London Fields

In response to criticism of a perceived over-complexity of his 2003 novel Yellow Dog Amis countered with these words: “No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are…”, and then goes on to casually mention what he deems to be his own “higher voice”. Much has been made over the years of Martin Amis’s ego – so much so, in fact, that perhaps his loudness and conviction at his own higher cal

In response to criticism of a perceived over-complexity of his 2003 novel Yellow Dog Amis countered with these words: “No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are…”, and then goes on to casually mention what he deems to be his own “higher voice”. Much has been made over the years of Martin Amis’s ego – so much so, in fact, that perhaps his loudness and conviction at his own higher calling have become part and parcel of his talent – or at least certainly of his public persona as a writer.

And while I’m quite prepared to accept that inflated egos and literary talent are not mutually exclusive – Dickens seemed in many ways to be an impossibly selfish man – nobody can say that having one (large ego) will immediately endear an author to a large audience. To imply that if a reader does not understand what he is writing makes the reader stupid and not himself a bad writer is bad enough, but what if the reader is intentionally kept in the dark in order to “prove” that the author is “good” in the first place? What if the author is so desperate to prove his own talent that he has to grasp onto oblique literary references, create thin characters whose only purpose is to demonstrate some philosophical, literary or existential point made by an Ancient Greek playwright, insert self-conscious “purple passages” and then, once the novel is published and people don’t like it, claim that of course the reason why they don’t like it is that they are thick. Good writers can easily be (though are by no means always) confident of their abilities, sure. But there's a thin line between confidence and insecurity – at least on the surface of things. Underneath, of course they are polar opposites. Self-confidence, at least in northern European cultures, tends to be reserved rather than brash. Humility invariably is.

I found London Fields very tiresome. Opaque narrative, both in content and form. Characters that are thin puppets and symbols of other ideas (“Talent”; “Hope”; even “Guy”). Trickery at every turn: from telling us the thrust of the final outcome at the beginning, to interspersing chapters with confusingly shifting narrative positions ("Does that make me...) and making it unclear which characters are “real” and which are part of the “story” (...thick?") (it’s all a story, of course). This last trick is one which Auster does, too, and I’m left wondering about why it is that I so much prefer how, for example The New York Trilogy achieves this, whereas London Fields just leaves me cold, confused and even annoyed. And I think that it’s the playful, humourous voice that makes the difference. Auster is a genuinely sociable, affable guy by all accounts; there is something very theatrical and tongue-in-cheek (and just plain funny!) about inventing a character called Paul Auster, who lives in New York (or at least, the New York that has been invented for your novel) and having your invented characters interact with this "fictional" Paul Auster (who actually simultaneously does of course really exist, and interact with the characters in his, um own head. It sounds egotistical to include "yourself" in your own novel, but in Auster's case it isn’t, it’s the very opposite. He’s playing games with his own creative mind, chuckling away at the absurdity of it, and yet at the same time asking himself what all this weirdness is, this writing, this creating of worlds within worlds in this strange theatre of the imagination.

Whereas Amis includes an alter ego writer in London Fields, I would suggest, for a more egotistical reason. He is being much more “serious” (in the sense of taking himself more seriously – in the negative sense of that phrase, in the sense of demonstrating to everyone what a superior calling being An Author With a Voice is. Having gone to English public school myself – the very same one that Amis did, incidentally – I know what those places can do to you. They can make you very self-conscious and very afraid that you are not somehow extremely talented, brainy and altogether brilliant. Relax, Mr Amis. Don’t let those old schoolmasters get the better of you. And don’t worry. We know you’re talented and can write and have read lots and lots of books and authors that we’ve never heard of. But that does not give you the right to call me thick, just because that isn’t my thing any more.

This book has no heart for me. Mr Amis, you left your soul in Little Dean’s Yard – they destroyed it at school in favour of your brain and, unfortunately, your ego.

To sum up: There are times when Amis’s public persona resembles an overgrown public-schoolboy (“preppie”): arrogant, offensively supercilious and utterly unaware of people’s feelings or right to even have an opinion. And indeed, I did not understand everything in this dense, untransparent novel. And maybe that makes me “thick”. But that doesn’t necessarily make me a bad judge of books. I know what I like and I didn’t like this – your prodigious brain and talent, sir, notwithstanding. Until he learns to be less English public-school and just plain obnoxious, I will not read another word of his books.

So there.