London Fields

London Fields is a novel full of brilliant ideas, but sadly it fails to live up to the initial promise it shows. There’s a great novel in here that is struggling to get out.

Nicola Six knows she is going to get murdered. She even knows when it will happen, but rather than try to prevent it, she actively tries to bring about her murder. This is the central plot of Martin Amis’ novel, a murder mystery in which the “murderee” picks the murderer, not the other way around. It’s a fascinating premise and an interesting inversion of typical tropes. Unfortunately, it’s weighed down by its plot, which moves at a glacial pace; the middle section of the book in particular really sags. I frequently found myself wishing it would get on with things.

The two other central characters in the book are Keith Talent and Guy Clinch. Keith Talent is a grotesque man. He is a fraudster, a thief, a rapist and an abuser. He is also an amateur darts player. Somehow, Amis makes him the funniest character in the novel. Guy Clinch is a wealthy banker, fed up with his wife Hope and his young son Marmaduke, who seems to hurt Guy in every scene he appears in.

The two men seem to have very different attitudes towards women: Keith sees women as sexual objects, whereas Guy sees them as helpless creatures in need of rescuing. Nicola, meeting both of them in a pub, is perfectly happy and capable of exploiting their fantasies. She’s intelligent, calculating and manipulative, and the character who drives the story forward. I don’t find any of the characters believable; they border on absurd caricatures, but I don’t think they are supposed to be. Rather, their exaggerated personalities are what makes them so memorable. Amis is more interested in using them to satirise human behaviour rather than painting a realistic portrait. Nicola is elevated to an almost mythical status. It’s interesting that, in a book dominated by men behaving terribly, Amis makes Nicola the most powerful character.

These characters are set against a backdrop of a London that Amis envisaged ten years into the future, 1999. There is some sort of crisis or global catastrophe unfolding, though it rarely seems to influence the events of the story. Amis seems to be drawing a heavy-handed parallel between Nicola’s impending death and the apparent end of the world, but I never found it particularly compelling. By the final pages of the book, I was still unconvinced I should care about this.

However, the London that Amis creates is entirely convincing, and his writing is at times hilarious. I particularly enjoyed this description of a spate of burglaries:

Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle – the shop, and the flat above it – had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they themselves had just been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste – it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it – so they just went on burgling.

On a sentence-by-sentence basis, London Fields is often gorgeous. At other times though, the wordplay becomes too convoluted, almost like Amis is just showing off. I wasn’t very familiar with Amis’ prior work, but knowing now that he is an essayist makes a lot of sense. His writing is often brilliant in isolation, but the individual parts don’t always come together to make a compelling novel.

What Stayed With Me

I’m not sure I’ll remember lots of the plot in a year or two’s time, but I will certainly never forget the characters. Keith Talent is a ludicrous character and despite his many flaws and vices, his obsession to the game of darts is just hilarious to read about.

Without spoiling it, I thought the climax of the novel was subversive and clever, although I didn’t find it particularly satisfying. That, in itself, is a microcosm of the problem I have with the whole novel. Ultimately, I admired London Fields more than I can say I enjoyed it. There is a great novel in here, but it really could have done with an editor brave enough to cut it down.