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London Fields

Martin Amis

3.72 · Rating details · 10,635 ratings · 741 reviews

London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?

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Paperback, 526 pages

Published February 2003 by Vintage (first published 1989)

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· 10,635 ratings · 741 reviews

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Sep 05, 2014 Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing

Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he is telling, a story involving a host of memorable and very human characters, not to mention a couple of super-human characters: an Incredible Hulk-like toddler and one doozy of a MAN MAGNET, and, yes, indeed, that’s spelle ...more

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Aug 10, 2009 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: substance-related-disorders, love-and-other-indoor-sports, crazy-ladies, crime-and-punishment

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 ...more

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Aug 16, 2016 Lisa rated it really liked it

Shelves: monster-mash-of-a-mess, unforgettable, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die

Ha!

I did it.

I finished London Fields, after a week or so on a roller coaster, up and down, loving it, hating it, being annoyed, bored, laughing out loud, bored again. In the end, I actually caught myself crying as well, which was the last thing I expected, having worked up a genuine distaste for the book somewhere in the middle.

I don't think I have ever read a book that I could easily give either one star or five stars, and feel perfectly justified to do so. I rarely change my mind so completel ...more

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Nov 10, 2018 ☘Misericordia☘ ~ The Serendipity Aegis ~ ⚡ϟ⚡ϟ⚡⛈ ✺❂❤❣ rated it it was ok

Shelves: gloriously-bad

A mumbo-jumbo of words trying desperately to congeal into a plot. And failing at it, miserably. A case of when the book is way worse than the bad film. I have a feeling that some promiscuos dictionary had a love affair with the Holy Bible and a bunch of pop-sci lit and quite a bit of erotica and this is their collective offspring. It should come with a warning: Careful! Words hijacked this book!

The style is ridiculous. Pompous and sleep-inducing. An example of what I mean by this: there is a pie ...more

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May 02, 2013 Jeff rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: brit-lit

Back before Goodreads and the interwebz, most discussions of pop culture, for me, usually took place in bars. After work. Late. Half-sober. Some sample conversational starters/topics:

What was Marlon Brando’s best performance? Does it involve butter?

Why does Pon Farr take seven years? Does this mean the Vulcan’s don’t have porn?

Who was the greatest left handed pitcher of the seventies?

What do you mean there’s another version of Blade Runner?

How drunk is “Tom Waits drunk”?

Why can’t we meet women? ...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Paul Bryant rated it it was ok

Shelves: novels, abandoned

THE BRITISH CLASS SYSTEM

At the top there is the Monarchy and the aristocracy. They're all still there, no one has gone away. The 14th Duke of Banffshire and all the scurvy crew. The only good news is - they're not allowed to hunt foxes any more ! Yay - one and a half cheers for democracy! So that's the Upper Class.

Next step down is the complicated Middle Class which is divided into three :

Upper middle : these are your professions, of course. Judges, lawyers, bankers, etc. There was a radio inter ...more

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Jul 16, 2013 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: unicorn, mnemonic-devices, rain-man-reviews, world-of-insects

Many thanks to ⇨ this review⇦ for providing the inspiration!

Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh! Gosh!

Gosh.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

I haven’t read a book this good in really, *really* long time.

And we’re not talking about o ...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Warwick rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, london

London Fields is a book with a plot so pointless it made me angry, and a cast of blatant stereotypes. It's distinguished by some flourishes of wonderful writing, and the presence of one character who is one of my favourite creations of modern British fiction.

Initially, there is plenty to like. The narrator – a failed American writer on a house-swap in London – has an engaging line in self-doubt, a brooding sense of millennial disaster, and a neat turn of phrase. The traffic-clogged, grimy street ...more

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Nov 20, 2008 Manny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts

This book just has it all.

Um. That's not very specific. I suppose I'd better say what "it" is. Well... off the top of my head: an engaging femme fatale, an equally engaging anti-hero - Keith Talent is an asshole's asshole - a dangerous baby, psychic powers, explicit descriptions of sex and competitive darts (though not both at the same time), references to nuclear and climate-related apocalypses, witty and stylish writing. Pause for breath. I know I'm missing a bunch of things.

A plot? An endin ...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Maciek rated it really liked it

Shelves: own-in-paperback, owned-books, read-in-2012, reviewed

First published in 1989, London Fields is now often considered to be Martin Amis's magnum opus. The New York Times described it as a "virtuoso depiction of a wild and lustful society" and a "large book of comic and satirical invention", which succeeds as a "picaresque novel rich in its effects".The Guardian was a little less positive, and called the book "a cheat. A con-trick", writing that "from start to finish, all 470 pages of it, it's an elaborate tease." But the paper couldn't brush it off ...more

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Mar 12, 2014 Kemper rated it really liked it

Recommended to Kemper by: Anthony Vacca

Shelves: 2014, future-is-now, writers-writing, modern-lit, s-e-x, crime-mystery

”This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once they start. You can't stop people, once they start creating.

What a gift. ”This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once they start. You can't stop people, once they start creating.

What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic, and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?”

Samson Young is an American novelist whose career has failed because he doesn’t have the imagination to make anything up. After coming to London as part of an apartment swap with a far more successful writer, Sam witnesses Nicola Smith throwing away her diaries and recovers them. What he finds is the story of a woman who has the ability to foresee the future and has become a professional man-eater in order to willingly follow the path that will lead to her murder. In order to bring about her demise Nicola begins playing mind games with a mild-mannered upper-class gent Guy Clinch, and Keith Talent, a thuggish petty criminal with dreams of being a professional dart player. Sam sees an opportunity to write the book he always dreamed of by documenting the events leading up to Nicola’s death, and all of this takes place with the millennium approaching and the world seemingly on the brink of political and environmental catastrophe.

Nobody writes despicable people like Martin Amis…

This is only the third book of his I’ve read (Money and Lionel Asbo: State of England being the other two.) but one thing that jumps out at me about all three is that Amis has this knack of creating these violent brutes and then making them somehow entertaining. London Fields is a prime example of this with the creation of one of the most vicious creatures I’ve ever read in fiction: Marmaduke Clinch, Guy’s infant son.

Oh, did you think I was going to say it was Keith Talent?

As an unrepentant cheat, drunk and abusive spouse Keith certainly wouldn’t be winning any prizes as London’s best citizen, but compared to Marmaduke Clinch, he’s a choir boy. Marmaduke’s reign of terror includes physical assault, property damage, sexual harassment, psychological warfare and self-inflicted injuries. And he’s not even 1 year old yet. Amis describes it like this:

”Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn’t awake.”

But Marmaduke is just one dark joke being told in this story. As Amis works us through the lives and motives of Nicola, Guy and Keith as told by Sam writing the story and fretting about writing the story, the whole thing becomes a swirl of death and sex and creation and humor and schemes and secrets. There’s enough layers and themes here to keep a college campus full of English students writing essays for years so I’m not even going to try to figure out what it all means here. I’ll simply say that I was laughing for most of this book, but I noticed that my chuckles got more and more uneasy the closer I got to the end. ...more

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Feb 23, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, read-2020, reviews-4-stars, reviews, amis

Male and Female Readings

For a male reader, “London Fields" is, like "Lolita", a Nabokovian exercise in guilty pleasure.

Which, of course, begs the question of what it represents for a female reader, assuming there is a difference in the response of male and female readers (i.e., assuming that men and women read fiction [or at least this fiction] differently).

We (male readers?) can get something of an answer from the experience of “London Fields” at the 1989 Booker Awards:

“Maggie Gee an

...more

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Apr 22, 2011 Krok Zero rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: spring-2011

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 stori 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. ...more

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Sep 25, 2008 Jonathan rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Misanthropes

This incoherent tale oozes malignant intent and world weary cynicism. None of the main characters have any positive traits whatsoever. They are variously weak, selfish, greedy, naive, manipulative and violent. The story is punctuated by the self-conscious musings of a narrator who is both seperate from, and part of, the story. These interruptions become grating after a while and are superflous to the narrative.

Amis's representation of Keith Talent serves as a crude representation of the tabloid ...more

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Apr 04, 2010 MJ Nicholls rated it really liked it

Shelves: novels, sassysassenachs

A highly engaging novel from the Dean of Bloated, Ponderous, Semi-Comic Cerebral Wank.

Martin's novels are renowned for their "composite" qualities, i.e. he writes three separate books and mashes them together. London Fields is a "profound" murder mystery, a scathing satire on hack writers (no surprises there), and a "state of Britain" epic all at once.

The end result is as uneven, stylistically overindulgent and frustratingly dense as you could expect from Amis. But his characters are very entert ...more

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Jun 03, 2007 Michael Shilling rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

People often say Martin Amis in the brilliant guy at the party you avoid, but Amis actually can roll a great joint and cut a fine rail. Also he knows secrets about the host that you'd have never suspected. His breath is terrible, though, and he keeps trying to kiss you.

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Nov 18, 2017 Elaine rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2017

Quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. It may have had its moment but that moment was ages ago and now it is just an overlong dully but pretentiously written sexist piece of trash. Life is too short.

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Aug 12, 2007 R. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2007

Congratulations, little 470-page tome. You outbid Ada in the little push-pull contest I had going on all evening. It was either you or her. You won. I hope that you don't disappoint me. You won't disappoint me.

Your author is, according to the jacket copy, "a force unto himself".

I imagine your author looks in the mirror, flashes his teeth and nods, "I am a force unto myself!" before going about his day, drawling in American to his American wife, "I think I'd really like to hit America--no, no, ...more

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Mar 08, 2018 Ailsa rated it really liked it

'It's funny, isn't it', she said, 'that there's nothing more boring, in any kind of narrative, than someone vacillating over something you know they're going to do. I keep noticing it in the trash I watch and read. Will the spy come out of retirement for one last mission. Will the gangster heed his wife's warnings or go for the clinching bank job. It's a nightmare sitting through that stuff. It's dead, dead.'

London Fields is not dead. Unpredictable, it doesn't torture the reader with preamble an ...more

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Jul 19, 2019 WILLIAM2 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: signed, fiction, uk, 20-ce

Read 3 times.

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Apr 10, 2019 Jason Pettus rated it it was ok

Shelves: character-heavy, dark, hipster, postmodernism, subversive, classic, anti-villain

Martin Amis was recently in the news again, for a reason I now can't remember, and it made me think about how I knew absolutely nothing about this famed British author, despite him having popped up on the literary radar regularly for the last forty years. And so when I was at my neighborhood library the other day, and learned that none of my reserves had yet arrived, I used that as an opportunity to check out what is arguably Amis' most famous book, 1989's London Fields. Unfortunately, though, I Martin Amis was recently in the news again, for a reason I now can't remember, and it made me think about how I knew absolutely nothing about this famed British author, despite him having popped up on the literary radar regularly for the last forty years. And so when I was at my neighborhood library the other day, and learned that none of my reserves had yet arrived, I used that as an opportunity to check out what is arguably Amis' most famous book, 1989's London Fields. Unfortunately, though, I discovered that the book is just barely tolerable, not in the "this is objectively terrible and always has been" sense, but more in the sense of, "I can see why this was such a big hit in 1989, so too bad for Amis that this kind of storytelling has so profoundly fallen out of favor in the thirty years since." And that's because this fits exactly into the middle of the wheelhouse in that curious historical period that's perhaps best called, "Nerdy Generation X White Males Write Brutal Late-Postmodernism Noir Stories As A Way Of Legitimizing Their Misogyny And Racism," which started life with the early-'80s "Brat Pack" authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney and reached its apex with the mid-'90s scripts of Quentin Tarantino.

The simple objective fact is that London Fields is a relentlessly offensive novel, one in which an unapologetic serial child rapist serves as one of our main four protagonists, the action is centered around a dive bar filled with barely literate black men who are all wife-beating drug dealers who communicate in caveman pantomime, and the only female of the foursome is a manipulative self-hating shrew who loves anal sex and houses a suicidal deathwish, a Persian woman of color whose excessive body hair is sexually fetishizied by the three men who are each held in her thrall. Of course, if you were around in those years like me, you'll remember that Amis and others got away with this naked misanthropy by claiming that it's all a deliberately over-the-top fairytale, and that in the Age Of Irony we were living in, none of it was to be actually taken seriously by the audience (and that you were an uneducated Jesse Helms philistine if you did), which then turned Amis and the others into literary superstars, cool-as-fuck tough guys who dared to push the buttons of the staid, repressive Reagan/Thatcher-loving audience around them.

By the 2010s, though, we now recognize the truth, that artists like these are not tough-guy heroes but instead pasty, weaselly villains, whose violent anti-hero fairytales were not done as coolly detached comments on Postmodernist society, but rather as barely concealed rationalizations for their petty hatred of anything they can't control or dominate; and such men are no longer treated as award-winning millionaire celebrities, but rather as the dangerous incel losers who organize anonymous troll wars against writers of color who are more successful than them, and who tuck down their fedoras a little more as they enter the gay danceclub or black church or Muslim mosque with their automatic rifle in hand. Despite all this, I'm still giving London Fields 2 stars instead of 1, because it at least serves as an important historical document, a reminder of how easy it used to be for straight white males to spin-doctor their hatred so that they somehow looked like the hero for sharing it, and a reminder of why our current "woke" times was so necessary in the first place. But this overwritten, plotless mess is not worth your time anymore as just a general piece of commercial fiction to be read for pleasure, an unending slog that is all empty machismo bravado and no substance, and which trades on tawdry, distasteful shock as an unconvincing way to justify its existence. The shell game for these kinds of writers is now over, and we should all be extremely thankful for that, so do yourself a favor and leave this dreck back in the dustbins of history where it belongs. ...more

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Aug 26, 2011 William Thomas rated it did not like it

Martin Amis suffers from the same syndrome as his father. Kingsley Amis Syndrome. Also known as Ken Kesey Syndrome but not to be confused with Harper Lee Syndrome. A stellar first novel ala the Rachel Papers and then a steep decline into a babbling imbecile who more or less writes as a way to mentally masturbate and force you, the reader, to watch.

This book was little more than a bumbling, mumbling jumble of words. And not very many words, at that. Because within the first twenty pages he uses ...more

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Aug 16, 2009 Robin rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

Wow -- this was so not my thing. And it wasn't that I was offended. I was just not impressed. It had so much unrealized potential... no, that's not it. Some of the ideas, like some of the characterization and plot devices, could have developed in a more edited way in someone else's hands. But there was nothing unrealized about this book. He realized the hell out of it, and then some. That's the problem. Maybe it's that whole post-modern-you-get-to-know-everything-and-then-some kind of thing, but ...more

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Feb 28, 2015 Nicole rated it liked it

Shelves: dispo-bu-droit-lettres

Martin, Martin, Martin. I remember this from reading Money: you overstay your welcome, Martin.

I was right there with you for 300, 350 pages, really, even the weird sex stuff the femme fatale fantasy which strikes me as a bit more of the inside of your head than I want to see, the whole nine yards. I was good, I was prepared to cut you every kind of slack -- the cute author who's also our narrator thing, some pretty disgusting characters, the excess of Marmaduke, the coyness about the world situa ...more

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Apr 25, 2011 Jonfaith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Consider me dazzled, yet the very flurry of distorting mirrors and laser images reveal more about Mr. Amis and England than about The Novel (as it were) or The End -- in whatever eschatological capacity is extended to the present day punter. The figure of Keith Talent is amazingly realized, aside from the slurs, the belches and the nudges, there is something monstrously vivid in his haunts (both senses) and struggles. He may be Martin's Bloom.

Nicola Six's machinations were as uncomfortable for t ...more

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Dec 02, 2013 Max rated it liked it

Shelves: 2014

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 se ...more

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May 25, 2007 Eric rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Anyone who loves the craft

I loved this book and it is one of my top ten favorites of all time. The novel is sheer virtuousity, and what might suffer under the weight of showiness and pretense really works here because at the end of it all, it is so well written. And the book turns on you, an unexpected ending that made me read the book a second time after the first to see it with more narrative clarity--thematically, the reader and the protagonist suffer from the same limited omniscience—they are in it together; a positi ...more

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Jan 25, 2012 Megha rated it liked it · review of another edition

Martin Amis, you are such a tease!

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Jun 27, 2020 Luís rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller-crime, british-literature, classics

London Fields. Make no mistake about the title. There is nothing rustic about this novel. It is a story of murder, in a depressing London, not in itself - Portobello Road and its colourful facades, Notting Hill, but through the prism of the style of the author, qualified as master of the "unpleasant new".
Let's start, as Martin Amis decreed, with the potential assassin, the ill-named Keith Talent, give me the expression: small, sweeping strike, of the rogue genre, not enough shoulder for ultra-vi ...more

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May 10, 2012 Jean-marcel rated it really liked it

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 i 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!" ...more

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About Martin Amis

Martin Amis

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Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be reco ...more