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Originally Posted by lastcardcharlie
I have at last gotten around to reading London Fields, by Martin Amis, and I think I'm going to finish it. It's quite a funny comedy. Hackney Downs, London Fields, Cambridge Heath, Bethnal Green... the train journey into London from childhood, more dangerously and mystically East End each stop. First published in 1989, I had always assumed it was deeply representative of the 1980s, the decade of mass realization that people will pay a lot of money for somewhere to live; the title indicating the ensuing gentrification. But the relation with that hateful decade seems incidental, and it could almost have been written last year.
Martin Amis seems to polarize readers' responses. Nearly ten years ago I posted about my reading experience of this book (the first and still the only of Amis's books I've read):
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I really find the Brit classism and condescension that Amis so loves get my hackles up. All that stuff about what a pathetic worm the affluent Guy Clinch is, how easily he's taken advantage of by his self-indulgent wife and victimized by the scuzzy Keith Talent and Nicola Six (Ah, those last names!), how unremittingly awful his monstrous (unbelievably so) brat of a baby is, etc. It just feels like cheap shots taken by an author who probably doesn't like anybody very much. (It's my first venture into the younger Amis's fiction so if I'm wrong to think that's typical let me know and tell me what I should try next.)
Subsequently I read a thoughtful essay by the Japanese critic, Wendy Jones Nakanishi, who observes: “As the journalist Tim Adams observed in 1997, in an interview with Amis, although Amis exhibits 'more pure writing talent than the current Booker short-list combined, his books lack real emotional bite; we do not care what happens in them' While we admire the novels' ingenuity of construction, we fail to be moved by them. Their self-conscious brilliance ultimately proves to be oddly repellent: it dazzles but doesn't attract.” About the names, she writes:
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Even the names Amis gives to many of his characters illustrate a kind of contempt for the old realism. … Such names as Nicola's are known as 'cratylic': they advertise a property that is fixed, whether terrible or ludicrous. A character thus named must act out a characteristic, which is his inescapable identity (31). … Although this technique has been used by western authors for hundreds of years, in Amis's case, it seems to stem from a decision to rob his characters of dignity, of any claim to the possession of an identity independent of authorial intent.
The novel centres on a “death of love” thematics, with Nicola’s conduct (cynical creator of love dramas and a constant tease: “‘I am a male fantasy figure’”, p. 260) and her death figuring as a heavy symbol of that—and more generally about entropy and the degeneration of the social and natural worlds. See particularly, the passage in the middle of the novel (with its allusion to Amis’s earlier, and some think most successful, fiction):
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Everything is winding down, me this, mother earth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. … Who stitched us up with all these design flaws? Entropy, time’s arrow—ravenous disorder. (139).
I think Amis errs in a way that Zadie Smith alludes to: 'There is no bigger crime in the English comic novel than thinking you are right.'
