London Fields. - book reviews

National Review, May 28, 1990 by George Szamuely

THE WIDELY reproduced photograph of Martin Amis distributed to publicize London Fields seems to encapsulate his career as a whole. Posing self-consciously against the background of a graffiti-disfigured wall on one of those West London bridges that are the London Underground tracks where they run overground, the author looks sullen, yet self-assured. In contrast to the squalor of his surroundings as well as to the bleakly grey sky above, Amis himself is rather spruce: his suit casually elegant, his hair fashionably cut and obviously freshly washed. It is as if he were going on to a party once the photo session was over. Nonetheless, it is not there but here where he truly belongs, his scowl seems to suggest. Or, rather, is compelled to belong, since as an artist he has to be wherever whatever is going on goes on. And what goes on is ... dreadful.

The titles alone of the succession of international literary events that have made up his enviably successful career-dead Babies, Success, Other People, Einstein's Monsters, The Moronic Inferno-suggest that Amis takes a dim view of the times he is living in. Yet much of his fame also rests on his being a product-many will say, the embodiment-of the times he is living in. And Amis himself is well aware of this role. The greedy, self-centered, lustful narrator of his recent, enormously successful novel Money was called John Self. While he regularly impresses the gushing young females sent out to write profiles of him (as one from the New York Times Magazine recently was) with magisterial pronouncements like "Money is a more democratic medium than blood, but money as a cultural banner-you can feel the whole of society deteriorating around you because of that. Civility, civilization is falling apart," he makes no secret of the astronomical scale of his own advances. Whatever force his writings possess comes from the vividness of his horrified descriptions of the tabloid press, junk food, obsession with sport, pornographic videos, TV soaps, and the rest of the familiar list of seedy manifestations of popular culture. At the same time, scarcely to be found are profiles of Amis that do not mention the pinball machine in his writing den, his dart board, his own obsession with snooker and soccer, or, come to that, the cigarettes that he always rolls with his hands. Clearly, then, Amis exists, as his admirers would put it, in a state of creative tension with the times he is living in.

So what is it like to be alive now," as Amis puts it? What exactly is "modem life"? London Fields-a huge, dense, sprawling, plotless text-includes a number of its ingredients: jet lag, sports pages, 24-hour TV, darts, lots of porn in lots of places, lots of urban decay, lots of crime. The novel's subject-matter also should give us a clue. Three men, in the last year of the millennium, fantasize incessantly about the same woman, Nicola Six, who in turn indulges and even encourages these fevered imaginings.

Of the three, by far the most vividly characterized is Keith Talent, who is basically a lower-class version of John Self- greedy, nasty, bullying, lascivious, gluttonous, feckless, illiterate, alcoholic, criminal. Nicola's second pursuer, Guy Clinch (the third is the narrator), is likewise more an inhabitant of the small box than of the traditional novel. He is aristocratic, effete, craving neither sex nor food nor booze; dominated by women; immensely wealthy. While Nicola turns Keith on by made-up stories of her past sexual adventures and seemingly perpetual baths during his visits, with Guy she adopts the opposite approach, insisting she not only is a virgin but has yet to learn to kiss. What sex there is in the novel-and there is very little-is all in the anticipation.

But there is more to this anticipation than prolonged tumescence; it informs the work's apocalyptic tone. Nicola, who "always knew what was going to happen next," has dreamt that she will be murdered on her next-her 35th-birthday. Onto this is fastened an implausible, allegorical superstructure whereby Nicola's envisioning, and subsequent encouragement, of her own murder is to be taken as the fate of our planet-destruction, for no reason whatsoever.

Nicola herself is all symbolism. She is meant to be the opposite to the Eternal Feminine, the Earth Goddess. She inspires sexual longing, but she herself feels none. Throughout, there are murmurings to the effect that Nicola, in her seductiveness and hostility to propagation, is like our planet, or least the way it has become. This does not make too much sense and seems on the face of it a rather pretentious way of handling the familiar equation of death with sex.

Amis himself revealed that an article in a newspaper led him to the idea that "people who are murdered are somehow psychologically predisposed to be murdered," and that since London Fields was to be nothing less than his "novel of the century"-one whose salient evils allegedly are nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the planet-the thought occurred to him, hey, "Is the planet the murderee?" Like his writings, these public pronouncements have a certain elliptical, perhaps incomprehensible, quality to them. He is perpetually dazzled with how funny and clever words can sound when they are strung together without the tiresome obligation to mean something. Some critics seize upon this trait as a further sign of the man's brilliance. Most readers, I suspect, will be reminded of the party bore who is so absorbed in telling his hilarious stories that he has ceased to notice the strained, unsmiling faces of his audience.