A Post-Mod Scheherazade In a Funky, Fearful London
By
Michiko Kakutani
Books of The Times
February 13,
1990
London Fields
By Martin Amis
470 pages.
Harmony Books. $19.95.
At the very beginning of Martin Amis's new novel, his narrator declares,
''this is a true story,'' ''a murder story,'' ''a love story.'' This narrator -
Samson Young by name - isn't a terribly reliable (or ethical) fellow, but on
this point, at least, he's telling the truth. If one were to characterize
''London Fields'' further, one might add that it's a comic murder mystery, an
apocalyptic satire, a scatological meditation on love and death and nuclear
winter - ''Bonfire of the Vanities'' crossed with ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' as
narrated by Al Goldstein and Jonathan Swift.
Set in the year 1999, the novel takes place in a London that looks like
one of Dickens's slums fast-forwarded into the futuristic movie world of
''Blade Runner.'' ''Shops and flats jostled fascinatedly over the street like a
crowd round a bearpit, with slot-game parlours, disastrous beaneries, soup
queues, army hostels, with life set out on barrows, on pingpong tables, on
decapitated Protakabins.'' It seems to rain all the time here, and the menacing
weather has recently become international news - people are dying of bizarre
diseases, and the television pundits, who talk continually of ''the Crisis,''
predict some sort of dreadful event for the night of Nov. 5.
Mr. Amis's heroine, Nicola Six, seems the perfect avatar of this
death-obsessed world - she even calls her inner self, her alter ego, Enola Gay,
after the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Like the sinister Slothrop
in ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' Nicola mixes sex with destruction. Unable to love,
she has devoted her life to seduction. She has ''pauperized gigolos,'' ''spayed
studs,'' ''hospitalized heartbreakers''; and now, with a grisly premonition of
her own murder (she will be forced into a car and beaten to death with a blunt
instrument), she has mapped out an elaborate plot that will turn her vision
into a self-fulfilling prophecy - and, at the same time, pre-emptively punish
her would-be killer.
Nicola sees herself as both a world-class seductress and a kind of
Scheherazade, and she sets up her murder plot with the same care a storyteller
might lavish on a novel. The first man she entices into her spider's web of
deception is the narrator, Samson Young, who is hoping to turn her story into a
best-selling novel of his own. The second is Guy Clinch, a rich upper-class
dolt, who seems to have stepped out of an Evelyn Waugh novel into a menacing
social netherworld he will never understand. The third is Keith Talent, a
sex-crazed, emotionally robotic con man, who, we are repeatedly told, is
''modern, modern, modern.'' When he isn't beating up his wife or cheating
tourists out of money, Keith can be found at a filthy pub named the Black
Cross, where he plays darts and boasts noisily of his many seductions.
With both Guy and Keith, Nicola plays the tease. She lures Keith into
her confidence by giving him sex videos and large sums of money (stolen from
Guy). Even more outrageous is her ability to present herself to the gullible
Guy as a shy and inexperienced virgin: she promises him love and romance, and
eventually, sexual fulfillment.
Nicola's manipulations, rendered in graphic detail, take up almost the
entire novel, and they give Mr. Amis a chance to indulge in the sort of
unwholesome (and often comic) descriptions that readers of ''The Rachel
Papers,'' ''Dead Babies'' and ''Money'' have come to expect. There are extended
riffs about pornography, French kissing, women's underwear, masturbation,
sodomy and toilets. Yet if this lurid subject matter has contributed to the
book's best-seller status in England, it also belies the novel's
self-consciously literary qualities, its crafty use of all the latest
post-modern hardware.
Whereas many of the unsavory passages in Mr. Amis's previous books
seemed like gratuitous displays of adolescent voyeurism, the ones in ''London
Fields'' work to underscore the novel's overall theme - its depiction of a
decadent and terminally ill world, in which mindless coupling has replaced love
and passion, in which violence and greed have eclipsed decency and genuine
human emotion, in which class politics have become all-out war. Indeed, Mr.
Amis's faintly futuristic England stands light years away from the polite,
genteel worlds depicted by traditional British fiction; it bears more of a
resemblance to the comic-book ''culture of death'' found in the work of Thomas
Pynchon, the apocalyptic cityscapes found in the novels of Salman Rushdie.
In terms of language, too, Mr. Amis has parted company with many of his
countrymen, exchanging the delicately wrought, finely observed prose of the
old-fashioned English novel for the slangy, hyperventilated syllables of the
streets. By turns lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic, his narrative
works on the reader's ear, forcing one to share the characters' disparate
experiences through the very rhythms of their speech, the ebb and flow of their
language.
Some of Mr. Amis's literary pranks (like having his narrator live in a
borrowed flat that belongs to another writer who shares his own initials, M. A)
seem gratuitously clever, and his efforts to discuss the consequences of an
impending nuclear and environmental disaster can result in passages of awkward
sentimentality. For instance: ''Now they're briefer still, but animals have always
lived brief lives. What we take from animals, what we take from our pets
(without trying, and without asking), is a lesson about death: an overview of
the shorter span.''
All in all, though, the flaws in ''London Fields'' are ones of excess
and ambition rather than caution or lack of imagination. This is a large and
provocative novel.
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