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Rating:  -
although it has the slightly dated flavor of Y2K hysteria,
the characters, dialogue and character descriptions are
perfect. amis has a way of using single sentences to mean
multiple, sometimes ironically contradictory things, and
this only adds to the informational content inherent in
every word. he is truly a master of the english language,
if not a master of writing the ending to a novel. enjoy it
for what it's worth, which is a virtuoso use of the english
language.
Rating:  -
Good read. The plot is sort of metaphysical and a little stretched: Nicola Six is going to be killed by someone (we don't know who) because of her sexual deviations. She is basically arranging her own murder. Two characters are chosen by her for this mission, and she is building up her scheme to get them to hate and eventually kill her.
It is a nice relaxing read. Authors narrative is catchy and skillful, his sense of humour is great. Characters are very alive and not trivial. I was a little disappointed by the ending, but overall aftertaste of the book is good. I will read other books by Martin Amis.
Rating: -
London Fields is (as Amis confessed himself) a novella that somehow sprawled out into a 500 or so page novel. For such a long book, very little happens. Nicola Six (pronounced seeks) knows she is to be murdered, the question is by whom? - anachronistic, aristocratic, intellectual, Guy Clinch (representing the decline of the aristocracy and high culture), or his social and cultural opposite, the picaresque, working class, darts playing con man Keith Talent whose obsession with TV and pornography allows Amis to explore his Baudrillardian concerns with the increasing falseness of post modern reality.
The novel is a metafiction. The story is written by failed and dying, Jewish American writer Sampson Young, who discovers the story when he finds Nicola Six's discarded diaries and realises he has a chance to simply write down a great novel without having to make anything up. The narrative is interjected with short chapters, narrated by Young himself who becomes increasingly involved in the plot.
All this is fine. Amis as a Nabokovian, playful, reflexive stylist is on top form. But Amis's main problem as a writer is that he isn't content to be merely a stylist in the Nabokovian mould, he wants to be profound as well like Saul Bellow. Thus he set the story in a fictional future (an apocalyptic 1999, with London on the brink of some vaguely specified environmental/nuclear apocalypse called 'the crisis'). There are obvious references to nuclear weapons: Nicola Six has an invented friend called Enola Gay, she taunts Keith Talent by wearing a bikini (as in Atoll). The idea of all of this seems to be to create a simulated apocalypse which parallels the breakdown of post modern society. But like so many writers who try and pin down a zeitgeist in one, overarching metaphor, the imagery Amis uses in these sections of the book comes across as overstretched.
If only Amis had taken a leaf from his hero Nabokov, who warned against the dangers of 'big ideas' in novels. In inteviews, Nabokov declaimed against 'Poshlost' - a Russian term, with no clear translation in English, but roughly meaning vulgarity, social comment, political allegories, bloated topicalities. (see 'Strong Opinions' p100). Novels that trade in grand ideas run the risk of seeming like large whales which can be left floundering when the tide goes out. Now that we have reached 2006 and the Cold War is long gone, I wonder if Amis feels he was a bit silly to set a 1989 novel in an apocalyptic, turn of the Millennium London?
Rating: -
I re-read this recently and have to tell you, I think it's still the shiznit...Wonderful pyrotechnic writing, much hilarity ensues...all of Amis' ideas are splendidly realized...who cares if it's a "novel of ideas"? I don't even know what that means...as opposed to what? Also, if you don't like the "authorial voice" or whatever it is, why read an Amis novel? That's what you get, as Dick Cheney says, "bigtime!". And if that's not per your taste, perhaps you should chow down on the latest Grisham. Criticizing Mart for that kind of thing, for clever wordplay or whatever the hell it was, is like saying, "that Ella Fitzgerald scats too much for my taste - she's a bad singer"....
Characterological symbolism? Was that the phrase? Sheeshh...what verbal flatulence....hand that guy some Beano....
Rating: -
I spent about an hour reading all 74 reviews; it's not kosher to write a response to reviews...I thought the book was perfectly plotted, the relationship between the main characters had a wonderful symmetry, MMF or MMMF; a tad like Seinfeld except it wasn't topical, the story is mainly about Keith's quest for dartboard supremacy. I think the story could have gone on forever: Martin Amis had to murder Nicola just so he could meet a deadline.
My big hassle with it: if you were to contrast the writerly technique of Martin Amis to that (fiend and literary hero) Jack Kerouac, it really must be torture to write in Martin's style. The drafting, the editing, the reading, and redrafting. Martin's writing is probably fouled up by automation: when he wrote The Rachel Papers, it weighed in at 200 pages. By the late eighties computer he's got it up to nearly 500 pages, and by the mid-nineties he was getting nearly half a million bucks for a book...not bad.
But it's good fun: even minor characters like Analiese (Anal-liase) Furnish, are supplied with perfect names, and it all fits together like a mortiose and tenon.
It's really written for the joy of writing. He comes up with very specific characters, the relationships between the character drive the story...he doesn't write the thing because he has an important story to tell; it's obvious that he enjoys reading his own stuff; it's a hoot, it's better than standup comedy.
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