most of the disgust and anger that the reader feels. He's a nasty piece of work – a wife-beater, pornographer, and statutary rapist who makes regular trips to a fifteen-year-old prostitute.
Perhaps this is the first clue to a pervasive hatred that underlies much of Amis's writing. It shows itself in a constant low-level intolerance, sometimes in the form of bizarrely xenophobic outbreaks about "the blacks silent with unreadable hungers", and on one occasion the comment that "black people are better at fighting than white people, because, among other reasons, they all do it". How much of this is Amis and how much his narrator is, of course, difficult to say.
It all crystallises in the character of Nicola. I found her really the most pitiful example of what literary theorists like to call the "male gaze" that I've ever come across. Young, beautiful, sexually irresistible, she is described in long voyeuristic and faintly implausible passages in which she evaluates herself as a sex object:
she stood naked in the middle of the warm room. Her mouth was full, and unusually wide. Her mother had always said it was a whore's mouth. It seemed to have an extra half-inch at either wing, like the mouth of the clowngirl in pornography.
Nicola prowls about this novel like a embarrassing fantasy of Amis's, endlessly peeling off pairs of stockings, mulling over what kind of underwear to put on, having long contemplative baths, or thinking about masturbation. And by the way, Martin, you can't just get out of it by including an exchange like this one:
‘I'm worried they're going to say you're a male fantasy figure.’
‘I am a male fantasy figure. [...] You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books.’
Ah yes the sex. Nicola, you are unsurprised to learn at this point, is a bit of a goer. And wouldn't you know it, what she particularly likes is to take it up the arse.
Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local prevalence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. [...] No, not everybody did it. But Nicola did it. At a certain point (and she always vowed she wouldn't, and always knew she would) Nicola tended to redirect her lover's thrusts, down there in the binary system. . . .
I'm not saying that no women are like this. I'm just saying that Martin Amis offers the least convincing portrait of one that I've ever seen. The sex, and the dark sexual secrets, are just one aspect of what starts to seem like a frightened fascination with women in general. When Nicola is sure of something, she feels it "in her tits". We follow her into the toilet; whole scenes revolve around her urinating, menstruating, or in some other way secreting something which makes Martin Amis uncomfortable.
And when she appeared at the top of the stairs – the white dressing-gown, the hair aslant over the unpainted face – I fielded the brutal thought that she'd just had fifteen lovers all at once, or fifteen periods.
What does this seem like, if not fear and ignorance? It's a big problem, because Nicola is so pivotal to the plot and such a central character in the book. For the novel to work, you have to accept her, and understand her – that she wants to die, that she is spending so much time deliberately facilitating her own murder. But why? There is no real reason offered except for a general apocalyptic atmosphere and a few melancholy comments about how she feels that she's "come to the end of men". It's not enough.
There is a playful twist at the end, and a sort of satisfaction in how things are resolved. But I was left with a lasting irritation at how flimsy the plot was, which got in the way of my enjoyment at Keith and some of Amis's elegant sentences. Thinking back now, I still remember some wonderful passages. But I also still feel annoyed at how ridiculous Nicola was. The whole novel had the disconcerting air of being a great book, written by a twat.
May 16, 2009
This book just has it all.
Um. That's not very specific. I suppose I'd better say what "it" is. Well... off the top of my head: an engaging femme fatale, an equally engaging anti-hero - Keith Talent is an asshole's asshole - a dangerous baby, psychic powers, explicit descriptions of sex and competitive darts (though not both at the same time), references to nuclear and climate-related apocalypses, witty and stylish writing. Pause for breath. I know I'm missing a bunch of things.
A plot? An ending? There's definitely a sort of plot, and a sort of ending, but those aren't among the bigger items I missed. Anyway, if you like Martin Amis's other books, you'll probably like this one too. If you don't like his other books, stay well clear, but I'm sure you got that already. And if you've never read any Martin Amis, start with Money, which is similar but better, and then come back when you've finished.
Oh, and it's far, FAR superior to Yellow Dog. No reasonable person would dispute that.
Um. That's not very specific. I suppose I'd better say what "it" is. Well... off the top of my head: an engaging femme fatale, an equally engaging anti-hero - Keith Talent is an asshole's asshole - a dangerous baby, psychic powers, explicit descriptions of sex and competitive darts (though not both at the same time), references to nuclear and climate-related apocalypses, witty and stylish writing. Pause for breath. I know I'm missing a bunch of things.
A plot? An ending? There's definitely a sort of plot, and a sort of ending, but those aren't among the bigger items I missed. Anyway, if you like Martin Amis's other books, you'll probably like this one too. If you don't like his other books, stay well clear, but I'm sure you got that already. And if you've never read any Martin Amis, start with Money, which is similar but better, and then come back when you've finished.
Oh, and it's far, FAR superior to Yellow Dog. No reasonable person would dispute that.
September 19, 2023
Darts! A novel featuring darts! How long have I waited for the game of darts to show up in a novel, innit! Got me thinking of my childhood - sat there on a Sunday teatime not looking forward to school the next day, totally immersed watching Bullseye (for those who don't know, this was a British TV game show where contestants threw darts to win cash prizes and items like a food blender, a radio, a garden table & chairs, a beautifully crafted Wedgewood Dinner Service, a carriage clock, a knitting machine, a set of suitcases - and Bully's special prize! - a small speedboat, maybe a caravan, or a fancy holiday), where after I'd go throw a few darts of my own (this was only a velcro dart board with velcro darts that sometimes didn't stick, but I loved it!). This bought back all those pub memories too from when I was younger and just started drinking - when there were always a pair or two on the oche with a pint, a bag of port scratchings or scampi fries, and enough cigarette smoke being blown about to make finding your way to the bar or the loos not the easiest of tasks. And it's this old-school world of pubs and darts that takes up quite of bit of the novel. That brings me immediately to Keith Talent - couldn't really start anywhere else! - who lives and breaths darts and fags and pork pies and porn and stealing, and who is likely to become the most unforgettable character I come across from the novels I've read this year.
London Fields was hard work, no doubt about that. And for a novel of 470 odd pages it did feel longer, but it was all worth it. This was such a clever way of going about writing fiction,
and I was teased the whole way through, with set-pieces like the darts matches in the Black Cross pub, the conversations between Guy and the cheating, yobbish, grotesquely behaved Keith, between prick-tease death-wish Nicola Six and Guy, and even more sardonic between Keith and Nicola, which are realized with all of Amis's great ability for comic invention. Despite being a bit of a snob, Amis evocates the smells and tastes and language of the poverty stricken so well, and the many rowdy pubs and cramped flat scenes with Keith and his downtrodden wife Kath did more for me than the parts of the novel featuring the rich and better looking Guy Clinch and his bossy bitchy wife Hope - with any scene involving Nicola Six being most welcome. By a certain point I didn't even care who ends up killing Nicola, it was just so much fun reading of her sexually tormenting her two male admirers. I get there are deeper themes going on in here, like ecological and nuclear disaster, pre millennium tension, the devaluation of human life, but I felt structurally Amis didn't integrate these idea enough into the novel. The simple case of girl-meets-boy and all the crafty little meetings in-between was enough to satisfy me. Maybe it was that black lingerie that did it. Certainly wasn't the pork pies. And as for the way Amis used Samson Young, the narrator and fall guy, while he himself could just get on with the brilliant set-pieces, was genius. Best Amis novel I've read so far, innit!
October 28, 2014
”This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once they start. You can't stop people, once they start creating.
What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic, and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?”
Samson Young is an American novelist whose career has failed because he doesn’t have the imagination to make anything up. After coming to London as part of an apartment swap with a far more successful writer, Sam witnesses Nicola Smith throwing away her diaries and recovers them. What he finds is the story of a woman who has the ability to foresee the future and has become a professional man-eater in order to willingly follow the path that will lead to her murder. In order to bring about her demise Nicola begins playing mind games with a mild-mannered upper-class gent Guy Clinch, and Keith Talent, a thuggish petty criminal with dreams of being a professional dart player. Sam sees an opportunity to write the book he always dreamed of by documenting the events leading up to Nicola’s death, and all of this takes place with the millennium approaching and the world seemingly on the brink of political and environmental catastrophe.
Nobody writes despicable people like Martin Amis…
This is only the third book of his I’ve read (Money and Lionel Asbo: State of England being the other two.) but one thing that jumps out at me about all three is that Amis has this knack of creating these violent brutes and then making them somehow entertaining. London Fields is a prime example of this with the creation of one of the most vicious creatures I’ve ever read in fiction: Marmaduke Clinch, Guy’s infant son.
Oh, did you think I was going to say it was Keith Talent?
As an unrepentant cheat, drunk and abusive spouse Keith certainly wouldn’t be winning any prizes as London’s best citizen, but compared to Marmaduke Clinch, he’s a choir boy. Marmaduke’s reign of terror includes physical assault, property damage, sexual harassment, psychological warfare and self-inflicted injuries. And he’s not even 1 year old yet. Amis describes it like this:
”Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn’t awake.”
But Marmaduke is just one dark joke being told in this story. As Amis works us through the lives and motives of Nicola, Guy and Keith as told by Sam writing the story and fretting about writing the story, the whole thing becomes a swirl of death and sex and creation and humor and schemes and secrets. There’s enough layers and themes here to keep a college campus full of English students writing essays for years so I’m not even going to try to figure out what it all means here. I’ll simply say that I was laughing for most of this book, but I noticed that my chuckles got more and more uneasy the closer I got to the end.
What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic, and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?”
Samson Young is an American novelist whose career has failed because he doesn’t have the imagination to make anything up. After coming to London as part of an apartment swap with a far more successful writer, Sam witnesses Nicola Smith throwing away her diaries and recovers them. What he finds is the story of a woman who has the ability to foresee the future and has become a professional man-eater in order to willingly follow the path that will lead to her murder. In order to bring about her demise Nicola begins playing mind games with a mild-mannered upper-class gent Guy Clinch, and Keith Talent, a thuggish petty criminal with dreams of being a professional dart player. Sam sees an opportunity to write the book he always dreamed of by documenting the events leading up to Nicola’s death, and all of this takes place with the millennium approaching and the world seemingly on the brink of political and environmental catastrophe.
Nobody writes despicable people like Martin Amis…
This is only the third book of his I’ve read (Money and Lionel Asbo: State of England being the other two.) but one thing that jumps out at me about all three is that Amis has this knack of creating these violent brutes and then making them somehow entertaining. London Fields is a prime example of this with the creation of one of the most vicious creatures I’ve ever read in fiction: Marmaduke Clinch, Guy’s infant son.
Oh, did you think I was going to say it was Keith Talent?
As an unrepentant cheat, drunk and abusive spouse Keith certainly wouldn’t be winning any prizes as London’s best citizen, but compared to Marmaduke Clinch, he’s a choir boy. Marmaduke’s reign of terror includes physical assault, property damage, sexual harassment, psychological warfare and self-inflicted injuries. And he’s not even 1 year old yet. Amis describes it like this:
”Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn’t awake.”
But Marmaduke is just one dark joke being told in this story. As Amis works us through the lives and motives of Nicola, Guy and Keith as told by Sam writing the story and fretting about writing the story, the whole thing becomes a swirl of death and sex and creation and humor and schemes and secrets. There’s enough layers and themes here to keep a college campus full of English students writing essays for years so I’m not even going to try to figure out what it all means here. I’ll simply say that I was laughing for most of this book, but I noticed that my chuckles got more and more uneasy the closer I got to the end.
September 12, 2013
First published in 1989, London Fields is now often considered to be Martin Amis's magnum opus. The New York Times described it as a "virtuoso depiction of a wild and lustful society" and a "large book of comic and satirical invention", which succeeds as a "picaresque novel rich in its effects".The Guardian was a little less positive, and called the book "a cheat. A con-trick", writing that "from start to finish, all 470 pages of it, it's an elaborate tease." But the paper couldn't brush it off completely, and after accounting for all the perceived flaws and failures concluded that it was nonetheless "a powerful book". Two different papers on two different continents had two different reactions, but somehow arrived at similar conclusions - that the book was something and made an impact on those who read it (Amis always seemed to get more crap in his home country. this particular book was infamously omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist - two female judges objected to his treatment of female characters. Amis has still to win a Booker but probably never will). But what exactly is this something?
London Fields, as described by The Guardian, is a con trick. It's an elaborate set up by the characters against other characters, and by the author against the reader. The plot is kind of flimsy at best - a woman wants to commit suicide by having another man murder her - but instead of writing an ordinary (reversed) mystery, Amis constructs an elaborate play on authority in narration, taking place on several different stages and forcing the reader to question: who is really in control here?
The novel opens with the narrator, Samson Young, moving from New York to London, and swapping apartments with a renowned author, Mark Asprey (M.A. - get it?). Young's name is an oxymoron, as is dying from cancer - and he is a writer without success, especially when compared to Asprey. Asprey never appears in the book in person but remains a presence in the background, with references by Young made to his successful and lavish lifestyle (Samson is obviously biased here but also provides information about Asprey having a pseudonym, under which he publishes an unreliable memoir of his life filled with false claims. Do we believe him?). Samson has a problem - he cannot create. He's not imaginative and brave enough to invent people and events, and can only act as a scribe - someone who writes down what other people do. When he stumbles by accident upon the diaries of a woman known as Nicola Six, he realizes that it is his final chance - the story has quite literally fallen into his hands. Nicola is bored with life and afraid of aging, and wants to orchestrate her own murder - and Samson knows that he only has to observe everything and write it all down to later sell it as a work of fiction. The novel is presented as the text that Samson is writing - with each chapter written by him being followed with another chapter featuring his commentary. Samson comes in contact with all three characters, and also acts as a manipulator - dropping hints and directions to each of them, influencing the story, not only just writing it but starting to create it as well.
Keith Talent and Guy Clinch are Nicola's "victims" - I'm tempted to call it another oxymoron, since they're being manipulated and used by her for her own goal - but that goal is her own demise. Are Keith and Guy victims since they're being deceived, or are they're victimizers because they both think that they're getting their way with Nicola and act accordingly to their own desires? is Nicola the victimizer and predator? She presents a different persona for each men, using her sexuality in two different ways - she acts lavishly towards Keith's sexual desire, recording explicit videos to fuel his pornography addiction, and pretends to be a frightened virgin in love with Guy, complete with a sad story of growing up in an orphanage and searching for a missing friend. Or is Nicola a victim of her own failed self and also of the modern consumerist society which might be responsible for her fear of aging?
Keith Talent and Guy Clinch are two opposites. Keith Talent is described by Samson as a "bad guy", is a hooligan and thief who commits petty crimes and frauds, and also is an aficionado of the game of darts. His name is an oxymoron as well, as Samson at one point notes that he just doesn't "have the talent". Guy Clinch's name is also a double oxymoron - he is easily one of the least manly men in fiction, and he certainly doesn't clinch, pretending to avoid any conflict (especially with his wife) by going away. And then there's Samson - will his life be like the one of his biblical counterpart, and trust a woman who then will turn against him? And if so, will he have his one final moment before his death where he will destroy everything around him, burying everybody with himself?
There's an aura of doom surrounding everything in this book. It was published in 1989, when the Cold War was nearing its end but the threat of a nuclear holocaust was still very real to many people. Amis himself despises nuclear weapons and has written a collection of stories on the subject just two years earlier, which he titled Einstein's Monsters. London Fields doesn't take place in 1989, but in 1999 - although the specific date is never explicitly stated, the word "millennium" appears a number of times and in an interview Amis admitted to fastforwarding the story to 1999 - he said that it was his novel for the century (although there are some things specific for 89 - one character takes a trip to Yugoslavia which still exists (not a good idea in the late 80's/early 90's, with the rise of ethnic and nationalists tensions which would result in the country being torn apart in a series of wars) and is advised not to visit the COMECON countries - which was the old communist block in eastern Europe). London Fields is not a real place, as London is the world's famous urban megalopolis - but could it be a vision of the City after the seemingly inescapable destruction hits it and leaves all its glitter and gold buried deep in the dust, everything razed down to a surface of a flat field? Or maybe it is a longing of a place where Samuel claims to have played as a child, London Fields, and to which he wants to return before his death, but which might exist only in his imagination?
If this is his novel for the end of century, then it is very near The End. It's very grim. The first edition of the book had a cover with a giant red moon looming ominously over a series of lit streets. There are mentions of The Crisis which is approaching (implied to be a nuclear war) and which could literally change the planet's axis and throw it out of orbit, as the world spins out of control. Society is degraded and has fallen very low. Amis's England is a foul and dirty one, and his City is full of dirty streets, seedy riff raffs and questionable characters roaming about. The gentle, pastoral England with its high and civilized society is not to be found in his work(s) - the dirty and bleak streets are filled with vandals, drunks and thugs, for whom they are the bedroom, the living room and the bathroom - is it a commentary on Margaret Thatcher's (who was still the PM at the time of publication) disastrous social policies which put people on these streets, or the society she advocated - where each individual lives for only for themselves and the things they can get?
Amis has come under fire for exploiting the working class and portraying it in his characters with deliberate dehumanization, as stereotyped caricatures - either vicious or ridiculous, and often both, capable only of cynism (Notice how it didn't bother the NY Times which praised the book for its virtuosity in describing "a wild and lustful society" and creating a large and satirical picaresque narrative. But it's an American paper, so it's not their working class who's supposedly being snubbed, so whatever). Here Amis can hide behind postmodernism, and its notions of conflating popular art with high culture and purposeful exaggeration and caricaturization (is that even a word? It is now!) of characters and events until everything falls down on itself and involutes. The novel is prefaced by a letter from an M.A. who ponders on its title - is it Amis or Asprey/Appleby? Whose father is the novel dedicated to? And who's then doing the stereotyping? Martin Amis or Samson Young, the dying and bitter American?
It's a good book and it's a bad book, it's infuriating and it's exciting, it's boring and it's page turning. I thought that it almost overdid it with its range of ambiguity - basically every character is not only unlikable, but unreliable - but also with how it makes you feel: it rustles the fibers of your moral system by showing you repulsive people doing ugly things but at the same time it's so well done it takes your attention and keeps it all the way through. It has this very voyeuristic aura about it which of course is part of the charm, but also part of the problem. You don't really know how are you supposed to feel when you're reading it, and more importantly - what does it say about your own person. How are we supposed to feel about ourselves when we know that we are looking at something which shouldn't be applauded or even made public but at the same time we can't stop ourselves from staring right at it?
Two stars, Three stars, Four stars. Good Show!
London Fields, as described by The Guardian, is a con trick. It's an elaborate set up by the characters against other characters, and by the author against the reader. The plot is kind of flimsy at best - a woman wants to commit suicide by having another man murder her - but instead of writing an ordinary (reversed) mystery, Amis constructs an elaborate play on authority in narration, taking place on several different stages and forcing the reader to question: who is really in control here?
The novel opens with the narrator, Samson Young, moving from New York to London, and swapping apartments with a renowned author, Mark Asprey (M.A. - get it?). Young's name is an oxymoron, as is dying from cancer - and he is a writer without success, especially when compared to Asprey. Asprey never appears in the book in person but remains a presence in the background, with references by Young made to his successful and lavish lifestyle (Samson is obviously biased here but also provides information about Asprey having a pseudonym, under which he publishes an unreliable memoir of his life filled with false claims. Do we believe him?). Samson has a problem - he cannot create. He's not imaginative and brave enough to invent people and events, and can only act as a scribe - someone who writes down what other people do. When he stumbles by accident upon the diaries of a woman known as Nicola Six, he realizes that it is his final chance - the story has quite literally fallen into his hands. Nicola is bored with life and afraid of aging, and wants to orchestrate her own murder - and Samson knows that he only has to observe everything and write it all down to later sell it as a work of fiction. The novel is presented as the text that Samson is writing - with each chapter written by him being followed with another chapter featuring his commentary. Samson comes in contact with all three characters, and also acts as a manipulator - dropping hints and directions to each of them, influencing the story, not only just writing it but starting to create it as well.
Keith Talent and Guy Clinch are Nicola's "victims" - I'm tempted to call it another oxymoron, since they're being manipulated and used by her for her own goal - but that goal is her own demise. Are Keith and Guy victims since they're being deceived, or are they're victimizers because they both think that they're getting their way with Nicola and act accordingly to their own desires? is Nicola the victimizer and predator? She presents a different persona for each men, using her sexuality in two different ways - she acts lavishly towards Keith's sexual desire, recording explicit videos to fuel his pornography addiction, and pretends to be a frightened virgin in love with Guy, complete with a sad story of growing up in an orphanage and searching for a missing friend. Or is Nicola a victim of her own failed self and also of the modern consumerist society which might be responsible for her fear of aging?
Keith Talent and Guy Clinch are two opposites. Keith Talent is described by Samson as a "bad guy", is a hooligan and thief who commits petty crimes and frauds, and also is an aficionado of the game of darts. His name is an oxymoron as well, as Samson at one point notes that he just doesn't "have the talent". Guy Clinch's name is also a double oxymoron - he is easily one of the least manly men in fiction, and he certainly doesn't clinch, pretending to avoid any conflict (especially with his wife) by going away. And then there's Samson - will his life be like the one of his biblical counterpart, and trust a woman who then will turn against him? And if so, will he have his one final moment before his death where he will destroy everything around him, burying everybody with himself?
There's an aura of doom surrounding everything in this book. It was published in 1989, when the Cold War was nearing its end but the threat of a nuclear holocaust was still very real to many people. Amis himself despises nuclear weapons and has written a collection of stories on the subject just two years earlier, which he titled Einstein's Monsters. London Fields doesn't take place in 1989, but in 1999 - although the specific date is never explicitly stated, the word "millennium" appears a number of times and in an interview Amis admitted to fastforwarding the story to 1999 - he said that it was his novel for the century (although there are some things specific for 89 - one character takes a trip to Yugoslavia which still exists (not a good idea in the late 80's/early 90's, with the rise of ethnic and nationalists tensions which would result in the country being torn apart in a series of wars) and is advised not to visit the COMECON countries - which was the old communist block in eastern Europe). London Fields is not a real place, as London is the world's famous urban megalopolis - but could it be a vision of the City after the seemingly inescapable destruction hits it and leaves all its glitter and gold buried deep in the dust, everything razed down to a surface of a flat field? Or maybe it is a longing of a place where Samuel claims to have played as a child, London Fields, and to which he wants to return before his death, but which might exist only in his imagination?
If this is his novel for the end of century, then it is very near The End. It's very grim. The first edition of the book had a cover with a giant red moon looming ominously over a series of lit streets. There are mentions of The Crisis which is approaching (implied to be a nuclear war) and which could literally change the planet's axis and throw it out of orbit, as the world spins out of control. Society is degraded and has fallen very low. Amis's England is a foul and dirty one, and his City is full of dirty streets, seedy riff raffs and questionable characters roaming about. The gentle, pastoral England with its high and civilized society is not to be found in his work(s) - the dirty and bleak streets are filled with vandals, drunks and thugs, for whom they are the bedroom, the living room and the bathroom - is it a commentary on Margaret Thatcher's (who was still the PM at the time of publication) disastrous social policies which put people on these streets, or the society she advocated - where each individual lives for only for themselves and the things they can get?
Amis has come under fire for exploiting the working class and portraying it in his characters with deliberate dehumanization, as stereotyped caricatures - either vicious or ridiculous, and often both, capable only of cynism (Notice how it didn't bother the NY Times which praised the book for its virtuosity in describing "a wild and lustful society" and creating a large and satirical picaresque narrative. But it's an American paper, so it's not their working class who's supposedly being snubbed, so whatever). Here Amis can hide behind postmodernism, and its notions of conflating popular art with high culture and purposeful exaggeration and caricaturization (is that even a word? It is now!) of characters and events until everything falls down on itself and involutes. The novel is prefaced by a letter from an M.A. who ponders on its title - is it Amis or Asprey/Appleby? Whose father is the novel dedicated to? And who's then doing the stereotyping? Martin Amis or Samson Young, the dying and bitter American?
It's a good book and it's a bad book, it's infuriating and it's exciting, it's boring and it's page turning. I thought that it almost overdid it with its range of ambiguity - basically every character is not only unlikable, but unreliable - but also with how it makes you feel: it rustles the fibers of your moral system by showing you repulsive people doing ugly things but at the same time it's so well done it takes your attention and keeps it all the way through. It has this very voyeuristic aura about it which of course is part of the charm, but also part of the problem. You don't really know how are you supposed to feel when you're reading it, and more importantly - what does it say about your own person. How are we supposed to feel about ourselves when we know that we are looking at something which shouldn't be applauded or even made public but at the same time we can't stop ourselves from staring right at it?
Two stars, Three stars, Four stars. Good Show!
April 13, 2020
Male and Female Readings
For a male reader, “London Fields" is, like "Lolita", a Nabokovian exercise in guilty pleasure.
Which, of course, begs the question of what it represents for a female reader, assuming there is a difference in the response of male and female readers (i.e., assuming that men and women read fiction [or at least this fiction] differently).
We (male readers?) can get something of an answer from the experience of “London Fields” at the 1989 Booker Awards:
Martin Goff, the administrator of the Award, recalls:
Thus, Amis’ novel was excluded from the Booker shortlist and denied the chance to eventually win the prize, as a result of feminist intervention.
The Fictional Agency of a Female Character
Whatever was said in the discussions between the judges, it's difficult to comment on the arguments of Gee and McNeil, if only because they were private and aren't readily available. One of their complaints is that the character Nicola Six* was “a sexist figure of male fantasy.”
According to the literature professor Susan Brook, feminist linguist Sara Mills subsequently argued that the novel is not only structured around Nicola's passivity but also naturalises her lack of agency:
However, this doesn't take into account Nicola's fictional agency and her total dominance of men in the novel. You could almost argue that this is Nicola's story/novel. Besides, the narrator explains that “some people get others to perform their greatest cruelties. They get others to do it for them.”
It's tempting to apply this principle not just to Nicola, but to authors, who, in a way, act vicariously through their characters.
Outsmarted by His Own Characters
The narrator (the blocked American writer, Samson Young) claims that this is a true story, a murder story and a love story. He knows the murderer, the murderer and “the foil, the fool, the poor foal”. As it turns out, he knows all the players, only he doesn't know which one is which.
Sam decides to overcome his writer's block by documenting (“just writing down") the murder that is about to happen around him. He is “taking down the minutes of real life". He purports to be writing the novel we are reading, while he himself is terminally ill. So, realising the murder and finishing the novel become a race against time. The novel must be completed before the death of the author.
But the protagonists have a mind of their own, they're rebellious, and defeat his (and our) preconceptions and expectations. The (post-modern) author is outsmarted by his own characters. The protagonists are creative in their own right: “You can't stop people, once they start creating.” This aspect of the novel resembles Christine Brooke-Rose's metafictional “Textermination", whose characters want to survive the completion of the novel by its readers (which would otherwise freeze them in time).
The novel has been described as a satirical murder mystery, which is probably true. Sam says it's not a whodunit, it’s more a “whydoit”. He believes it has the makings of a “really snappy little thriller". The verbal exuberance justifies the label “snappy", though at 470 pages it is hardly “little". It flags for many of the last 100 pages, when it should pick up pace.
“Thou Hast All the All of Me" [Sonnet XXXI]
The murderee is supposed to be Nicola Six, a tall, dark, 34 year old Afghan princess, with the “Persian flesh", physique and temperament of a porn actress doing a major in literature. Though she's not a Kiwi, her surname is mistaken variously for “sex" or “seeks":
She manages to convince at least two of the male characters (whom she meets at the Black Cross Hotel in Portabello Road, Notting Hill) that she is a virgin, and they set about trying to deflower her.
She has previously left in her wake various “nervous collapses, shattered careers, suicide bids, blighted marriages (and rottener divorces) – no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by.”
The Black Cross Hotel (as it's called in the novel [formerly the Golden Cross, and Shannon's Market Bar])
Ransacked by Men's Thoughts
Needless to say, Nicola is “the sexist figure of male fantasy”. Amis himself recognises (without judgement or approval) that “Every square inch of her had been ransacked by men's thoughts." However, to dismiss the novel on the ground of sexism, is to deny yourself the self-aware fun that Amis has with the setup. Amis is as aware as his critics that some readers will be offended by his novel. Ever the post-mdernist, he adverts to it in the novel itself.
The Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Nicola's diary (and therefore the novel, which is partly based on it) is “just the chronicle of a death foretold". The novel moves inexorably (like Cupid's dart or the arrows of desire) towards her murder on her 35th birthday.
It does meander a little on the way though. Even Nicola says, “Nothing's more boring, in any kind of narrative, than someone vacillating over something you know they're going to do.”
Sam comments that, in this time of millennial crisis (the novel, published in 1989, is set in a future 1999, when nuclear explosions have tilted Earth off its axis), “something has gone wrong with desire...Love made the world go round. And the world was slowing up. The world wasn't going round.”
Class Dissonance
Nicola's love interests come from totally different social class backgrounds, which reflect the gentrification that had started to occur around Notting Hill in the 1980's.
To darts-player and small time cheat, Keith Talent (the murderer), (who is “low company...a common criminal...a common working lad...just scum...a complete dunce...[an exponent of] gross lechery"), Nicola is a “posh bird", a “class skirt", a bit of “posh skirt", a reverse/female Henry Higgins (from "My Fair Lady") who will help him to earn a passport to television celebrity from his humble base at the Black Cross Hotel.
To wealthy, upper middle class Guy Clinch (the foil), she is “beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available.”
She supposedly wants one of her lovers to kill her (“You can do what you like to me. You can kill me if you like”) as if it would be the ultimate act of romantic love. Her lovers are so passionate about her that they would be prepared to kill her, given sufficient reason. So the post-modern murder mystery is grounded in a Gothic romance.
Deft Dabs of Facile Fancy
Sam himself worries that Nicola might be “a male fantasy figure", to which she responds, “I am a male fantasy figure...You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books...I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: Femmes Fatale are ten a penny compared to what I am...I'm a Murderee.”
Sam's nemesis/Nabokovian double, Mark Asprey (= MA = Martin Amis), a successful English writer, with whom he has swapped his apartment in New York for one in Notting Hill, has the lead male of his own novel, Marius Appleby (another MA), describe the lead female Cornelia Contantine's “magnificent breasts" (elsewhere, they're “magnificent, splendid, awesome, majestic – and all the other words that mean ‘big'") which Asprey “created with two deft dabs of my facile fancy.”
Sam describes Mark Asprey's novel as “a thesaurus of miserable cliches. It's an awful little piece of shit. The thing is, I really want to know how Marius makes out with Cornelia.”
The Bitch in the Book
Of course, the (female) characters don't object to their portrayal. They're the stars:
Who knows what or who to believe when it comes to authorial sexism: “Boy, am I a reliable narrator,” boasts Sam, apparently ironically.
As an example, Sam ventures, “Christ, it’s only just occurred to me: people are going to imagine that I actually sat down and made all this stuff up.”
By the the end of the novel, Asprey counters:
Amis' novel is not just an amusing exercise in post-modernism, it anticipates the post-truth culture that emerged out of it and infected political discourse. Perhaps, Amis was suggesting that the infection had already begun, hence the references to the crisis that backgrounds the murder mystery. (Despite the fact that Earth has been knocked off its axis by nuclear explosions, the media is preoccupied with the illness of the American First Lady. You can imagine how this would play out if Melania had COVID-19.)
FOOTNOTES:
* Initially, the name Nicola Six made me think of Rachael, a Nexus-7 android, (or Zhora Salome, a Nexus-6 android) from the film "Blade Runner", or a post-punk musician.
TAINTED LOVE (VERSE):
Virus and Pain
(Apologies to James Taylor)
I've caught the virus
And I've felt the pain,
Known plus and minus,
Even missed your plane.
I should have hailed a cab,
Made it worth your while
To stay on my tab,
Guess I'm not your style.
Enola Graye to Little Boy
To you my dear, gratitude
For awakening emotions that
Until now have danced a dormant dance.
In this time of crisis, it's a platitude,
Nothing truly good eventuates.
Remember me if you get the chance.
SOUNDTRACK:
For a male reader, “London Fields" is, like "Lolita", a Nabokovian exercise in guilty pleasure.
Which, of course, begs the question of what it represents for a female reader, assuming there is a difference in the response of male and female readers (i.e., assuming that men and women read fiction [or at least this fiction] differently).
We (male readers?) can get something of an answer from the experience of “London Fields” at the 1989 Booker Awards:
“Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, the two female judges, were fiercely anti-Amis, accusing him of misogyny. The male judges – David Profumo, the American Edmund White and indeed [David] Lodge himself [the chairman of judges] – were keen on Amis’ London Fields.”
Martin Goff, the administrator of the Award, recalls:
“To my surprise, despite having a three-two majority in favour, David Lodge submitted and London Fields was excluded.”
Thus, Amis’ novel was excluded from the Booker shortlist and denied the chance to eventually win the prize, as a result of feminist intervention.
The Fictional Agency of a Female Character
Whatever was said in the discussions between the judges, it's difficult to comment on the arguments of Gee and McNeil, if only because they were private and aren't readily available. One of their complaints is that the character Nicola Six* was “a sexist figure of male fantasy.”
According to the literature professor Susan Brook, feminist linguist Sara Mills subsequently argued that the novel is not only structured around Nicola's passivity but also naturalises her lack of agency:
“It is not simply the case that the female character is acted upon...but the fact that she wishes to be acted upon and paradoxically strives to bring that about.”
However, this doesn't take into account Nicola's fictional agency and her total dominance of men in the novel. You could almost argue that this is Nicola's story/novel. Besides, the narrator explains that “some people get others to perform their greatest cruelties. They get others to do it for them.”
It's tempting to apply this principle not just to Nicola, but to authors, who, in a way, act vicariously through their characters.
Outsmarted by His Own Characters
The narrator (the blocked American writer, Samson Young) claims that this is a true story, a murder story and a love story. He knows the murderer, the murderer and “the foil, the fool, the poor foal”. As it turns out, he knows all the players, only he doesn't know which one is which.
Sam decides to overcome his writer's block by documenting (“just writing down") the murder that is about to happen around him. He is “taking down the minutes of real life". He purports to be writing the novel we are reading, while he himself is terminally ill. So, realising the murder and finishing the novel become a race against time. The novel must be completed before the death of the author.
But the protagonists have a mind of their own, they're rebellious, and defeat his (and our) preconceptions and expectations. The (post-modern) author is outsmarted by his own characters. The protagonists are creative in their own right: “You can't stop people, once they start creating.” This aspect of the novel resembles Christine Brooke-Rose's metafictional “Textermination", whose characters want to survive the completion of the novel by its readers (which would otherwise freeze them in time).
The novel has been described as a satirical murder mystery, which is probably true. Sam says it's not a whodunit, it’s more a “whydoit”. He believes it has the makings of a “really snappy little thriller". The verbal exuberance justifies the label “snappy", though at 470 pages it is hardly “little". It flags for many of the last 100 pages, when it should pick up pace.
“Thou Hast All the All of Me" [Sonnet XXXI]
The murderee is supposed to be Nicola Six, a tall, dark, 34 year old Afghan princess, with the “Persian flesh", physique and temperament of a porn actress doing a major in literature. Though she's not a Kiwi, her surname is mistaken variously for “sex" or “seeks":
“Potently, magically, uncontrollably attractive, Nicola was not yet beautiful. But already she was an ill wind, blowing no good.”
She manages to convince at least two of the male characters (whom she meets at the Black Cross Hotel in Portabello Road, Notting Hill) that she is a virgin, and they set about trying to deflower her.
She has previously left in her wake various “nervous collapses, shattered careers, suicide bids, blighted marriages (and rottener divorces) – no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by.”
The Black Cross Hotel (as it's called in the novel [formerly the Golden Cross, and Shannon's Market Bar])
Ransacked by Men's Thoughts
Needless to say, Nicola is “the sexist figure of male fantasy”. Amis himself recognises (without judgement or approval) that “Every square inch of her had been ransacked by men's thoughts." However, to dismiss the novel on the ground of sexism, is to deny yourself the self-aware fun that Amis has with the setup. Amis is as aware as his critics that some readers will be offended by his novel. Ever the post-mdernist, he adverts to it in the novel itself.
The Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Nicola's diary (and therefore the novel, which is partly based on it) is “just the chronicle of a death foretold". The novel moves inexorably (like Cupid's dart or the arrows of desire) towards her murder on her 35th birthday.
It does meander a little on the way though. Even Nicola says, “Nothing's more boring, in any kind of narrative, than someone vacillating over something you know they're going to do.”
Sam comments that, in this time of millennial crisis (the novel, published in 1989, is set in a future 1999, when nuclear explosions have tilted Earth off its axis), “something has gone wrong with desire...Love made the world go round. And the world was slowing up. The world wasn't going round.”
Class Dissonance
Nicola's love interests come from totally different social class backgrounds, which reflect the gentrification that had started to occur around Notting Hill in the 1980's.
To darts-player and small time cheat, Keith Talent (the murderer), (who is “low company...a common criminal...a common working lad...just scum...a complete dunce...[an exponent of] gross lechery"), Nicola is a “posh bird", a “class skirt", a bit of “posh skirt", a reverse/female Henry Higgins (from "My Fair Lady") who will help him to earn a passport to television celebrity from his humble base at the Black Cross Hotel.
To wealthy, upper middle class Guy Clinch (the foil), she is “beauty, extreme yet ambiguously available.”
She supposedly wants one of her lovers to kill her (“You can do what you like to me. You can kill me if you like”) as if it would be the ultimate act of romantic love. Her lovers are so passionate about her that they would be prepared to kill her, given sufficient reason. So the post-modern murder mystery is grounded in a Gothic romance.
Deft Dabs of Facile Fancy
Sam himself worries that Nicola might be “a male fantasy figure", to which she responds, “I am a male fantasy figure...You should see me in bed. I do all the gimmicks men read up on in the magazines and the hot books...I'm not a Femme Fatale. Listen, mister: Femmes Fatale are ten a penny compared to what I am...I'm a Murderee.”
Sam's nemesis/Nabokovian double, Mark Asprey (= MA = Martin Amis), a successful English writer, with whom he has swapped his apartment in New York for one in Notting Hill, has the lead male of his own novel, Marius Appleby (another MA), describe the lead female Cornelia Contantine's “magnificent breasts" (elsewhere, they're “magnificent, splendid, awesome, majestic – and all the other words that mean ‘big'") which Asprey “created with two deft dabs of my facile fancy.”
Sam describes Mark Asprey's novel as “a thesaurus of miserable cliches. It's an awful little piece of shit. The thing is, I really want to know how Marius makes out with Cornelia.”
The Bitch in the Book
Of course, the (female) characters don't object to their portrayal. They're the stars:
“They all want to be in it. They all want to be the bitch in the book.”
Who knows what or who to believe when it comes to authorial sexism: “Boy, am I a reliable narrator,” boasts Sam, apparently ironically.
As an example, Sam ventures, “Christ, it’s only just occurred to me: people are going to imagine that I actually sat down and made all this stuff up.”
By the the end of the novel, Asprey counters:
“It doesn't matter what anyone writes anymore. The time for truth has passed. The truth doesn't matter anymore and is not wanted.”
Amis' novel is not just an amusing exercise in post-modernism, it anticipates the post-truth culture that emerged out of it and infected political discourse. Perhaps, Amis was suggesting that the infection had already begun, hence the references to the crisis that backgrounds the murder mystery. (Despite the fact that Earth has been knocked off its axis by nuclear explosions, the media is preoccupied with the illness of the American First Lady. You can imagine how this would play out if Melania had COVID-19.)
FOOTNOTES:
* Initially, the name Nicola Six made me think of Rachael, a Nexus-7 android, (or Zhora Salome, a Nexus-6 android) from the film "Blade Runner", or a post-punk musician.
TAINTED LOVE (VERSE):
Virus and Pain
(Apologies to James Taylor)
I've caught the virus
And I've felt the pain,
Known plus and minus,
Even missed your plane.
I should have hailed a cab,
Made it worth your while
To stay on my tab,
Guess I'm not your style.
Enola Graye to Little Boy
To you my dear, gratitude
For awakening emotions that
Until now have danced a dormant dance.
In this time of crisis, it's a platitude,
Nothing truly good eventuates.
Remember me if you get the chance.
SOUNDTRACK:
May 22, 2011
My first Amis. Didn't disappoint! I'm not sure it pulled off its staggering ambitions but it's very easy to enjoy, if you enjoy elaborately witty studies of human perversity and pain.
Character-driven is a term you often hear applied to fiction. It applies here more than usual, and in a different sense. The characters are stock types that Amis has elevated to the realm of literary internality without really changing their status as stock types. They're familiar to anyone familiar with crime stories, or with noir, though London Fields is neither, and only pretends to be the former. Ever see Lang's Scarlet Street? You had Joan Bennett as the femme fatale, working with violent lowlife Dan Duryea to fleece poor schmuck Edward G. Robinson out of some cash. In this novel we have Nicola Six (her name a cognate of the guitarist for Motley Crue -- why?) as the femme, working her inscrutably intricate schemes around the lowlife Keith Talent and the schmuck Guy Clinch -- the fall guy. But it's not about cash (though some of that does change hands), and most of the time it doesn't even seem to be about murder, despite Nicola's introduction as "the murderee." There's also a pomo unreliable narrator in the mix.
Why are these people together in one book? Maybe they each represent a different kind of artist. Samson Young, the narrator, is your fraudulent hack. Incapable of invention himself, he attaches himself to a real-life narrative he stumbles upon and lets the book write itself. On the other hand, he's also ostensibly responsible for all of the book's marvelous prose, so at least the formal aspect of his artistry is very legit. He is the analogue to Dr. Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire, this book's clear antecedent. Kinbote was nuts, but as a writer he was a genius, because he was Nabokov. Nicola Six is the artist so dedicated to her life's work that she is literally willing -- hoping, even -- to die for it. Her art is the orchestration of her own demise; she was once an actress, and now plays her greatest role. Creativity as suicide. Keith Talent -- the book's most vivid, fascinating creation -- is the artist without self-consciousness. The purity of working-class poetry innit. Yeah cheers. But his poetry isn't poetry, it's darts. Keith devotes himself to darts with a fervor and clarity of purpose that not even Nicola can match. Her motivations are muddled and complex, while Keith's are simple and unadulterated to the point of absurdity. You can't spell darts without art. That leaves Guy Clinch, too banal and passive to be an artist himself (though he tries to dabble in fiction, which Sam informs us is crap), but perfectly suited to be the lump of clay cruelly molded by the others. In this book all art depends upon the exploitation or subjugation of someone else, and Guy is at the bottom of that food chain.
Have I made this book sound like a heady chore, or a schematic bore? It's not. It's awesome. It's really fun to read. We circle these characters as they circle each other, first in alternating chapters, then with commingled perspectives as their lives become more entangled. They do things that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes pathetic, sometimes mystifying. At a certain point the criminal plot machinations that brought these people together cease to matter, and it becomes a simpler novel about three variously unhappy persons mucking about in each others' lives; it is the world's most finely wrought episode of Three's Company. Sam the narrator lurks in the background, offering a director's commentary track on each chapter. On the margins there is some vaguely sci-fi business about the end of the millennium (the book came out in 1989) and/or the end of the world. It's not clear what this has to do with the principal plot, other than that eschatology was on Amis' mind as he was writing. And that mindset, in turn, informs his depiction of the characters and their cultural context.
There's more to say, but I'm sapped. This is a long book. Life is represented with both starkly direct harshness and bafflingly circuitous style. During the first half I was in love, but I grew impatient as Amis dragged out his drain-circling. The ending does not quite hit that Mamet bullseye of "both surprising and inevitable" -- it's not really entirely surprising, if you've been theorizing even a little bit -- but it is certainly worthy of thought and discussion. There are the mind-teasing layers one would expect of a novel influenced by Pale Fire. There's a lot of sex talk, though relatively little actual sex. There are some faux-profound statements that may or may not mean anything. There's some brilliant writing, some memorable scenes, and some stuff you'll want to skim. Just don't disrespect the darts. You don't never show no disrespect for the darts.
Character-driven is a term you often hear applied to fiction. It applies here more than usual, and in a different sense. The characters are stock types that Amis has elevated to the realm of literary internality without really changing their status as stock types. They're familiar to anyone familiar with crime stories, or with noir, though London Fields is neither, and only pretends to be the former. Ever see Lang's Scarlet Street? You had Joan Bennett as the femme fatale, working with violent lowlife Dan Duryea to fleece poor schmuck Edward G. Robinson out of some cash. In this novel we have Nicola Six (her name a cognate of the guitarist for Motley Crue -- why?) as the femme, working her inscrutably intricate schemes around the lowlife Keith Talent and the schmuck Guy Clinch -- the fall guy. But it's not about cash (though some of that does change hands), and most of the time it doesn't even seem to be about murder, despite Nicola's introduction as "the murderee." There's also a pomo unreliable narrator in the mix.
Why are these people together in one book? Maybe they each represent a different kind of artist. Samson Young, the narrator, is your fraudulent hack. Incapable of invention himself, he attaches himself to a real-life narrative he stumbles upon and lets the book write itself. On the other hand, he's also ostensibly responsible for all of the book's marvelous prose, so at least the formal aspect of his artistry is very legit. He is the analogue to Dr. Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire, this book's clear antecedent. Kinbote was nuts, but as a writer he was a genius, because he was Nabokov. Nicola Six is the artist so dedicated to her life's work that she is literally willing -- hoping, even -- to die for it. Her art is the orchestration of her own demise; she was once an actress, and now plays her greatest role. Creativity as suicide. Keith Talent -- the book's most vivid, fascinating creation -- is the artist without self-consciousness. The purity of working-class poetry innit. Yeah cheers. But his poetry isn't poetry, it's darts. Keith devotes himself to darts with a fervor and clarity of purpose that not even Nicola can match. Her motivations are muddled and complex, while Keith's are simple and unadulterated to the point of absurdity. You can't spell darts without art. That leaves Guy Clinch, too banal and passive to be an artist himself (though he tries to dabble in fiction, which Sam informs us is crap), but perfectly suited to be the lump of clay cruelly molded by the others. In this book all art depends upon the exploitation or subjugation of someone else, and Guy is at the bottom of that food chain.
Have I made this book sound like a heady chore, or a schematic bore? It's not. It's awesome. It's really fun to read. We circle these characters as they circle each other, first in alternating chapters, then with commingled perspectives as their lives become more entangled. They do things that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes pathetic, sometimes mystifying. At a certain point the criminal plot machinations that brought these people together cease to matter, and it becomes a simpler novel about three variously unhappy persons mucking about in each others' lives; it is the world's most finely wrought episode of Three's Company. Sam the narrator lurks in the background, offering a director's commentary track on each chapter. On the margins there is some vaguely sci-fi business about the end of the millennium (the book came out in 1989) and/or the end of the world. It's not clear what this has to do with the principal plot, other than that eschatology was on Amis' mind as he was writing. And that mindset, in turn, informs his depiction of the characters and their cultural context.
There's more to say, but I'm sapped. This is a long book. Life is represented with both starkly direct harshness and bafflingly circuitous style. During the first half I was in love, but I grew impatient as Amis dragged out his drain-circling. The ending does not quite hit that Mamet bullseye of "both surprising and inevitable" -- it's not really entirely surprising, if you've been theorizing even a little bit -- but it is certainly worthy of thought and discussion. There are the mind-teasing layers one would expect of a novel influenced by Pale Fire. There's a lot of sex talk, though relatively little actual sex. There are some faux-profound statements that may or may not mean anything. There's some brilliant writing, some memorable scenes, and some stuff you'll want to skim. Just don't disrespect the darts. You don't never show no disrespect for the darts.
Read
June 11, 2023Notes on fourth or fifth reading.
Nicola Six's legion of men don't have name or lives. They're more like units, monads, and as such disposable.
"Considered more generally - when you looked at the human wreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide bids, the blighted marriages (and rottener divorces) - Nicola's knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. The typical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat, with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousers round his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now in underwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, or else to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leave at the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse. Nicola's men, and their escape velocities ..." (p. 25)
Martin Amis
19 May 2023
Requiescat in pace
Nicola Six's legion of men don't have name or lives. They're more like units, monads, and as such disposable.
"Considered more generally - when you looked at the human wreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide bids, the blighted marriages (and rottener divorces) - Nicola's knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved enough by. The typical Nicola romance would end, near the doorway of her attic flat, with the man of the moment sprinting down the passage, his trousers round his knees, a ripped jacket thrown over his ripped shirt, and hotly followed by Nicola herself (now in a nightdress, now in underwear, now naked beneath a half-furled towel), either to speed him on his way with a blood libel and a skilfully hurled ashtray, or else to win back his love, by apologies, by caresses, or by main force. In any event the man of the moment invariably kept going. Often she would fly right out into the street. On several occasions she had taken a brick to the waiting car. On several more she had lain down in front of it. All this changed nothing, of course. The car would always leave at the highest speed of which it was mechanically capable, though sometimes, admittedly, in reverse. Nicola's men, and their escape velocities ..." (p. 25)
Martin Amis
19 May 2023
Requiescat in pace
November 19, 2017
Quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. It may have had its moment but that moment was ages ago and now it is just an overlong dully but pretentiously written sexist piece of trash. Life is too short.
September 25, 2008
This incoherent tale oozes malignant intent and world weary cynicism. None of the main characters have any positive traits whatsoever. They are variously weak, selfish, greedy, naive, manipulative and violent. The story is punctuated by the self-conscious musings of a narrator who is both seperate from, and part of, the story. These interruptions become grating after a while and are superflous to the narrative.
Amis's representation of Keith Talent serves as a crude representation of the tabloid reading, darts playing, wife beating, working class male. Nicola Six, the book's anti-heroine, is scheming, femme fatale who curiously has no sense of self worth or any ounce of compassion. Apparently she embraces the prospect of her own death, as from the outset the reader is told that she is a willing "murderee". Not only does she have no self worth she only seems to serve purpose when sexually manipulating the male characters and apparently desires her own violent demise. Guy Clinch, the other central character in the book is lampooned throughout for his naive and incredulous pandering to Nicola's lies and deceptions. The virtues of trust, compassion and affection are in his case a fatal flaw and sign of weakness and gullibility.
The key question which drives the plot forward and which the whole book hinges on, with Amis taking over 400 pages to actually address, is who is Nicola's murderer? Unable to deliver a twist which has impact he opts instead for an obscure and incoherent conclusion, which is both unsatisfying and denies the text any sort of finality.
Ultimately, this book ambles along inconclusively for far too long. The occassional bright or well crafted passage can illuminate but more often than not this book is drawn out, dull and lacking any real sense of purpose.
Amis's representation of Keith Talent serves as a crude representation of the tabloid reading, darts playing, wife beating, working class male. Nicola Six, the book's anti-heroine, is scheming, femme fatale who curiously has no sense of self worth or any ounce of compassion. Apparently she embraces the prospect of her own death, as from the outset the reader is told that she is a willing "murderee". Not only does she have no self worth she only seems to serve purpose when sexually manipulating the male characters and apparently desires her own violent demise. Guy Clinch, the other central character in the book is lampooned throughout for his naive and incredulous pandering to Nicola's lies and deceptions. The virtues of trust, compassion and affection are in his case a fatal flaw and sign of weakness and gullibility.
The key question which drives the plot forward and which the whole book hinges on, with Amis taking over 400 pages to actually address, is who is Nicola's murderer? Unable to deliver a twist which has impact he opts instead for an obscure and incoherent conclusion, which is both unsatisfying and denies the text any sort of finality.
Ultimately, this book ambles along inconclusively for far too long. The occassional bright or well crafted passage can illuminate but more often than not this book is drawn out, dull and lacking any real sense of purpose.
February 28, 2022
Ian McEwan’ın Bir Parmak Bal kitabını okurken okunacaklar arasına giren kitaplardan. Eğlenceli bir anlatım ile karşılaşacağımı biliyordum ama bu kadar sert olacağını düşünmemiştim. Nicole Six (aka femme fatale) hikaye boyunca erkek karakterlerle dalga geçerken, Martin Amis de kitap boyunca okuruyla dalga geçiyor adeta. Sevdim mi sevmedim mi sorusunun net cevabı hala yok ama sonu kesinlikle sarsıcı. Üzerinden biraz zaman geçtikten sonra Para: Bir İntihar Mektubu ile şansımı bir kez daha deneyip ilişkimizi netleştirmek istiyorum.
April 9, 2010
A highly engaging novel from the Dean of Bloated, Ponderous, Semi-Comic Cerebral Wank.
Martin's novels are renowned for their "composite" qualities, i.e. he writes three separate books and mashes them together. London Fields is a "profound" murder mystery, a scathing satire on hack writers (no surprises there), and a "state of Britain" epic all at once.
The end result is as uneven, stylistically overindulgent and frustratingly dense as you could expect from Amis. But his characters are very entertaining. His prose style at times drives a ramrod through any writer you care to mention, and even at his flabbiest, he keeps your attention.
Style is all you should ever really seek from Amis. However, he really gives the storytelling a proper heave in this one. Darts, suicidal femme fatales, bumbling city boys. Nice.
But the ending. Oh, Martin! The ending! How could you!
Martin's novels are renowned for their "composite" qualities, i.e. he writes three separate books and mashes them together. London Fields is a "profound" murder mystery, a scathing satire on hack writers (no surprises there), and a "state of Britain" epic all at once.
The end result is as uneven, stylistically overindulgent and frustratingly dense as you could expect from Amis. But his characters are very entertaining. His prose style at times drives a ramrod through any writer you care to mention, and even at his flabbiest, he keeps your attention.
Style is all you should ever really seek from Amis. However, he really gives the storytelling a proper heave in this one. Darts, suicidal femme fatales, bumbling city boys. Nice.
But the ending. Oh, Martin! The ending! How could you!
April 10, 2019
Martin Amis was recently in the news again, for a reason I now can't remember, and it made me think about how I knew absolutely nothing about this famed British author, despite him having popped up on the literary radar regularly for the last forty years. And so when I was at my neighborhood library the other day, and learned that none of my reserves had yet arrived, I used that as an opportunity to check out what is arguably Amis' most famous book, 1989's London Fields. Unfortunately, though, I discovered that the book is just barely tolerable, not in the "this is objectively terrible and always has been" sense, but more in the sense of, "I can see why this was such a big hit in 1989, so too bad for Amis that this kind of storytelling has so profoundly fallen out of favor in the thirty years since." And that's because this fits exactly into the middle of the wheelhouse in that curious historical period that's perhaps best called, "Nerdy Generation X White Males Write Brutal Late-Postmodernism Noir Stories As A Way Of Legitimizing Their Misogyny And Racism," which started life with the early-'80s "Brat Pack" authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney and reached its apex with the mid-'90s scripts of Quentin Tarantino.
The simple objective fact is that London Fields is a relentlessly offensive novel, one in which an unapologetic serial child rapist serves as one of our main four protagonists, the action is centered around a dive bar filled with barely literate black men who are all wife-beating drug dealers who communicate in caveman pantomime, and the only female of the foursome is a manipulative self-hating shrew who loves anal sex and houses a suicidal deathwish, a Persian woman of color whose excessive body hair is sexually fetishizied by the three men who are each held in her thrall. Of course, if you were around in those years like me, you'll remember that Amis and others got away with this naked misanthropy by claiming that it's all a deliberately over-the-top fairytale, and that in the Age Of Irony we were living in, none of it was to be actually taken seriously by the audience (and that you were an uneducated Jesse Helms philistine if you did), which then turned Amis and the others into literary superstars, cool-as-fuck tough guys who dared to push the buttons of the staid, repressive Reagan/Thatcher-loving audience around them.
By the 2010s, though, we now recognize the truth, that artists like these are not tough-guy heroes but instead pasty, weaselly villains, whose violent anti-hero fairytales were not done as coolly detached comments on Postmodernist society, but rather as barely concealed rationalizations for their petty hatred of anything they can't control or dominate; and such men are no longer treated as award-winning millionaire celebrities, but rather as the dangerous incel losers who organize anonymous troll wars against writers of color who are more successful than them, and who tuck down their fedoras a little more as they enter the gay danceclub or black church or Muslim mosque with their automatic rifle in hand. Despite all this, I'm still giving London Fields 2 stars instead of 1, because it at least serves as an important historical document, a reminder of how easy it used to be for straight white males to spin-doctor their hatred so that they somehow looked like the hero for sharing it, and a reminder of why our current "woke" times was so necessary in the first place. But this overwritten, plotless mess is not worth your time anymore as just a general piece of commercial fiction to be read for pleasure, an unending slog that is all empty machismo bravado and no substance, and which trades on tawdry, distasteful shock as an unconvincing way to justify its existence. The shell game for these kinds of writers is now over, and we should all be extremely thankful for that, so do yourself a favor and leave this dreck back in the dustbins of history where it belongs.
The simple objective fact is that London Fields is a relentlessly offensive novel, one in which an unapologetic serial child rapist serves as one of our main four protagonists, the action is centered around a dive bar filled with barely literate black men who are all wife-beating drug dealers who communicate in caveman pantomime, and the only female of the foursome is a manipulative self-hating shrew who loves anal sex and houses a suicidal deathwish, a Persian woman of color whose excessive body hair is sexually fetishizied by the three men who are each held in her thrall. Of course, if you were around in those years like me, you'll remember that Amis and others got away with this naked misanthropy by claiming that it's all a deliberately over-the-top fairytale, and that in the Age Of Irony we were living in, none of it was to be actually taken seriously by the audience (and that you were an uneducated Jesse Helms philistine if you did), which then turned Amis and the others into literary superstars, cool-as-fuck tough guys who dared to push the buttons of the staid, repressive Reagan/Thatcher-loving audience around them.
By the 2010s, though, we now recognize the truth, that artists like these are not tough-guy heroes but instead pasty, weaselly villains, whose violent anti-hero fairytales were not done as coolly detached comments on Postmodernist society, but rather as barely concealed rationalizations for their petty hatred of anything they can't control or dominate; and such men are no longer treated as award-winning millionaire celebrities, but rather as the dangerous incel losers who organize anonymous troll wars against writers of color who are more successful than them, and who tuck down their fedoras a little more as they enter the gay danceclub or black church or Muslim mosque with their automatic rifle in hand. Despite all this, I'm still giving London Fields 2 stars instead of 1, because it at least serves as an important historical document, a reminder of how easy it used to be for straight white males to spin-doctor their hatred so that they somehow looked like the hero for sharing it, and a reminder of why our current "woke" times was so necessary in the first place. But this overwritten, plotless mess is not worth your time anymore as just a general piece of commercial fiction to be read for pleasure, an unending slog that is all empty machismo bravado and no substance, and which trades on tawdry, distasteful shock as an unconvincing way to justify its existence. The shell game for these kinds of writers is now over, and we should all be extremely thankful for that, so do yourself a favor and leave this dreck back in the dustbins of history where it belongs.
June 3, 2007
People often say Martin Amis in the brilliant guy at the party you avoid, but Amis actually can roll a great joint and cut a fine rail. Also he knows secrets about the host that you'd have never suspected. His breath is terrible, though, and he keeps trying to kiss you.
October 4, 2007
Congratulations, little 470-page tome. You outbid Ada in the little push-pull contest I had going on all evening. It was either you or her. You won. I hope that you don't disappoint me. You won't disappoint me.
Your author is, according to the jacket copy, "a force unto himself".
I imagine your author looks in the mirror, flashes his teeth and nods, "I am a force unto myself!" before going about his day, drawling in American to his American wife, "I think I'd really like to hit America--no, no, not a book tour, just a bit of a buzz-around, take in the sites. I...I feel American just talking about it. But we'd have to be incognito. Drawdfully Dumasian, but there you have it."
Martin Mull was on TV tonight. Nick-at-Nite is showing Roseanne reruns. On TBS, Mean Girls with the murderee of I Know Who Killed Me, Lindsay Lohan.
Do you see the connections, yet?
I finally broke down and bought a CD copy of Tom Waits' Bone Machine tonight (my cassette copy, purchased January 1993 is still imm-ac-u-late)...and guess what...Tom Waits while Martin Mulls: http://youtube.com/watch?v=R_0E7x3Nqys
Connections, connections.
There is a song called "London Fields": http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xw_2j-bxR7Y
Written, performed by one of the guys from Ministry, the masterminds of "Just One Fix" (video featuring William S. Burroughs, who worked with Waits on The Black Rider) The drummer is now drumming for R.E.M. (R.E.M. has another double-M guy...Microwave Mytrowitz and, yeah, well, also Mike Mills)
Do you see the connections, yet?
Right now, I can think of three people I know who have M.M. initials.
No, five. No, six. No, seven. Do I include myself? Make it eight? The alternate first name was an "M". Which name? Well, now that would be telling, wouldn't it. Secret names are secret for a reason. To know it you have to be, well, familiar. Makes me feel a bit like Rumpelstiltskin. Forests to prance in, and all that.
Anyways, all signs. I'm listening, London Fields. London Fields, I'm listening. I'm listening.
All along, I had no choice.
UPDATE: The chapter entitled "The Doors of Deception" has hilarious slapstick, as Guy Clinch deals with his demonspawn, Marmaduke. Yes, yes. Evil children are funny (but isn't that redundant?).
UPDATE: Jesus Christ in Heaven Above. What do I have to do to get you to read the chapter entitled, "The Script Followed by Guy Clinch"? What? Again, this focuses on the evil that is Marmaduke. Screaming his head off, asking for biscuits. It does not get any better than this in the...in the annals of Brit lit.
UPDATE: A bit of The Information literary envy on pages 301-303, as Mark Asprey (the successful playwright) writes a note to Samson Young (the author/narrator, renter of Asprey's London flat) to let him know that he (Asprey) purchased Young's latest novel (The Memoirs of a Listener) on a remainder table at Barnes & Noble: "Seldom have I gained such pleasure from the outlay of a mere 98 cents."
UPDATE: Whoo-golly, the end. And we are. We are the end. We are. We are, terrible little creatures, aren't we? But, then again, what's the alternative? It would have to be something ridiculously hopeful.
Your author is, according to the jacket copy, "a force unto himself".
I imagine your author looks in the mirror, flashes his teeth and nods, "I am a force unto myself!" before going about his day, drawling in American to his American wife, "I think I'd really like to hit America--no, no, not a book tour, just a bit of a buzz-around, take in the sites. I...I feel American just talking about it. But we'd have to be incognito. Drawdfully Dumasian, but there you have it."
Martin Mull was on TV tonight. Nick-at-Nite is showing Roseanne reruns. On TBS, Mean Girls with the murderee of I Know Who Killed Me, Lindsay Lohan.
Do you see the connections, yet?
I finally broke down and bought a CD copy of Tom Waits' Bone Machine tonight (my cassette copy, purchased January 1993 is still imm-ac-u-late)...and guess what...Tom Waits while Martin Mulls: http://youtube.com/watch?v=R_0E7x3Nqys
Connections, connections.
There is a song called "London Fields": http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xw_2j-bxR7Y
Written, performed by one of the guys from Ministry, the masterminds of "Just One Fix" (video featuring William S. Burroughs, who worked with Waits on The Black Rider) The drummer is now drumming for R.E.M. (R.E.M. has another double-M guy...Microwave Mytrowitz and, yeah, well, also Mike Mills)
Do you see the connections, yet?
Right now, I can think of three people I know who have M.M. initials.
No, five. No, six. No, seven. Do I include myself? Make it eight? The alternate first name was an "M". Which name? Well, now that would be telling, wouldn't it. Secret names are secret for a reason. To know it you have to be, well, familiar. Makes me feel a bit like Rumpelstiltskin. Forests to prance in, and all that.
Anyways, all signs. I'm listening, London Fields. London Fields, I'm listening. I'm listening.
All along, I had no choice.
UPDATE: The chapter entitled "The Doors of Deception" has hilarious slapstick, as Guy Clinch deals with his demonspawn, Marmaduke. Yes, yes. Evil children are funny (but isn't that redundant?).
UPDATE: Jesus Christ in Heaven Above. What do I have to do to get you to read the chapter entitled, "The Script Followed by Guy Clinch"? What? Again, this focuses on the evil that is Marmaduke. Screaming his head off, asking for biscuits. It does not get any better than this in the...in the annals of Brit lit.
UPDATE: A bit of The Information literary envy on pages 301-303, as Mark Asprey (the successful playwright) writes a note to Samson Young (the author/narrator, renter of Asprey's London flat) to let him know that he (Asprey) purchased Young's latest novel (The Memoirs of a Listener) on a remainder table at Barnes & Noble: "Seldom have I gained such pleasure from the outlay of a mere 98 cents."
UPDATE: Whoo-golly, the end. And we are. We are the end. We are. We are, terrible little creatures, aren't we? But, then again, what's the alternative? It would have to be something ridiculously hopeful.
March 9, 2018
'It's funny, isn't it', she said, 'that there's nothing more boring, in any kind of narrative, than someone vacillating over something you know they're going to do. I keep noticing it in the trash I watch and read. Will the spy come out of retirement for one last mission. Will the gangster heed his wife's warnings or go for the clinching bank job. It's a nightmare sitting through that stuff. It's dead, dead.'
London Fields is not dead. Unpredictable, it doesn't torture the reader with preamble and tired tropes. Amis delights me. He pulls off prose that would be pretentious under another author's hand. Lost its sparkle towards the last 200 pages, too much bloat. I'm also not enthused with his preoccupation with the British class system seen here and in Success. Excited that I have two of his major works yet unread: Money and The Information.
.
.
.
"Darts is what the Brits do best, in the afterglow of empire."
"Boy, am I a reliable narrator."
"The boyish brightness of his rough silk tie spoke to Nicola of an insufficiently examined self, or an insufficiently critical one."
"She might have been the illustration to an article about women who had everything. Everything except children. Nicola Six: nobody's babymamma."
London Fields is not dead. Unpredictable, it doesn't torture the reader with preamble and tired tropes. Amis delights me. He pulls off prose that would be pretentious under another author's hand. Lost its sparkle towards the last 200 pages, too much bloat. I'm also not enthused with his preoccupation with the British class system seen here and in Success. Excited that I have two of his major works yet unread: Money and The Information.
.
.
.
"Darts is what the Brits do best, in the afterglow of empire."
"Boy, am I a reliable narrator."
"The boyish brightness of his rough silk tie spoke to Nicola of an insufficiently examined self, or an insufficiently critical one."
"She might have been the illustration to an article about women who had everything. Everything except children. Nicola Six: nobody's babymamma."
November 11, 2018
Amis in Ammos
A volte succede che ti ricordi di più le condizioni di lettura delle storie o dei personaggi: questo Amis mi era venuta voglia di leggerlo ricordando il piacere perverso provato con il crudele e ammaliante L'informazione. E così nell'agosto 2012, in larga parte a Patmos, sulla sabbia, all'ombra di una tamerice in riva al mare dopo lo scollinamento a piedi per raggiungere la spiaggia di Psili Amos (c'è sempre una spiaggia che si chiama Ψιλή Άμμος...), con piacevole contrasto rispetto alle vie di Londra dove si mangiano piccantissimi curry, leggevo.
Anche il minicommento che segue è del 2012.
Diverse volte si ride: Amis propone sempre la sua scrittura ricca e speziata; ma la tira troppo in lungo, la parte "catastrofista" rimane piuttosto arida, e la sensazione generale alla fine è abbastanza di inessenziale. Se ne può fare a meno.
A volte succede che ti ricordi di più le condizioni di lettura delle storie o dei personaggi: questo Amis mi era venuta voglia di leggerlo ricordando il piacere perverso provato con il crudele e ammaliante L'informazione. E così nell'agosto 2012, in larga parte a Patmos, sulla sabbia, all'ombra di una tamerice in riva al mare dopo lo scollinamento a piedi per raggiungere la spiaggia di Psili Amos (c'è sempre una spiaggia che si chiama Ψιλή Άμμος...), con piacevole contrasto rispetto alle vie di Londra dove si mangiano piccantissimi curry, leggevo.
Anche il minicommento che segue è del 2012.
Diverse volte si ride: Amis propone sempre la sua scrittura ricca e speziata; ma la tira troppo in lungo, la parte "catastrofista" rimane piuttosto arida, e la sensazione generale alla fine è abbastanza di inessenziale. Se ne può fare a meno.
May 21, 2023
London Fields. Make no mistake about the title. There is nothing rustic about this novel. It is a story of murder, in a depressing London, not in itself - Portobello Road and its colorful facades, Notting Hill, but through the prism of the author's style, qualified as master of the "unpleasant new."
Let's start, as Martin Amis decreed, with the potential assassin, the ill-named Keith Talent, give me the expression: small, sweeping strike of the rogue genre, not enough shoulder for ultra-violence, the racketeering or robbery, low-level seducer. Champion of the pub he frequented, the follower of the national sport of any right self-respecting public house, darts or darts. He was hiding a woman and child in an apartment in a cramped closet. Let's move on to the victim: Nicola Six, attractive thirty-something woman, oh so artificial, quintessence in her way of the weaker sex, afflicted with a marked appetite for alcohol, and endowed with the faculty of guessing what necessarily - fatally instead,
will happen to him. And then we have Guy Clinch, the stooge of the two aforementioned, the good guy; the one who is said to be gentle with a little superior smile of commiseration suffers pain from those around him, particularly from his Pantagruel's son. Finally, let's not forget the narrator, Samson Young, an author afflicted with a crying lack of imagination, is omnipresent, taking us into the confidence of his writing novel. Who knows his characters and meets them at intervals regularly, and asks them to act according to his plans to tie up the work in creation.
The novel, where cynical humor is very present, describes an English Thatcherian society downgraded in the anxiety-provoking climate of possible nuclear annihilation and more broadly illustrated the absurdity and the grotesque of Western capitalist society. This disturbing book certainly has literary qualities but sometimes appears confused and will likely tire more than one.
Let's start, as Martin Amis decreed, with the potential assassin, the ill-named Keith Talent, give me the expression: small, sweeping strike of the rogue genre, not enough shoulder for ultra-violence, the racketeering or robbery, low-level seducer. Champion of the pub he frequented, the follower of the national sport of any right self-respecting public house, darts or darts. He was hiding a woman and child in an apartment in a cramped closet. Let's move on to the victim: Nicola Six, attractive thirty-something woman, oh so artificial, quintessence in her way of the weaker sex, afflicted with a marked appetite for alcohol, and endowed with the faculty of guessing what necessarily - fatally instead,
will happen to him. And then we have Guy Clinch, the stooge of the two aforementioned, the good guy; the one who is said to be gentle with a little superior smile of commiseration suffers pain from those around him, particularly from his Pantagruel's son. Finally, let's not forget the narrator, Samson Young, an author afflicted with a crying lack of imagination, is omnipresent, taking us into the confidence of his writing novel. Who knows his characters and meets them at intervals regularly, and asks them to act according to his plans to tie up the work in creation.
The novel, where cynical humor is very present, describes an English Thatcherian society downgraded in the anxiety-provoking climate of possible nuclear annihilation and more broadly illustrated the absurdity and the grotesque of Western capitalist society. This disturbing book certainly has literary qualities but sometimes appears confused and will likely tire more than one.
February 9, 2015
Composição da narrativa:
Testosterona - 80%
Progesterona - 20%
Interesse despertado pela leitura:
Aborrecimento - 70%
Entusiasmo – 30%
Expressões visíveis durante o processo:
Atenção – 70%
Dispersão – 30%
Sons audíveis enquanto a sujeita olhava o livro:
Bocejo - 90%
Riso – 10%
Empatia com as personagens:
Bébé Marmaduke – 99%
Restantes – 1%
Desistênca a cerca de 60% do final.
Nota: Marmaduke é um super bébé que morde, arranca olhos e bate, forte e feio, em todos que se aproximam. Um delírio!
Testosterona - 80%
Progesterona - 20%
Interesse despertado pela leitura:
Aborrecimento - 70%
Entusiasmo – 30%
Expressões visíveis durante o processo:
Atenção – 70%
Dispersão – 30%
Sons audíveis enquanto a sujeita olhava o livro:
Bocejo - 90%
Riso – 10%
Empatia com as personagens:
Bébé Marmaduke – 99%
Restantes – 1%
Desistênca a cerca de 60% do final.
Nota: Marmaduke é um super bébé que morde, arranca olhos e bate, forte e feio, em todos que se aproximam. Um delírio!
March 26, 2015
Martin, Martin, Martin. I remember this from reading Money: you overstay your welcome, Martin.
I was right there with you for 300, 350 pages, really, even the weird sex stuff the femme fatale fantasy which strikes me as a bit more of the inside of your head than I want to see, the whole nine yards. I was good, I was prepared to cut you every kind of slack -- the cute author who's also our narrator thing, some pretty disgusting characters, the excess of Marmaduke, the coyness about the world situation, the whole cynical anger thing you have going on, I was there for all of it, I was enthused, even.
But here's the thing, Martin, the thing is, you don't know when to quit. Because those last hundred, hundredfifty pages, they are like pulling teeth. (Maybe you need a braver editor? Maybe its some kind of inherited assumption that you can have the floor as long as you want it? Lucky Jim was nice and short, you know.) Anyway, I get it, I'm there, I just want to finish now, and you could so easily have left me wanting more.
Instead, I'm thinking, get the hell out of my house. Maybe you intend it as some elaborate metaphor for the extended cock tease (which, btw, yuck, I mean I think you mean to put some ironic distance there, the guy's balls are literally blue at one point, and I can only assume that this is a joke, plus clearly you mean to come out ahead of the fictional memoir thing that our narrator is reading on the whole depiction of women front, but, as I may have mentioned, it just goes on for SO FUCKING LONG, and I'm not sure you ever REALLY imagined a female reader, but whatever, I would have cut you the slack, again, if it had just been SHORTER). If so, the metaphor is not working for me. Just kill her already.
Just kill her, and then get the hell out of my house.
So close, Martin. So close.
I was right there with you for 300, 350 pages, really, even the weird sex stuff the femme fatale fantasy which strikes me as a bit more of the inside of your head than I want to see, the whole nine yards. I was good, I was prepared to cut you every kind of slack -- the cute author who's also our narrator thing, some pretty disgusting characters, the excess of Marmaduke, the coyness about the world situation, the whole cynical anger thing you have going on, I was there for all of it, I was enthused, even.
But here's the thing, Martin, the thing is, you don't know when to quit. Because those last hundred, hundredfifty pages, they are like pulling teeth. (Maybe you need a braver editor? Maybe its some kind of inherited assumption that you can have the floor as long as you want it? Lucky Jim was nice and short, you know.) Anyway, I get it, I'm there, I just want to finish now, and you could so easily have left me wanting more.
Instead, I'm thinking, get the hell out of my house. Maybe you intend it as some elaborate metaphor for the extended cock tease (which, btw, yuck, I mean I think you mean to put some ironic distance there, the guy's balls are literally blue at one point, and I can only assume that this is a joke, plus clearly you mean to come out ahead of the fictional memoir thing that our narrator is reading on the whole depiction of women front, but, as I may have mentioned, it just goes on for SO FUCKING LONG, and I'm not sure you ever REALLY imagined a female reader, but whatever, I would have cut you the slack, again, if it had just been SHORTER). If so, the metaphor is not working for me. Just kill her already.
Just kill her, and then get the hell out of my house.
So close, Martin. So close.
December 30, 2009
Wow -- this was so not my thing. And it wasn't that I was offended. I was just not impressed. It had so much unrealized potential... no, that's not it. Some of the ideas, like some of the characterization and plot devices, could have developed in a more edited way in someone else's hands. But there was nothing unrealized about this book. He realized the hell out of it, and then some. That's the problem. Maybe it's that whole post-modern-you-get-to-know-everything-and-then-some kind of thing, but that doesn't usually bother me. (LOVE DFW, etc.) It's that there was so much of each chapter that was not just superfluous, which I can sometimes take if it's entertaining and thought-provoking, but annoying.
My new bumper sticker -- IRBRP (I'd Rather Be Reading Proust). I know that's SO not fair here, but that's what I kept repeating to myself over and over in my head as I was reading this.
Jessica, I thought I was with you. It's been fun....
My new bumper sticker -- IRBRP (I'd Rather Be Reading Proust). I know that's SO not fair here, but that's what I kept repeating to myself over and over in my head as I was reading this.
Jessica, I thought I was with you. It's been fun....
March 24, 2020
Read 3 times.
August 26, 2011
Martin Amis suffers from the same syndrome as his father. Kingsley Amis Syndrome. Also known as Ken Kesey Syndrome but not to be confused with Harper Lee Syndrome. A stellar first novel ala the Rachel Papers and then a steep decline into a babbling imbecile who more or less writes as a way to mentally masturbate and force you, the reader, to watch.
This book was little more than a bumbling, mumbling jumble of words. And not very many words, at that. Because within the first twenty pages he uses the word 'ponder' approximately 5 times. Someone, please give me Martin Amis' address so that I can mail him a thesaurus. It is an attempt at meta-fiction with its unconventional narration, but falters in that aim for all of its pretentious, self-deprecating, pomposity. Take a look at Haruki Murakami, Amis, and see how he breaks the 4th Wall. That's how its done. That's the only way its done.
Flat, meaningless characters with little redeeming qualities leave the reader feeling cheated. Because the characters and the narrator are unlikeable, and we feel like we've been swindled by a master forger for all that. Like someone was forcing us to read this forgery for the name on it, feeding it to us in some sadistic Jigsaw styled game.
Steer clear of this abomination.
This book was little more than a bumbling, mumbling jumble of words. And not very many words, at that. Because within the first twenty pages he uses the word 'ponder' approximately 5 times. Someone, please give me Martin Amis' address so that I can mail him a thesaurus. It is an attempt at meta-fiction with its unconventional narration, but falters in that aim for all of its pretentious, self-deprecating, pomposity. Take a look at Haruki Murakami, Amis, and see how he breaks the 4th Wall. That's how its done. That's the only way its done.
Flat, meaningless characters with little redeeming qualities leave the reader feeling cheated. Because the characters and the narrator are unlikeable, and we feel like we've been swindled by a master forger for all that. Like someone was forcing us to read this forgery for the name on it, feeding it to us in some sadistic Jigsaw styled game.
Steer clear of this abomination.
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