Death & The Maiden
Martin Amis’ London Fields  

2,020 words

This is London; and there are no fields. Only fields of operation and observation, only fields of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, only fields of hatred and coercion.
-Martin Amis, London Fields

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The late Martin Amis was an English novelist and the son of a novelist, Sir Kingsley Amis. Amis Junior dedicated one of his novels, London Fields, to his father. Something of an enfant terrible of the English literary world, Amis’ early novels courted mild controversy, and portrayed a new kind of English decadence. The Swinging Sixties had mutated into the louche Seventies when Amis’ debut novel, The Rachel Papers, was published, and early Amis has become something of a time-capsule of pre-Blair England, and London in particular. London Fields was published on the cusp between the “Yuppie” 1980s and the 1990s, when England began, culturally speaking, to lose her way.

After gaining a First at Oxford, Amis was always going to carry on the family business of novel-writing, and it was easy to make a name for himself because he already had one. His journalistic colleagues at the Spectator magazine, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, used to vie to send up Amis’ privilege, with Rushdie suggesting an autobiography entitled Martin Amis: My Struggle.

Amis’ second novel, Dead Babies, was published in 1975, and when I read it a year later, aged 15, it would have been one of the first books I had read that was not a part of my steady diet of science fiction. The publisher must have got cold feet over the title, because the first UK and US paperback editions were titled Dark Secrets. It may be that Amis took his original title from a 1971 Alice Cooper album, Killer, which features a song called Dead Babies.

More novels followed: the disappointing Other People, the jaunty but tense step-brother duel of Success, and the first real example of Amis’ brilliance with plot and dialogue, Money. Then came a novel which was a definitive advance stylistically, and contained a plot as morbid as it is decadent.

London Fields is a novel within a novel. A dying American writer, Samson Young, comes to London and decides that, if London is a pub, and if you want the whole story, then a pub is where you must go. He finds the type of urban hell-hole which does exist, and there he finds the cast of his long-awaited novel. Young has had ten years of writer’s block, but now the truth has arrived he has no trouble writing it all down, as he inveigles himself into the lives of the three main characters he meets at the Black Cross pub in west London (that’s the Bohemian quarter). Unable to write, Young finds his long-sought novel writing itself, in real time and in real life. It’s a murder story – “not so much a whodunit as a whydoit” – with a twist: the murder hasn’t happened yet.

The plot is an interlocking one. A beautiful and clairvoyant woman, Nicola Six, knows that she is going to be murdered (and it’s fine with her), that she is a “murderee”, and she just needs the right man for the job. Playing off two men against one another, she orchestrates her own murder, and all under the watchful, authorial eye of Young, her deathbed amanuensis; “Nicola set up the oldest conflict in the world. Two men. One woman. Someone dies”. First, the potential murderer.

Keith Talent is possibly the vilest of Amis’ early bad guys. The sinister Johnny of Dead Babies is a psychotic posing as an aristocrat, and the fat film mogul of Money, John Self, is possibly the drunkest anti-hero in English literary history outside of Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, but they lack the sheer moral vacuum of Amis’s – or, rather, Young’s – criminal, dart-playing satyromaniac and serial rapist. Dressed in pimp’s clothes and speaking in “miserable stringer’s clichés”, Talent is a moral monster, and sets the almost cartoonish scene for London Fields. This is unreservedly not a realist novel, although it carries a taint of the real which is now becoming relevant, and London Fields is worth reading once more in this terrible new century, new millennium.

Murderee Nicola Six is the classic Madonna/whore double act, but instead of having to alternate the roles with the same man, she gets to fool two. When she discovers Young is novelizing her plight, her only concern is that he might make her look ridiculous. In death, she wants to outlive other women, at least in literature.

Guy Clinch is the foil, “the poor foal.” Leading him on sexually by preying on his dreamy romanticism (and his money, for her final project), Nicola spins a yarn that channels money from Guy to her to Keith Talent, to save him from loan sharks who wish to break his darting finger (“What happened to starting with a bloke’s family?” Keith laments). Keith, you see, will be Nicola’s murderer. It’s all been arranged.

Amis plays fast and loose with artistic license. When Nicola tells Guy a lie about trying to locate a Burmese girl and her son (who she says she befriended at an entirely fictional convent), knowing he has the money and contacts to look for these non-existent characters, she tells him the girl is called En Lah Gai, but Nicola only ever called her “Enola Gay” and her little boy simply “Little Boy”. This is a risk Nicola often takes with her death trip, and although Guy does not recognize these grimly famous names, it is outrageous to suggest that none of the many consular contacts Guy speaks to would have made the connection with the name of the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima – Enola Gay (named for the pilot’s mother) – and the nickname for the bomb, Little Boy.

So, the four characters circle one another. The pub where it all begins is called The Black Cross, and Young notes that a cross has four points, not three, and he is inextricably involved in more than just an authorial sense. Is he the anthropologist who influences the tribe he studies, Young asks, the Heisenbergian observer who interacts with the system he observes?

But there is a fifth character present throughout London Fields: the crisis. Young broods as he arrives in London: “Nobody in their right mind wants to come to London right now. They’re afraid the crisis is going to reach a conclusion, and everything is going to fall into chaos.”

The crisis is hinted at obliquely throughout the novel, and its entropic progress shadows the journey into chaos – and death – of its four main characters. The crisis is partly geopolitical, partly climatic. “Spasm war” and “pulse war” are taking place in obscure regions of the globe, while that same globe is thrashed by extreme weather so that “Meteorologists were the new war-correspondents.” Nicola herself foresaw the crisis: “On television at the age of four she saw the warnings, and the circles of concentric devastation, with London like a bull’s-eye in the centre of the board. She knew that would happen, too. It was just a matter of time.”

The darting metaphor is the controlling one in London Fields, which uses as its spine the progress of Keith Talent in a darts competition that would gain him entrance to his Shangri-La; Television. After Young has been introduced to Keith, Guy, and Nicola – who lives above him – he sees her the next day dumping books into a wastepaper pin. He retrieves Nicola’s diaries, learns of her plan for willing auto-destruction, confronts her, and a necrophiliac deal is struck between two people dying for different reasons. “Race you to the finish,” quips Nicola. “We are all of us in some kind of pain,” Young says.

Amis is not a misanthrope, rather he seems to have grown weary of people:

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they’re feeling and how they’re going down.

As the book hurtles to its bloody dénouement, there is neither a redeeming quality to be found in any of the characters (except perhaps the dying Young) and certainly no redemption in sight. Young tells Nicola to give it up, to try Plan B, try living instead of dying. But, as he notes, “You can’t stop people once they start creating.”

This is a decadent novel, in the original sense of the word. We associate the word with Huysman’s Against Nature, say, or Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but “decadence” was originally a musical term, describing the jarring of notes that should not be played together. This description suits London Fields. Before I re-read the novel for the first time in two decades, I watched 2019’s film version. Expecting to be sneeringly disappointed, I thought it a reasonable job of the author I grew up reading. The book is a cross-pollination of sub-plots that constellate around Nicola’s willed and violent demise, and the script was admirably condensed from a longish novel, doubtless because Amis himself was the co-writer of the screenplay. Billy Bob Thornton plays Samson Young, while Amber Heard plays Nicola, who says of potential actresses who might play her should Young’s novel of her murder ever be filmed, “They all want to be the bitch in the book.”

Heard was involved in a recent, very public, and rather disgusting legal dispute with her ex, Johnny Depp, and the actor is also in London Fields as dart-player and loan shark Chick Purchase He is rather good, as well as being an obvious Anglophile. Just as he modelled his speech patterns and voice on Keith Richards for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, here he mimics Bowie. Amis himself makes a cameo appearance as Purchase’s manager, Julian Neat.

London Fields would be unpublishable today. Publishers all have “sensitivity readers” now, who go through manuscripts for racial quotas, sympathetic roles for blacks – yes, and doubtless plenty of white undesirables. Every black in London Fields is a pimp, a thief, a drug-user, or all three. It’s interesting that, in the novel, Amis (or Samson Young) mentions that Nicola’s skin is “brown” about a dozen times, and she is also referred to twice as a “dark bitch”. Amber Heard looks pretty much Scandinavian (with a touch of Scarlett Johansson in her cheekbones), and I suspect the producers had a reluctance to cast a black – or even half-caste – woman as a bad girl, a really bad girl.

When Amis had children, he mellowed, and his writing became more introverted. Novelistically, for me, London Fields was his zenith. The overlong The Information rehashed the dueling writers sub-plot of London Fields, The Pregnant Widow was a hollowed-out version of his earlier, cackling, scabrous style, and Yellow Dog was almost unreadable. Lionel Asbo took a slightly different take on the English yobbery which always fascinated Amis, Night-Train was an experimental noir thriller that worked quite well, and Time’s Arrow (which didn’t) was a Holocaust novel in which time flowed backwards.

Like Dickens, Amis was a great novelistic observer of London, although from a somewhat different angle. The amount of dog-crap on the pavements, the decline of the English pigeon, the conversion of telephone-boxes into a cross between an advertising board for prostitutes and a urinal; the streets of Amis’ London “don’t seem readable”. What would he make of them now? But the situation of London Fields, less than a decade before the Blairite revolution would set the wheels turning that would take us here, makes Amis’ feel for what is about to happen to England somewhere between a prophecy and a fever-dream:

Somewhere else in More Die of Heartbreak Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the ‘real modern action’. Everywhere else is ‘convulsed’ in some earlier stage of development. That’s true. But England feels like the forefront of something, the elegiac side of it, perhaps.

England certainly feels elegiac now. Perhaps London Fields’ time has come round again.