"Murder mysteries" are not usually to my taste, but this was so much more than a murder- I couldn't put it down. Nicola Six reminds me of Oedipa Maas (Crying of Lot 49). Someone tell me why!

It's unusual for me to abandon a book, but I read the first three chapters of this book and gave up. I'd heard interesting things about it as a deconstructed mystery and as having a fascinating unreliable narrator. I definitely saw potential for both of those in what I read, but every description of woman from the point of view of every character and the main narrator just made my skin crawl. The raw misogyny was dripping off the pages and I just don't have any interest in trying to slog through that or read around it right now. I'm tired of it.

Verdict: ‘London Fields’ is as dense with technical brilliance. Clearly Amis is a genius. Too bad he has chosen to use his powers for evil.

Some people preface a review by lamenting ‘I wanted to like this book…’ I was one of those people until reading a rant (apologies, authorship now forgotten) quite rightly pointing out the nonsense of such a sentiment by asking ‘who would go into a booking wanting NOT to like it?’ The logic hit home and I have since fond a place for the phrase in my menagerie of pet peeves. That said I rather want not to like ‘London Fields’.

I did not begin with this desire but I’ve definitely ended on it and so find myself at a bit of a loss when it comes to this review. It’s been awhile since I’ve finished Amis’ The Younger’s tome so I’m just going to start writing about it and see if I can’t sort out my feelings as I go. So to reiterate, I had nothing against ‘London Fields’ going in for the simple reason that I knew nothing about it, book or author, other than it was relatively contemporary. That was why I chose it. I’d been on a classics kick lately and fancied a change.

I was impressed right away. It is hard not to be. ‘London Fields’ is technically masterful. Regardless your thoughts on the substance you cannot help but be bowled over by the style. Plotting, characters, structure, atmosphere is all so intricately intertwined, is all set down to the last detail. It is overwhelms and engrosses little a Bosch triptych of literature. Christ this is sounding high minded, ham-fistedly so when compared with the subject of my review. I’ll back off and synopsise.

‘London Fields’ is divided into two alternating parts. You’ve got the first person narrative of Samson, dying NY writer who has stumbled across a novel being played out in real life. This part concerns Sampson’s life and offers insight into how he achieves some of the knowledge put forward in the other half of the book; his novel. This is narrated omnisciently and concerns three main characters; Nicola Six (murderee), Keith Talent (murderer), and Guy Clinch (fall guy). As I type this, Word fails to recognize the legitimacy of ‘murderee’ as, I suppose, the more common-place term would be ‘victim’. This, however, is not a word that can apply to Nicola so, like Amis, I’ll stick to murderee.

Nicola runs the show. She is beautiful, intelligent and sexually liberated and knows how things will turn out before they happen. This gentle clairvoyance isn’t really expanded upon but seems to have less to do with any mystical ESP-like abilities than it is down to her intuitive awareness that she is a literary archetype. This book is meta like that. Keith is a dart-playing, council flat living, pre-teen shagging, minor felon cess-pit of a person and he plays the role of murderer. Guy is decent and dumb and posh and dissatisfied with life and he is cast as fall guy (get it?). Once Nicola is aware of her destruction she sets about architecting it through a baroque series of Guy and Keith entangling manoeuvres.

Samson, our semi-omniscient, kind of detached, rather unreliable, super-meta narrator, has gotten in on the ground floor of this real-life thriller by dint of being in the pub when these 3 first came into contact and later finding Nicola’s discarded journals detailing her premonitions. In the course of literaturizing the lives of our triumvirate he finds it necessary to confide his hobby in Nicola and consult her from time to time which, I suppose, gives her some measure of artistic control in the narrative. This is only fair and apt. As I’ve said before, Nicola runs the show. Also it is the not-to-distant future (at least it would be if you read this book when it came out, for the contemporary reader it is set in Bizarro 90’s) and the world appears to be ending, but that’s really more of a side note than a plot point.

I won’t summarize further. I could claim I refrain in the name of avoiding spoilers etc. but really the progression of ‘London Fields’ just too complicated to make the attempt worthwhile. This is a long book and a dense book and a very very clever book. Each minor character come pre-packed with enough backstory and symbolism to star in their own novel and the cumulative effect of them crowded together in the pages of ‘London Fields’ is like being in a room with the entirety of the Hindu Pantheon. Thousands of tiny things happen and not a single one is wasted. Everything feeds fascinatingly into the master narrative, not resolving it, just making it more complex.

Ask me what happened in those hundreds of pages and I’d be hard pressed to give you a cohesive answer. Lots of little things happened which built to an end that was revealed at the beginning. If that sounds tedious it isn’t. You may know what’s going to happen, but the how, the details surrounding it, are so fascinating you keep reading to see more of the picture. I keep coming back to my opening metaphor comparing it to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Like the triptych, the plot is not the point; it’s the illustration of it that’s the star.



Unlike Bosch, Amis has opted to skip over the ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ portions of the triptych and jumped straight into hell and the minute details range from ‘funny but kind of awful’ to ‘super awful’, culminating in ‘horrorday’tm. I read somewhere that this book was narrowly omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist because a couple of the judges fervently objected to Amis’ treatment of women in this book. I can certainly see where they were coming from but as far as I’m concerned ‘appalling treatment of women’ was just a convenient hook on which to hang their objection coat. I object to Amis’ appalling treatment of life. Of weather. Of children. Of parenthood. Of pubs. Everything in ‘London Fields’ is treated appallingly and I cannot condone such literary malice. It is bullying. By the end it even felt sadistic, as if the writer was enjoying making you wince and squirm as the plot twisted in to tighter grotesques.

But let’s backtrack for just one moment because, before I produce my inevitable verdict, I would like to talk about Nicola Six. I described her earlier as a sort of self-aware archetype and I’d like to expand on that because I think she is rather genius. I don’t like her, naturally, any more than I like anything in this book, but she is still an amazing creation. She is an archetype. She is the beautiful, intelligent, alluring woman who is realizing she is no longer a girl. She wants something beyond the social acceptable female desires of wife and motherhood and therefore she must die. This may sound old-fashioned but the premise has lasted well through the years. She is the same archetype as Emma Bovary, as Lily Bart from ‘House of Mirth’, as Sylvia Plath herself (her barely disguised alter ego Esther actually manages to survive ‘The Bell Jar’) I’m sure there are more. These are just 3 examples I’ve read this year.

I’ve enjoyed these reads in varying degrees but poked at the framework afterwards. Death makes for a nice poignant ending but is there any literarily satisfying way for these smart, pretty, ambitious women to at least maintain some control and not end as victims? Well Nicola Six is the answer to that so I guess this is another example of being careful what you wish for. Her untimely death may be inevitable but she is not a victim. She takes the matter in hand and manages it from start to finish, ultimately orchestrating all the characters of her story to her liking. As I’ve said before, when Amis tells us that Nicola Six has, since she was a young girl, known what was going to happen, this isn’t clairvoyance, this is just a postmodern self-awareness that she is a character in a novel.

Narrator Sampson is on the verge of the revelation, but chooses to believe he has simply run across a real-life novel rather than realise his life is a novel. So in the end Nicola triumphs over even her narrator. Nicola is the reason the Booker panel’s excuse of ‘bad treatment of women’ comes off as just an excuse to me. Sure, Keith’s ladies get some horrific treatment but in the end it is a woman who rules the book supreme. This doesn’t detract any from it being a mean, nasty read though.

I struggled with what to rate this book. I can’t just put the 5 writing against the 1 horrorplot and come out with a 3. Three is average and London Fields is not average. A dead baby would have made this an easy 1, but, though we came close, no children were actually killed in the course of the narrative. Marmaduke is so terrifying I’m tempted to count him anyway. I do really want to completely dislike this book, but despite my visceral reaction I did get a few interesting things out of it. One being the previously discussed subversion of archetype by Nicola Six. The other was a musing on time as a force, like gravity, which has stuck with me as a point of interest rather than of horror. ‘London Fields’ gets a grudging two but I’m afraid I’m in no rush to try another Amis. If you see him, try and comfort him as best you can.

I cannot recommend this book. That's it. That's the entire post.

Excellent writing, but the joke wore thin. Often simply grim without much humour.

There were a few decent laughs throughout but, despite the interesting twist at the very end, not much progress plot-wise. The characters are all caricatures, so if we're not hearing about them doing anything then we know we're not about to get a deep character study instead. Absurdity and surrealism for their own sake can only carry us so far.

That said, the writing was regularly outstanding on the small scale, sentence to sentence. If I was completely detached from the narrative, I remained engaged by the author's arrangement of the English language, by the story's vaulting vocabulary, with striking lines slung like garlands through each page. Really enjoyable.

Bottom line, though: I was glad to finish it. Unnecessarily, self-indulgently long.


PS.
I've since read some reviews that suggest the prejudices of the narrator are actually the prejudices of the author himself.

This is a parody of popular storytelling in contemporary society. The baseness, the extremity, the bile – it is all part of the characterisation of the narrator first and foremost. Likewise, the futility of the plotline, the lack of sufficient motives for characters; Amis is deriding the typical overamped modern novel. Don't look for sense where none was ever intended, where it was deliberately excluded.

How much you can read into the views and attitudes of the author himself is moot, as is whether it's all any good or not. But don't act like key themes of the book were only included by accident.

I'm so conflicted about Martin Amis--I love his writing so much, but oddly I tend not to like his actual books, and there's a lot about the story of this one that I found really problematic. But he's wicked talented, there's no doubt about that.

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.

Glimtvis genial, sproglig overlegen og (indrømmet) indimellem en intellektuel prøvelse. Det er sort humor når den er allermørkest.

Quite the weird and wonderful trip, this book. The novel-within-a-novel device generally doesn't work for me, but it's done here in such an original way that it completely won me over. The timing and development of the three characters is so perfect, and I can't remember being this hungry for the last 10-20 pages of any book in some time.