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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780679730347
ISBN number: 0679730346
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: April 03, 1991
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: April 03, 1991
Sale Popularity Level: 172482
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
In this wildly ambitious and funny novel, one of England's brilliant young writers relates two murders in the making. The very first is the self-orchestrated extinction of Nicola Six. The second is the murder of the Earth itself, whose fate seems intricately bound up with Nicola's.
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Rated by buyers 
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You'll have to trust me when I say I'm not ordinarily one for dramatic gestures, but I threw my copy of London Fields in the trash the moment I finished it. I read to its tortured, labored "surprise" ending because I like to give all books a fair shake. I threw it away because it would be embarrassing to have it share a shelf with Pale Fire.
I am thrown into a grey mood at the state of modern literature. Does postmodernism really excuse flat stock characters, unfunny comedy, and plot that isn't contrived so much as forced at gunpoint (or with a cartool, if you like)? It seems having a collection of themes and tropes is enough so that all the details of setting, characterization and narrative are inconsequential--prop them up in cardboard, they are not the principles. What exactly is meant to be satirized here? I see a collection of characters half-formed, the better to poke tedious fun at, ominous rumblings about the Crisis, millennial angst and the State of the World that manage to remain miraculously vague and incoherent despite ostensibly being the backdrop for all these conveniently literary events.
I may not be Michiko Kakutani of the NYT book review (who also recommended Zadie Smith - this being strike two against her), but I know when a writer has more style and talent than heart, wit, insight, or whatever general expansiveness of spirit is required to make great literature.
Several reviewers commented that this is the most challenging of Amis' works. For some authors this would present a serious concern for bad very first impressions. I have not yet decrypted Finnegans Wake and don't know that I ever will. Had I started on Finnegan's Wake, it would have been the beginning and end of Joyce for me. But I started Nabokov on Ada, and became his devoted reader forever. In Amis' case, It feels lucky to have started with the best and most challenging of his works, because that means the rest of his oeuvre can be safely missed.
Rated by buyers 
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Strange book. There are many characters I find memorable and many quotable lines, but ultimately I didn't get it. It did remind of Pale Fire, that's true. I liked Lucky Jim.
Rated by buyers -
I enjoyed this novel. I stayed up late reading it over six nights. Yet, when the structure of the story began in the last sections to erode, and when the climactic fireworks, on a variety of levels, that Amis had taken such glee in arranging failed to spark as I'd hoped, I felt let down. Much of the novel's capable of five stars. I had just read Nabokov's "Ada" & "Bend Sinister" (also reviewed by me), so I was curious to discover how an author considered an heir to such narrative pyrotechnics would fare.
Amis appears to strain to get into the head of his louche character, Keith. I sense that the author's milieu's closer to hapless Guy, and perhaps Amis had to overcompensate. As others have remarked, it's as surprising to us as to Nicola when Guy fails to catch the atomic references early on, and after his Oxford degree! Also, the level of moronic panting that Guy's reduced to in his admittingly entertaining pursuit of Nicola does strain credulity as well as his trousers.
Still, there's so much that keeps you reading. You learn a lot about darts, erroneous or factual. Baby Marmaduke's reign of nursery tyranny continues to delight Amis as he ups the infant's cruelty, and this gets a poignant (not a common sentiment in this heartless saga) balance in the cries of little baby Kim-- these moments turn heartbreaking, if ultimately unresolved off-stage, to my confusion. There's also confusion in the apocalyptic set-piece. "The Crisis" of a lower and nearer sun fails to end after the wonderfully evoked eclipse on "Horrorday," and I was never quite clear about what the American president's wife and the geopolitics and the economic stagnation all added up to. Not to mention who Nicola represented: there's hints scattered but these never cohere.
Similarly, Samson Young's character never gains the clarity of the main three characters which he purportedly's writing about; his own failed romance with Missy and the failed pregnancy fizzle and you're never quite sure what occurred the six days he was or was not overseas while Mark Asprey's back in the London flat. Nicola, of course, adds mystery at every level, and above all, despite the novel's flaws, her endless tease of not only Keith and Guy (the Keats scene's superbly demented) makes her unforgettable. I get the sense that Amis created a character larger than the novel itself, which considering the heft and scope of this warped Waugh- meets- Nabokov epic remains quite a feat, for all its inevitable and unfortunate consequences for the novel.
As Sam admits late on: there go my "unities." Amis may have been too clever in outwitting himself, like Guy playing chess with his computer, into a narrative corner he could not escape. It's an unresolved mess, but a witty panorama of a future (already in our past, pre-Internet and pre-cellphones) that two decades ago, with its vague terrors on a global level and the environmental decay and personal fatigue appears to be inching ever closer.
Rated by buyers 
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A mistress of seduction, having `come to the end of men' and a belief in the possibility of love, seeks her own murder--and sets about ruining the lives of two very different men in order to bring it about. The narrator of the novel--a self-described failure at art and love--is terminally ill and now quickly failing at life, too; he's set himself the task of chronicling the rather ignoble efforts of Nicola Six and her pyrrhic dual seduction. The proceedings are set against an ominously looming worldwide crisis of nuclear and climactic proportions.
That, in maybe an eggshell, is the plot of *London Fields.* A nice enough hook, but as in any Amis novel, it's the execution that has you swallow the line and sinker, too. No one writes like Martin Amis. No one. Pity, too. It's poetry, in great parts, his style--an epic metropolitan voice as if Homer had been reborn in London with a wicked sense of humor, both castle and gutter, and a penchant for writing about deadbeats, sex-obsessed middle-aged guys, and a world gargling down the toilet-tube.
How even a sub-intelligent reader can possibly run his eyeballs over this novel and see in it only cynicism, nastiness, disgust, and mocking hatred is beyond comprehension. Are they paying attention to what Amis has actually written right there on the page in grey and white--or only what has been written *about* him?
*London Fields,* like much of Amis' work is a deeply-felt and elegiac novel that is actually quite heartbreaking in its inimitable way. Rude, often crude, scalding and scornful, relentlessly, unrepentantly bleak--yes, that's all true, thank God, but Amis' style...and what a style!...is a corrosive that strips away all self-serving illusion and sentimentality to expose the skeleton of the last honest humanism still possible.
Here is Amis on one of his characters in *London Fields*:
`In the book, she stood for something. In the flesh, she was pointless: a complete waste of time. Or not quite. In the flesh, she broke your heart, as all human beings do. I watched her, an older man, failed in art and love. Fat ankles. Dear flesh.'
A waste of time that breaks your heart. In a sense, that sums up Amis' view on life, love, history, and existence itself as presented in *London Fields.* But the vitriolic comedy and famous disgust that Amis directs towards and lavishes upon everyone and everything is, in fact, the lament of the idealist who sees how very very far short human beings fall from anything even a kissing cousin of humanity.
His exaggerated characters, yes, arguably caricatures, are nevertheless uncomfortably familiar and that's precisely what makes their misdeeds and misadventures so uncomfortably compelling--and, I suspect, arouses so much wrath in those who consider the truth to be bad taste. These are, indeed, people we `know,' and sometimes even love; worse still, if we could stop the automatic monkey finger-pointing for five minutes, we realize these people are *us.*
Five stars, if that's all I can give it. *London Fields* deserves at the very least a small constellation of them.
Rated by buyers -
Martin Amis' long (perhaps long-winded) novel about a femme fatale-psychic who is predisposed to being murdered as she entraps Keith Talent, a brutish dart player, and Guy Clinch, a struggling writer into her web of seduction and deceit. Amis pads this thin story with typically entertaining and satisfying scenarios that he seems to have a knack for, but the novel just isn't nearly as interesting as his Information or Money. At some point during the project, Amis lost touch with the original force of his conception, and you can tell that the rest of the material is simply a weak endeavor to complete the aborted project. Not a bad read, but probably too much of a commitment for the quality, even among fans of Amis' usually interesting prose.
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