London Fields…..Winter ‘22

Japanese Canon F1, 50mm F1.4 HP5 (1600)

“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.”

I confess I approached London Fields the way one approaches a public lavatory in Victoria Station — with low expectations, a handkerchief pressed to the face, and the grim certainty that whatever awaits within will have been deposited by someone enormously pleased with himself. And lo, here is Martin Amis, trousers metaphorically around his ankles, straining to produce 470 pages of millennial dread and grunting with the effort like a man passing a thesaurus. The premise, such as it is: it is 1999, the planet is wheezing towards apocalypse, and a femme fatale named Nicola Six has decided to arrange her own murder, presumably having read the book in advance and concluded, as I did, that death was the more bearable option.

The dramatis personae are a rogues' gallery assembled, one suspects, so that Amis might feel superior to all of them simultaneously — a feat of literary onanism Petronius himself would have admired. We have Keith Talent, a darts-flinging proto-yob written with the tender condescension of a duke describing his gamekeeper's bowel habits; Guy Clinch, a posh dolt so wet you could wring him out over a flower bed; and Nicola herself, a "murderee," which is the sort of word Amis coins when his actual ideas have called in sick. Each is less a human being than a smirk wearing a coat, paraded before us so the author can demonstrate that he, Martin, has noticed things about the lower orders and the female of the species. Bravo. Have a biscuit.

But the true horror — and here I reach for the smelling salts — is the prose, which does not so much flow as detonate, sentence after sentence going off like a clown car in a vocabulary factory. The man cannot resist a flourish; offer him a full stop and he'll garnish it with three subordinate clauses, a pun, and a meteorological metaphor borrowed from someone with feelings. It is writing that struts about admiring itself in shop windows, every paragraph a peacock auditioning for a part it didn't get. There are passages of genuine, scalpel-bright brilliance in here, I grant you — which only makes the surrounding showing-off more enraging, like finding a Vermeer hung in a kebab shop.

So, the verdict. London Fields is a novel of dazzling, exhausting, look-at-me virtuosity — a book that mistakes velocity for depth and contempt for wit, written by a man who clearly believes the apocalypse would be improved by his commentary on it. Is it clever? Insufferably. Is it good? On alternate Tuesdays, in a good light, with the reader anaesthetised. Read it, by all means, but keep that handkerchief handy — and remember, as Nicola Six understood better than anyone, that there are worse things than a quick death, and 470 pages of Martin Amis admiring his own reflection is most of them.