What a fun fucking book. I blew off everything today (and, well, most of the week) just to read this book, because it was that fucking fun. God, I loved this book. I just read it nonstop, and when the recurring irritation that is my life did tear me away, I kept thinking about what I'd read, and just ached to go back to read it some more.... I went at this book hard, folks, and now that I'm finished, I feel like I barely can walk across the room. Maybe this qualifies as Too Much Information, but I think reading London Fields might have given me a urinary tract infection.Okay, so I've never read anything by Martin Amis, probably for the same reasons most of us haven't: yeah, remember that guy you knew who liked Martin Amis so much? Yeah. Ughhhh.... yeah, he was disgusting, really repulsive, I know. That arrogant prick. I know, I know.... Well, Martin Amis is that guy, you definitely can tell by his author photo. Last night I was out with friends and trying to convince them to give this book a shot. They both did sound interested, despite misgivings ("I always associate him with this guy I knew in high school, ugh...") until the book came out and got passed around, and unfortunately opened to the author photo. "Sick," Meg said, shuddering, and shoved the book back into my hands. "Sorry," April murmured, shaking her head. "Sorry, but no. Ugh. Look at that guy."That guy: Martin Amis. Martin Amis: that guy.So yeah, and it turns out London Fields is also that guy. You know the guy I mean, that close friend of yours -- every time you meet for dinner he shows up forty-five minutes late, he invariably, embarrassingly, and with appalling success hits on the waitress, and after dinner at drinks he smokes all your cigarettes and keeps interrupting you, and somehow runs out of cash so you have to buy the drinks, even though he makes like six times more money than you ever will. When you hang out London Fields regales you with stories about his job in advertising, about the child idiot label whores he's currently dating; he's constantly demonstrating his immense cleverness, and often uses words you have sneak off to look up on your iphone OED. Many of his screamingly hilarious anecdotes are about going to nightclubs or whorehouses with his old friends from Princeton. There are always some difficult moments on these evenings with London Fields: the cringe-inducing narcissism, that inevitable rape joke. London Fields is not a guy you'd ever bring around most of your other friends, especially the hot female ones, or the highly moral ones who'd stop talking to you for consorting with someone so clearly distasteful and, they'd be sure, purely evil to boot.But you love this guy. You really do. Honestly you consider him one of your greatest friends. London Fields isn't someone you'd call for comfort during a 4am crisis, and you wouldn't talk about politics with him, or probably even about books, even though you both read. You and London Fields talk about Love, and about Sex and Death. You talk about The World. You talk just to Talk. You love London Fields even though he's an asshole -- you love London Fields, maybe, because he's an asshole, because secretly, deep down, you're an asshole too. LF's sort of a bad friend, even, you know, sort of a bad guy. He's That Guy, but you love him. Because he's hilarious. He's made a Manhattan spray out your nose before -- it hurt -- the things that he says are so hysterical. Plus, even if he's always getting up and running out to the bathroom and therefore missing vast and crucial sections of the movie that's Reality, on certain vital points LF is absolutely dead on. And, let's be honest here, he's got amazing style. He's got style like crazy, and sometimes that's all you care about. And maybe most nights you get dinner with respectable people, with other social workers and teachers, who are honest and kind. But that shit can get boring, and boring's what you can't stand. There are better books out there than your friend London Fields. There are libraries full of them. But there are not many books that are this much fucking fun.London Fields is a self-conscious fin de millénaire novel that takes place in London as the world seems to be ending. The story is a sort of inverted murder mystery following the intersection of four central characters: Nicola Six, sexed-out trainwreck femme fatale rushed direct via SST from Central Casting; psychopathic pre-chav-era dart hooligan and anti-villain Keith Talent; moneyed nothingburger father and husband Guy Clinch; and Samson Young, an ailing, unsuccessful writer from New York who's done an apartment swap and who narrates the action as everything unfolds. The plot, such as it is, is mostly stupid, and really sort of beside the point. Who cares? Reading this book made me realize something, which is that the world is really ending; it's ending all the time, all around us, just like in the book! I do appreciate fiction that helps me figure out something useful like that, but really what I appreciate is being entertained. Despite some obvious flaws, this book is FUN. To me it was a page turner, and would be perfect reading for a transatlantic flight! This is the first book I've read by Martin Amis, and I've heard that his stuff varies a lot, but based on this one I think of him as a sort of Sidney Sheldon figure for people who are pretty pretentious. If that sounds good to you, I would say give it a go!Well, I might say that. But maybe I shouldn't. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who's easily offended. And by "easily offended" I mean offended by sex, sexism, classism, violence, rape, child abuse, predictable and often lame plotting, stereotypes, sociopathy, gross humor, or pretty much anything else. There are jokes in here about dog- and babyfucking, for example, so if you don't find that sort of thing hilarious, you might stay away. If you're not easily offended, though, and not too snobby, then you might love this book. It really was a lot more fun than I'd expected it to be -- I'd thought MA was better known for being "smart" than "fun," but his priorities seemed the opposite. And like all good fun, or funniness, it was very dark. It was dark and did get at things that are Serious Concerns, but it did it right, not all ponderous, truly did stay a blast. Every few pages there was a line that would actually make me emit a little scream of laughter, or else get dangerously depressed about not being able to come up with shit like that with my own feeble brain. A book isn't good if it doesn't make you insanely jealous of its author at least part of the time. There was stuff in here that made me want to hunt down Martin Amis and pry out portions of his brain with a screwdriver, for future grafting to my own somewhat sludgier, less linguistically and comically flexible organ.I'd hang out with Martin again, if I ever find myself in a certain mood. He's not the kind of guy you want to spend every waking moment with, but there are certain times when you're really glad you know someone like him. Please don't get me wrong: there was some dumb shit in this book, but I'm not going to criticize it, because the thing was that I just didn't care. The dumb shit didn't get in the way of my enjoying the book immensely. So Martin can come on over, interrupt me, show off his vocabulary, smoke all my cigarettes, and tell me about the new 20-year-old girlfriend and her $600 shoes; I'd be happy to have him, as long as no one else is around.Recommended! (With caveats, like all responsible recommendations.)
My first Amis. Didn't disappoint! I'm not sure it pulled off its staggering ambitions but it's very easy to enjoy, if you enjoy elaborately witty studies of human perversity and pain.Character-driven is a term you often hear applied to fiction. It applies here more than usual, and in a different sense. The characters are stock types that Amis has elevated to the realm of literary internality without really changing their status as stock types. They're familiar to anyone familiar with crime stories, or with noir, though London Fields is neither, and only pretends to be the former. Ever see Lang's Scarlet Street? You had Joan Bennett as the femme fatale, working with violent lowlife Dan Duryea to fleece poor schmuck Edward G. Robinson out of some cash. In this novel we have Nicola Six (her name a cognate of the guitarist for Motley Crue -- why?) as the femme, working her inscrutably intricate schemes around the lowlife Keith Talent and the schmuck Guy Clinch -- the fall guy. But it's not about cash (though some of that does change hands), and most of the time it doesn't even seem to be about murder, despite Nicola's introduction as "the murderee." There's also a pomo unreliable narrator in the mix.Why are these people together in one book? Maybe they each represent a different kind of artist. Samson Young, the narrator, is your fraudulent hack. Incapable of invention himself, he attaches himself to a real-life narrative he stumbles upon and lets the book write itself. On the other hand, he's also ostensibly responsible for all of the book's marvelous prose, so at least the formal aspect of his artistry is very legit. He is the analogue to Dr. Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire, this book's clear antecedent. Kinbote was nuts, but as a writer he was a genius, because he was Nabokov. Nicola Six is the artist so dedicated to her life's work that she is literally willing -- hoping, even -- to die for it. Her art is the orchestration of her own demise; she was once an actress, and now plays her greatest role. Creativity as suicide. Keith Talent -- the book's most vivid, fascinating creation -- is the artist without self-consciousness. The purity of working-class poetry innit. Yeah cheers. But his poetry isn't poetry, it's darts. Keith devotes himself to darts with a fervor and clarity of purpose that not even Nicola can match. Her motivations are muddled and complex, while Keith's are simple and unadulterated to the point of absurdity. You can't spell darts without art. That leaves Guy Clinch, too banal and passive to be an artist himself (though he tries to dabble in fiction, which Sam informs us is crap), but perfectly suited to be the lump of clay cruelly molded by the others. In this book all art depends upon the exploitation or subjugation of someone else, and Guy is at the bottom of that food chain.Have I made this book sound like a heady chore, or a schematic bore? It's not. It's awesome. It's really fun to read. We circle these characters as they circle each other, first in alternating chapters, then with commingled perspectives as their lives become more entangled. They do things that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes pathetic, sometimes mystifying. At a certain point the criminal plot machinations that brought these people together cease to matter, and it becomes a simpler novel about three variously unhappy persons mucking about in each others' lives; it is the world's most finely wrought episode of Three's Company. Sam the narrator lurks in the background, offering a director's commentary track on each chapter. On the margins there is some vaguely sci-fi business about the end of the millennium (the book came out in 1989) and/or the end of the world. It's not clear what this has to do with the principal plot, other than that eschatology was on Amis' mind as he was writing. And that mindset, in turn, informs his depiction of the characters and their cultural context.There's more to say, but I'm sapped. This is a long book. Life is represented with both starkly direct harshness and bafflingly circuitous style. During the first half I was in love, but I grew impatient as Amis dragged out his drain-circling. The ending does not quite hit that Mamet bullseye of "both surprising and inevitable" -- it's not really entirely surprising, if you've been theorizing even a little bit -- but it is certainly worthy of thought and discussion. There are the mind-teasing layers one would expect of a novel influenced by Pale Fire. There's a lot of sex talk, though relatively little actual sex. There are some faux-profound statements that may or may not mean anything. There's some brilliant writing, some memorable scenes, and some stuff you'll want to skim. Just don't disrespect the darts. You don't never show no disrespect for the darts.
What do You think about London Fields (2015)?
Author has a great knowledge of vocabulary. Some characters are a bit too slimy for me to want to spend 470( sometimes dense) pages with. Ex: Keith Talent steals from gullible old women, ingnores/ cheats on his wife with one of his numerous girlfriends(one of which is a 16 year old prostitute: managed by her mother), gets drunk all the day long. Amis has his moments of insight and there are some moving and excitable passages but just as often he overplays his hand with excessively flowery and sensitive passages that don't all make sense to a simple reader like myself. Also, the baby( marmaduke) is playfully portrayed as a little "hell raiser " but as time goes on this character is static and repetitive an loses his charm and Amis tries too hard to make him funny. Having said that , Amis is an authors author with his amazing range of vocabulary, although this can make the read turbulent because I am constantly having to look up words and figure out which sense of the definitions are used.
—Max
Composição da narrativa:tTestosterona - t80%Progesterona - 20%Interesse despertado pela leitura:tAborrecimentot - 70%Entusiasmo – 30%Expressões visíveis durante o processo:tAtenção – 70%Dispersão – 30%Sons audíveis enquanto a sujeita olhava o livro: tBocejot- 90%Riso – 10%Empatia com as personagens:tBébé Marmaduke – 99%Restantes – 1%Desistênca a cerca de 60% do final.tNota: Marmaduke é um super bébé que morde, arranca olhos e bate, forte e feio, em todos que se aproximam. Um delírio!
—Teresa
It's a Martin Amis book. You will feel kind of defiled and filthy after reading it, but also sharper and challenged. I read this book aloud to my girl years back, and for months afterward we would both horse around and try to talk like Keith Talent. He really is one of the most memorable in a long line of Amis scumbags: Rather dangerous, but the book sort of builds him up, deflates him and makes him seem rather pathetic, though not as much so as Money's John Self, for example.The scenario here is very, very strange. The "femme fatale" is an actress who plays with these two fellows: Keith, the conn artist, scammer and thug, and Guy Clinch, his apparent opposite who lives in comfort in one of the city's best neighbourhood, has a fine home, a son, and a bullshit marriage. She does it all for the sake of theatre, but she wants something. Specifically, she wants to be murdered in a most dramatic and potent way. I was never too clear on why she wanted this, but she's sort of the "mysterious other" that drives the book on; her motives are obscure and cloudy and I'm not sure Amis himself would be able to give you a straight answer.There's a weird digression about sodomy part way through that had me shaking my head and thinking, "tut, Martin, you don't really believe this shit, do you?" But then, "ah, I noticed you put this in your book....so what do you really believe?" is probably the absolute worst question you could ever pose to an author, and as the whole story is told in the first person by a visiting writer who is an unwitting part of Nicola Six's games, I wouldn't really consider his word as a stand-in for Amis's. Still, the Samson Young narrator character seems to have a number of Amis's odd little obsessions. Why does it always come back to nukes, with Amis? He seems to like to set his stories at the edge of some great apocalyptic event, but he never quite tells you what this tension is all for, or what this event really means. And what's the deal with the demonic baby?SO yes, you can easily breeze through this book despite all its subtleties, and I wouldn't recommend this. It's probably the most abstract Amis narrative I've come across yet, despite its apparently straightforward (if distinctly odd) plot. The ending is the sort of thing you might miss if you blink too much. There are scenes and strange asides and digressions that seem a little inexplicable, but made more sense to me upon second reading. The book's also hilarious in a number of ways, though you may find its humour to be somewhat in poor taste if you are of a sensitive disposition. I loved Keith Talent probably more than I should have, and I'm sure this would make Martin A. grin with evil mirth. And yes, it really is all about clinicism..."onna darts!"
—Jean-marcel
