Yeah Cheers for London Fields
Into the Heart of Berkness with Martin Amis’s masterpiece
When did you realise novels could be fun?
I should say when did you remember. If as a kid you read of your own accord, you were reading for pleasures. Those of narrative pull, the proxy fast-friendships of fictional characters which somehow made you nostalgic, the allure of exotic settings (anywhere that wasn’t your bedroom or classroom felt exotic), the pleasures of scares or laughter depending on how a book fit with your hardening psyche.
This changed with adolescence. I don’t quite blame school. I’ve never bought the idea that the books we got ‘made’ to read at school put us off them for life (if school meant to make us it didn’t work; hardly anyone did read them, and I was no exception; I blagged my way through English GCSE having gotten a sufficient idea of the set texts from eavesdropping on our lessons). The ideal of education, you’d hope, would be not to pander to a kid’s tastes but to connect their nascent feeling for books with even better books out there. As I wrote in a post on the Best of ’22:
read weird books young. Not because there’s anything morally improving in doing so. But so you get in early, before you’ve inherited defence mechanisms that let you off from bothering with such works, before you receive the wisdom for and against.
Teenagers think they’re rebels. But that’s the age when your receptivity towards received wisdom was at its hungriest, which coincided with your accelerating sense of identity. Instead of reading grown-up books making you a grown-up reader, you were a grown-up reader and therefore you read grown-up books. And if burying your nose in them was gonna take up a not insignificant part of your youth they ought at least to smell of prestige, social improvement, to evince continuity with some magisterial tradition of great, grave thought. There’s a reason most people read Dostoevsky in their teens.
My proving-myself phase was marked by Coetzee, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Nausea, The Stranger. There was pleasure in them, the enlarging sense of language they gave, if language of a thorny, modernist kind. And marked by Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, whose pleasures were ones of recognition (of course; another kind of youthful vanity). Other books - Lanark, If on a winter’s night a traveller, the first run of The Sandman - gave pleasure with their menthol tingle of mind-expansion1, a naive gee-whiz at your first proper experience of formal trickery outside a Warner Bros cartoon.
A few of these books even had funny bits - an ironic tone, a wry remark, maybe a sustained farcical scene like the ones in Crime and Punishment - but mostly they gave you “a persistent smile of admiration.”2 You didn’t laugh. Not like at TV.
Then aged 21 I found myself laughing along to a book in a way I’d not done since I was a kid reading Terry Pratchett or Calvin and Hobbes. The book was London Fields.
In London Fields a 34-year-old woman called Nicola Six is in a love triangle that’s more a Bermuda Triangle. Having always known she’d die by male hands she wants to “get to the end of men”. She sucks two into her plot to make her death-wish come true by playing up to their respective fantasies, at the cost of wrecking their lives. First, “the foil, the fool, the poor foal” Guy Clinch, a well-meaning and, crucially, well-off toff who falls in love with her ingenue act. Then Keith Talent, a part-time “cheat”, in that he spends the other part of his time playing darts, a sport he dreams of becoming king with Nicola as his trashy queen.
Small-time crook Keith is usually billed as the main draw of the novel—Jay McInerney for The Observer puts Amis’s “brilliant comic creation” of him on a par with Graham Greene’s Pinkie Brown and Saul Bellow’s Rinaldo Cantabile. But unlike the lopsided triple-act of Amis’s The Zone of Interest, which I wrote about in my last post, London Fields lavishes and rewards attention at all corners of the triangle. Or cross, rather, like the Black Cross pub where the four principals meet—the fourth node, fourth ‘field’ being our narrator, Samson Young, an American writer staying in London seemingly for a sabbatical but with other, graver matters closer to heart.
The novel’s comic creation, its funny original style, is the other draw of the novel, the point on which it’s usually championed (or defended). I myself would love to assure you London Fields makes you laugh like when a friend tells a good joke: warmly, in congratulations. But here there’s a problem. As I warned in my piece on Veep and The Thick of It:
Whenever you’re told about a person who’s hilarious, a real crack-up, already you’re poisoned against them. It’s even worse for a comedy, going around calling itself comedic from the outset.
Rather than retell the novel’s jokes and then add ‘I guess you had to be there’, I wanna try work out its ways of being humorous, its comic style or form3—as with my piece on Chris Morris, try explain not what Martin Amis found funny but how.
Most novels people call funny they mean they’re narrated with a sarky tone and that’s it. Amis had an ironic tone (often branded as ‘sneering’), with such lines as “though he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features” - and he could crack wise - “meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit” - but he wasn’t satisfied with coasting on whatever native talent he had for being funny.
London Fields is, as
wrote about Catch 22, “first and foremost a comic novel whose primary structural principle is the joke and whose design and execution are most appropriately construed as the vehicles of mirth.” So various and dense are London Fields’ ‘vehicles of mirth’ it reads as though it was written by a team of comedy writers. (I can’t discuss said vehicles or devices without giving them away, so be warned.)Lists: There’s Nicola Six’s kisses, which get a chapter named after them; Keith’s knock-off perfumes - “Outrage”, “Scandal”; or his colourful carousel of love affairs, the non-racism of his libido being his aforementioned redeeming feature.4
Repetitions and callbacks: Throughout the novel Keith says “Yeah cheers”, modulated according to character dynamic: when he’s drunk on a plane, when he’s lording it over Guy or squirming under Nicola. During a sequence where she subtly humiliates him by giving him what he thought he wanted in a succession of posh eat- and drinkeries, we read throughout of how class-petrified Keith “kept his counsel.” He’s also repeatedly, inordinately impressed by old things, which evoke to him classiness. When he reads the stone inscription above the door where Samson is staying he coos, “1876!” Later when reading a cod-history of darts that claims the Normans brought them to England he thinks, “1066!”
Escalations: One of the many people Keith cheats is a trustful old dear called Lady Barnaby, with a threatening boiler: “He felt nervous being in the same room - or on the same floor - as this labouring gravity-bomb in its padded vest.” He keeps pretending to fix it for her, and each time it adds another pascal of pressure. Then he treats, that is, cheats her with a holiday to war-torn Yugoslavia (“But it wasn’t a hotel. You expect a toilet but this was ridiculous: some kind of barracks full of mad thugs”). Last we hear of “Lady B” she’s been left catatonic.
Character death-matches: One of the pleasures in a long story with many plot-lines is when characters who haven’t met finally do. The second strongest force field in the novel is Guy’s demonic baby Marmaduke. But in Nicola he finds an equal and opposing force when she introduces him to ‘the pinching game’: “he backed away, nursing his wrist, and with a new expression on his face, as if he had just learnt something (one of life’s lessons), as if he had never known such outrage, such scandal.” (Note the callback to Keith’s fake fragrances.)
Sustained riffs and set-pieces: These work as chapters within chapters, and as such they each have their own unifying theme and/or drama arising from a character-clash. To neutralise Guy’s (entirely correct) worry she’s stringing him along while slumming it with Keith, Nicola exploits his upper class pity for the lower class man by persuading him Keith is illiterate and letting him spy on her English lesson with the man about Keats. In on the ruse, Keith reads from hidden cards she’s prepared for him, but, too pleased with himself, he can’t help improvising with tabloid-learnt fillers. “The index card here said, simply, ‘by John Keats’ But Keith felt at this stage that he could do a little better than that. ‘Enriched,’ he said, ‘by the plucky little… by the… talented Romantic who’s… who’s untimely-’ (‘By John Keats,’ said Nicola.)”
Jarring jokes: There’s a banker minor character in the novel, who towards the end we’re told is related to Guy: “I guess it looks like a cheap shot, the revelation, at this stage, that Richard is Guy’s brother. But I can only duplicate my own astonishment.” Amis hasn’t made a literary goof but a gag; he uses the jarringness of a writing ‘mistake’ to spin a new joke, and a resonant one: some people just are too stiffly posh to mention a sibling let alone that he’s rich. Similarly it jars but then feels right - like any joke by definition does - when fey Guy dukes it out at last with macho Keith but wins handily: “Guy still had all the money, and all the strength.”
Sight gags: Nicola, having long intuited TV-mad Keith’s kink for voyeurism, treats him to personalised porn videos; for the last one, and as a departing kiss, she removes her knickers and puts them over his face to watch TV through: “‘Might look rather comic on anyone but you, Keith.’ The black gusset puffed out for a moment as Keith said, ‘Yeah cheers.’”
Tours de force: This list does violence to Amis’s method. What stands London Fields apart is how he weaves the above elements together. Take the fourth-act-closing chapter ‘The Ladies and the Gents’, when Keith plays the semi-finals of his darts tournament—a tawdry tapestry of all the above and more.
Are these jokes, with their admitted variety, unified by cruelty? Amis once told The Washington Post a joke “assumes a butt, and a certain superiority in the teller. The culture won’t put up with that for much longer.”
Julia Bell for The New Statesman won’t. For her, Amis’s humour was “snide elitism bordering on sadism.” Charlie Kimber writes in his obit in The Socialist Worker (the unminced words of its headline being ‘Islamophobic novelist Martin Amis dies’) that “most of the characters are just lazily‑drawn targets for mockery. Was it a brilliant observation for... Keith Talent to end many of his sentences with ‘innit’?” Even James Marriot for The Times claimed that this characterisation “makes you think of the sort of cardiganed middle class gentleman who effortfully addresses his plumber as ‘mate’.”
Inauthenticity, then, is the charge, that and finding humour in squalor. Many authors have plumbed English squalor but they at least have the decency to emerge with a lesson. Other authors would’ve sensitively probed the codependency between professional sports and the working class male; Amis meanwhile has Keith describe a darts match using every commentator cliché because he actually sees the world in sports journalese. Charlie Kimber presents as Exhibit B the dialogue of Keith’s most long-suffering shag-buddy, Trish Shirt: “He comes round my owce. Eel bring me… booze and that. To my owce. And use me like a toilet.” As if to ask: why should everyone else get normal type but working class people have their speech relayed phonetically or fretted with apostrophes?
What this talk of snobbery obscures is that Amis was, demonstrably, an equal-opportunity ironist; he had fun with how all social classes spoke. There’s his Charles-like king from Yellow Dog who can’t say “bloody” but only “bleddy”, or a daffy aristo in The Information who fatally mixes up the phrases “writing for peanuts” and “writing for toffee”. Or the embarrassingly earnest attempts of Guy in London Fields to write poetry, such as his bad Renaissance puns - “like Putti in his hands!” or the way he quizzes Samson Young about writing, “How do you do that?” True Amis does transcribe Yardie patois like that of Keith’s pub-pal Thelonius, but he also captures the nasal tone of Janit, Samson’s contact at his US publishers: the way she says “Pregnint!” or “Permanint”, to the point Samson dryly commands, “Janit, say spearmint.” I get why in a British culture of bad TV comedy that parodies the accents of foreigners and the poor any phonetic writing of colloquial English might spook. But wouldn’t writing everyone in a novel speaking exactly the same way be weirder still? Be more patronisingly homogenous?
Maybe Amis’s impersonations would be more palatable if he was writing from an authentic place. Take that title: the name of a neighbourhood and park in Hackney, East London, which he nevertheless chose for such a West London novel.
Why be so literal though? Do people read The Lord of the Flies increasingly annoyed at the still no-show of a fly in a special hat? Plus the area London Fields does make an appearance, understandably vaguely as a childhood memory of a man about to die. Then there’s the bivalence of the title, as Amis explained in his preface. One cover artist got it right:
The novel is built on Venn diagram overlaps, the new colours cast from the interaction of different spheres of influence, different London force fields.
I read it after my first months of living in London, and though I knew it caught something of the city’s vibe I never thought of it as a guidebook. The charges of inauthenticity and sadism can both be answered by recalling Amis’s style is a non-realist, exaggerated one. And so when people criticise the novel for over-the-top characters it’s like they’re criticising a car for having wheels. (I wonder whether watching The Simpsons they wince air through their teeth and complain, ‘Isn’t it all a bit caricatured?’) Writing for Jacobin Richard Seymour points out:
None of Amis’s characters persuade by being true to life. Listen to the hedonistic, Anglo-American advertising yobbo John Self in Money describing the after-effects of a few days of heavy drinking and bad eating: “Ten minutes later I came out of that can on all fours, a pale and very penitent crocodile, really sorry about all that stagnant gook and offal I went and quaffed last night.” Who talks like this? No one, but you still want to hear him confess. The language is voltaic. The same can sometimes be said even of what is widely regarded as his worst novel, Yellow Dog. The gangster Joseph Andrews, for example, is an exalted concoction of memoirs by “Mad” Frankie Fraser, Lenny MacLean, and Dave Courtney, a caricature in extremis that, like the character itself, persuades through force.
‘Dickensian’ is the usual apology or excuse here, and only part of the answer. Because while the characters are exaggerated, extreme, not true-to-life, they nonetheless land through the vividness of their parts. It’s pointillism in day-glo. Keith might not be a complex person, but he’s rendered complexly, from every angle: we read about his “leonine puffy face”, his dog Clive, his meagre bookshelf and fake CV, the way he lines cigs on his armrest when watching darts, his well-reasoned preference for lager when playing darts himself (“It’s kegged”).
This attention to detail is just not what you’d bother with in writing “lazily‑drawn targets for mockery”. (Have a leaf through The Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn’s novel To Hell in a Handcart to see what that looks like.) Attention to detail is a function of concern. Spending 490 pages rubbing every seam and seamy side of his characters, Amis had to, by definition, feel concern for them. He isn’t being snide, he’s in love with them. Especially Keith, to whom he even gives a fleck of redeemability: Keith jots in private his guilty knowledge that the violence he hands out to wife Kath is trickling elsewhere, as Samson discovers (or rather miscovers). Depicting your characters kinks-and-all is more ‘authentic’ in any case than sanctifying or only piously slumming it with them.
The criticism of London Fields that stuck more, both in the sense that it really hit the novel and has lingered since, is of its depiction of Kath, Trish Shirt, Guy’s sister-in-law Lizzyboo et al. Booker Prize director Martyn Goff summed it up for The Independent in 1997:
“It was an incredible row… Maggie [Gee] and Helen [McNeil] felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn’t be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn’t favour or bless that sort of treatment.
It’s weirdly consoling to see how cyclic this stuff is. Remember when Martin Scorsese was accused by Marvel fans of glamorising gangsters? I look forward to directors appearing in the corner of the screen like a sign-language intepreter, sadly shaking their head or nodding proudly so the audience knows which treatment of the characters you’re meant to favour and which not. Maybe books could use red ink for the disapproved-of bits.
Treated most ‘badly’ of all, most terminally anyway, is Nicola Six with her death-wish: the fatal in femme fatale. Updike thought this made her an example of Amis’s fascination with the anti-human. A male friend argued the novel hadn’t given a sufficient motive for why man-eating Nicola would plan to be murdered in simply her desire to head off turning 35. My female friends got it straightaway—as one said (albeit in our complacent twenties), “If there were an equivalent ‘Seven Ages of Woman’, then turning 35 is when you enter the second-to-last.”5
What about the other polarity though, the criticism that antiheroine Nicola, head-turning and heart-stamping as she is, is nothing but a male fantasy? I don’t know how many times I can quote Gina McKee in Brass Eye intoning with a faux po-face, “But maybe that’s the point”, or post the gif of Rainier Wolfcastle saying:
It’s like when critics accused Terry Gilliam in his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote for making the female lead Angelica a Madonna/Whore fantasy, as though they’d caught him out in doing so, despite the film showing her dressed as a madonna for a student film in one scene then in the next her father calling her a whore. Amis didn’t unknowingly, self-exposingly, write Nicola as a male fantasy but as a character about male fantasies. Her whole plan is to play up to the ones of posho Guy and yobbo Keith; with the latter, she exploits his chauvinism in the most emasculating way possible; meanwhile the former she leaves with the bluest balls and reddest erection in literature. She dominates the men around her6, narrator included. And this not just in passing but for what accounts for 80% of the plot movement of the novel. In her puppet-mastery and murderee-drive she’s a precursor to the cool-girl-playing Amy Dunne in Gone Girl.7(And her murderee-drive is a drive. It gives London Fields what many of Amis’s novels lack: narrative propulsion.)
But Amis gifts Nicola with even more than self-possession as a character and centrality to the plot. She’s also the keystone of the novel as a unified work of art, the reason why London Fields is one of the few times when Martin Amis got everything right.
The author and journalist Bidisha makes the case for art as the expression of identity-markers: “Martin Amis will never be as gay, Black, depressed, horny or nuts as he wants to be.”
But Amis wasn’t a confessional writer. Though more than one obit compared him to Norman Mailer, his novels weren’t extensions of his verbose, variously brilliant or barmy personality. Nietzsche’s ever-useful binary is useful here too: of Apollonian art - lucidity, balance, proportion - versus Dionysian - passion, horniness, being nuts. Martin Amis was an Apollonian in disguise as a Dionysian.
This became clearer as his novels went on: there’s the way The Information obeys generic decorum, or the old-school comic pastoral of The Pregnant Widow. But those novels gesture at a form and design they don’t satisfy, unlike London Fields.
For one it’s the most systematically structured of Amis’s novel. The first dozen of its 24 chapters are grouped in four sets of three, alternating POV between Keith, Nicola and Guy, in that order. There’s a satisfying tidyness to this scheme, it helps give each chapter and chapter-group its own vision, a Galapogian individuality and internal complexity. The groupings are then dropped for the second dozen chapters, as the characters’ lives are starting to mesh, crosshatch, soon to explode.
Too many stories these days are so literal, whereas the cross-hatched structure of London Fields allows for all sorts of misapprehension and deceit. And with different subtleties and local effects: see Keith winding up Guy about Nicola’s (fake) lovelorn rejection interspersed with him singing along to a fruit machine. Or Nicola’s ratcheting up of Keith’s vainglory towards her climactic psych! And each chapter is capped with an untitled sub-chapter in which narrator Samson gives another character’s POV on what we just read, what we thought happened. Irony here not just a tone but a formal device.
Samson’s subchapters also let Amis incorporate the theme of writing itself, in a way that’s not intrusive or corny. In his novel Money - about John Self, a slobbish wannabe film producer - Amis famously, and not entirely pointfully, gave himself a cameo. But in London Fields the narrator is himself an author. Samson’s commentary on the book he’s writing and we’re reading is saved from preciousness since it’s his first go at a novel (a non-fiction novel like In Cold Blood.)8 His role as its author in the wider plot isn’t intrusive but intrinsic to his (and Amis’s) story about Nicola: a woman who is herself so self-made, who is writing her own ending, who “has out-written us all.”
As well as being an author, Samson is American in a way that’s integrated into the story and not just a grab for US sales. He’s an outsider and hence legit monitor of the British class system via his friendships with upper class Guy, working class Keith, and free-floating middle class Nicola with her sharp perspective on the fantasies and anxieties of those under her and above. This social panorama in turn warrants the novel its length. Its capaciousness isn’t baggy but appropriate, not to mention entertaining, with every minor character - a Japanese darts player, Keith’s infant daughter Kim - leaving their mark. (Kim who’s well marked herself: nappy crenelations, fag burns...)
But it’s Nicola in whom all the novel’s plot-threads, themes and beams join. In the prequel to this post I charted what Frank Kermode called Amis’s “hunger to be serious.” In his books Night Train and The Information he tried folding in bleak facts from astronomical physics; in House of Meetings and The Pregnant Widow he charted the aftermaths of the Russian and sexual revolutions. The man wrote two Holocaust novels for God’s sake. But none (not even the doggedly on-message Time’s Arrow) were integrated artworks like London Fields.
What Nicola is criticised for, her death-wish, is what makes the novel—cliché intended. The backdrop to this moribund woman, and the moribund man who becomes her sort of bard, is a whole world with a death-wish. Amis had toyed with titling the novel Millennium, for it is millennial in the old sense. Its world is one that’s cracking up before the coming end, whether by inequality, social decay, ecological collapse or plain old nukes. (Sound familiar?) And yet, via Nicola and her plot, Amis’s Big Questioning about these ideas isn’t a drag but enhancing, apposite. The novel has no grand idea that sticks out like a bookmark, no grubby detail that reads as besides the point. Its squalor and grandeur aren’t things Amis was dabbling in or using for snide kicks; they’re structurally necessary. Hence why London Fields is, out of all his novels, and in the words of Samson Young, “something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable”.
John Self (no relation) writes that Money was Amis’s best novel, that “it’s not even close.” But as good as Money is, in a way it can’t be his best. Voice novels, skaz ones, are all steam power. Take Portnoy’s Complaint, the greatest voice novel ever written; it ends as soon as that voice needs to, as it were, catch a breath (and therefore sets up its famous last line). Now Portnoy’s Complaint is hardly formless; Philip Roth planned and pruned it as much as any of his writing. But voice novels aren’t formful enough to warrant praise beyond how much you might be taken by a given voice: if that voice doesn’t work on you, then that novel as an artwork is screwed.
Polyphonic London Fields has that strength of voice; and it has thoughts and sentences you’ve never heard put that way before, i.e. Amis’s prose style, the typical battleground for both his haters and lovers, both who neglect what else made him good. And it has an intricacy of pattern delivered with maximal pleasure: said pleasures being its euphony or, catchier still, its anti-euphony; and its dark humour, entertaining violence, sexual titillation—a tabloid written by God.
These are its good bits. ‘The good bits’ was the title Amis gave to his review of William S Burroughs (who never forgave him). Amis was cursed by his own cuss when it came to his later novels, themselves mixed bags. But not only is London Fields all good bits, it’s a good whole: every set-up paid off, every diversion earned, justifiably everything it is. No wonder he said it was the novel that took the most out of him. So bury Martin Amis’s political opinions with him.9 What’ll survive of him is art.
It’s why SF fans tend to stay loyal, not because the genre’s so cerebral but because its cerebralness is an easy source of pleasure; it’s also why real SF-heads hate realist lit-fic.
The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis.
The humorous and the comic aren’t exactly the same to be fair. The former is any instance of levity. The latter is a mode, a way of seeing the world or telling a story, in which everything can be ridiculous. It’s why finger-wagging at the comic is always a category mistake, as though you’re calling out irreverence for not being reverent.
This had a personal chime: in Inside Story Amis gave us his own United Colours of Benetton roll-call of exes: “a Ceylonese, an Iranian, a Pakistani, three West Indians, and a mixed-race South African”.
If you go in for biographical explanations it might’ve been more Amis’s sister Sally, a few years off when he wrote the novel from her death by alcoholism, than any general belief on his part about women’s self-destructiveness that accounts for why he wrote Nicola Six the way he did.
Except, and this by design, “the worst”: darts rival Chick Purchase.
Her own precursor was Mary Lamb/Amy Hide from Amis’s Other People. (Which more than other Amis fiction is a patchwork of Nabokov allusions if not straight-out lifts.)
Spoiler: it makes sense that narrator Samson, the closest character in the novel to the author, not least in him being an author himself, is the one to murder Nicola in the end. Every fictional character who dies does so at the hands of the author, that serial killer.
There was always a smug sadomasochism in pointing out your fav is problematic, dressed as civic responsibility (I remember a board meeting where one arts-sector wally said of a proposed project on D H Lawrence, “Lawrence! Oh I love Lawrence. But should I?”). Who but a Buzzfeed listicle or negging post-grad points out these days what Charles Dickens thought of the 1857 Indian mutineers when you could just go re-read Bleak House?