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Book Reviewed by:A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME).
First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer's block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself.
A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.
Excerpt:
London Fields
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.
This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. And I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once they start. You can't stop people, once they start creating.
What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?
I must remain calm. I'm on deadline too ...
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. Nicola Six, a self-styled femme fatale, knows that she's going to be murdered soon. 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 so funny, this book, even as it is suffused with dread and despair and cruelty. 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. But amidst the destruction and violence, amidst the death of love, is some bright light of life...continued
Full Review
(988 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
Martin Amis (1949–2023) was an acclaimed English novelist and critic, known for his "bleak comedy," pyrotechnical prose, and his interest in vulgarity and profanity: creating "a high style to describe low things," as Dwight Garner put it in his obituary of Amis for the New York Times. His writing was witty, exuberant; he was, according to Garner, "the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction." The critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that he was "a writer equipped with a daunting arsenal of literary gifts: a dazzling, chameleonesque command of language, a willingness to tackle large issues and larger social canvases and an unforgiving, heat-seeking eye for the unwholesome ferment of contemporary life."
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