BookBrowse Reviews London Fields by Martin Amis

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This metafictional, postmodern black comedy follows a woman as she tries to manipulate two men into murdering her, and the writer who is trying to turn her story into a novel.

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In Martin Amis's London Fields—one of his most acclaimed and beloved novels—Samson Young, a struggling American novelist, comes to London and finds the perfect story, one that will reinvigorate his career and hopefully, finally, make him some money. Best of all, it's true, so he just has to write down what really happens. It's a murder mystery that hasn't happened yet. "Technically speaking, I am also, I suppose, an accessory before the fact, but to hell with all that for now," he says, excited.

The story is this: Nicola Six, a self-styled femme fatale, knows that she's going to be murdered soon, on the morning of her thirty-fifth birthday. She can see it, the scene: the murderer in a car on a dead-end street, telling her to get in…She wants it, is not afraid of it, knows both that it is inevitable and also that she has to make it come true, that she has to find the murderer. And she finds him in the Black Cross, a bar on the Portobello Road. It's Keith Talent, a small-time criminal, the worst guy you can imagine, utterly remorseless when it comes to cheating people and his treatment of women, a local darts enthusiast, and inexplicably charismatic ("Every pub has its superstar, its hero, its pub athlete, and Keith was the Knight of the Black Cross," Sam observes). Or maybe it's Guy Clinch, a rich, hapless, but good man, who's stuck in a loveless marriage and recently saddled with a terrifyingly violent baby named Marmaduke, whose favorite pastimes are biting, kicking, and headbutting Guy, and who requires a "kind of SWAT team of burly orderlies." (About the relationship between Guy, his wife Hope, and Marmaduke, Amis writes, "it became, well—you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military.") Longing for escape, Guy fearfully explores the world of London's poor, until he ends up in the Black Cross, where he meets Keith and Nicola.

Nicola sets off working the two men, playing them against each other, helping them, hurting them: all in service of her ultimate goal, which is to be murdered. To Guy she presents herself as virginal, barely been kissed, hopelessly inexperienced and hopelessly in love. She lets him kiss her ("This is heavenly. But do you think you could open your mouth a little bit?" Guy whispers) but when things get too surprising—a tongue in her mouth, for example—she reflexively headbutts him or kicks him in the groin. (Between Marmaduke and Nicola, Guy spends most of the novel in wounded pain; by the end his disfigurations are practically permanent.) For Keith she's a guardian angel, a provider of both sex and money; she prettily manipulates Guy into giving her thousands of pounds, supposedly for some noble purpose, that she then gives to Keith to pay off his debtors, so that they don't break his fingers before his big darts game (he's been tapped to compete in a televised tournament). Also involved is Sam himself, who was there at the Black Cross the day that Nicola came in; intrigued by her plan and the effect she had on the two men, he ingratiates himself in his characters' lives in order to get to know them better and write his novel. For example, he asks Keith to teach him darts:

"When I entered the garage for my first darts lesson Keith turned suddenly and gripped my shoulders and stared me in the eye as he spoke. Some kind of darts huddle. 'I've forgotten more than you'll ever know about darts,' says this darting poet and dreamer. 'I'm giving you some of my darts knowledge.' And I'm giving him fifty pounds an hour… He then went on to tell me everything he knew about the game. It took fifteen seconds."

Later, when Keith is training for his big game, Sam becomes his darts coach, in "a sinister reversal":

"I can't help him with the technique side of it (there isn't any), and I can't help him with the tactical side of it (there isn't any), but I can help him with the psychological side of it, and there's apparently plenty of that… Afterward, eerily, the money still changes hands in the same direction."

It's so funny, this book, even as it is suffused with dread and despair and cruelty. In the background of this four-person drama is "the Crisis": as Nicola hurtles herself towards her own destruction so, too, does the planet. There's ambiguous environmental disaster—dead clouds, a low sun; the weathermen have become the main news anchors, relegating the anchors to a few extraneous headlines—plus the probability of nuclear war. Everything's gotten bad, worse. Even Keith, concerned mostly with his darts and women, has noticed the deterioration in the world of cheats:

"Yet no one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world in which everyone cheated. The other morning Keith had bought five hundred vanity sachets of Outrage, his staple perfume. At lunchtime he discovered that they all contained water, a substance not much less expensive than Outrage, but harder to sell. Keith was relieved that he had already unloaded half the consignment on Damian Nobel in the Portobello Road. Then he held Damian's tenners up to the light: they were crude forgeries. He passed on the notes without much trouble, in return for twenty-four bottles of vodka which, it turned out, contained a misty, faintly scented liquid. Outrage! The incident struck Keith as a sign of the times."

Everything's nearing the end; the book is a race against time. Sam, dying of a painful disease, desires only to finish his book before he dies or the planet dies or both. But also, there's something else he wants, something he loves: Kim Talent, Keith's baby daughter—the gentle foil to Guy's Marmaduke—whom he teaches to crawl and rescues from the squalor of Keith's life. Amidst the destruction and violence, amidst the death of love, is some bright light of life.

This review first ran in the July 16, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.