London Fields (Audible Audio Edition) Martin Amis Steven Pacey Audible Studios Books
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The murderee is Nicola Six, a 'black hole' of sex and self-loathing who is intend on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honourable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. And as Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London - and, indeed, the whole world - seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.
London Fields (Audible Audio Edition) Martin Amis Steven Pacey Audible Studios Books
I've read several Martin Amis books (Money being my favorite, and considered his best, it appears), but I can't finish this one. Started out great, very exciting, and Amis is a master of the English language (but beware, he can get "wordy"). But it's just dragging on and kind of stuck at this point (I'm about 2/3 through). Frustrating. I wanted to like it. I love the character development and Amis nails the late '80's ennui and sterility, but I feel like the wheel is just spinning...Product details
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London Fields (Audible Audio Edition) Martin Amis Steven Pacey Audible Studios Books Reviews
Absolutely disliked
I actually hated the book, I wish somebody told that this book was about promiscous loosers. I will never read another book from Martin Amis,
Martin Amis is a wonderful and entertaining novelist. In his best novels, which, in my humble opinion, are "Money" and "The Information", he crafts hilarious and insightful narratives, mostly about modern urban life. These feature highly credible, albeit sometimes crazed characters, and a stylistic slash-and-burn brilliance. Read them and see what life is like without money or success in modern New York and London.
Having shown my respects to Mart, I'd call "London Fields" a less satisfying book, although definitely worth the read. In this novel, Mart writes about the hostility that a woman can harbor toward men and the ability of some women to captivate and then destroy the men they attract. To explore this theme, he creates Nicola Six, a femme fatale nonpareil, who makes one man love her and two depend on her as they struggle for self-worth. Then, the ruthless Nicola destroys them. Mart, by the way, presents this dynamic as a mystery, telling the reader from the very start that Nicola expects to be murdered by one of these men at book's conclusion. Who will it be, is Mart's not-great conceit.
So why is this book a notch below Amis's best work? In this narrative, I feel that Amis develops a fully credible dependency on Nicola for two of his male characters --the low life Keith Talent and the dying writer Samson Young. But this is not the case for the character Guy Clinch--an upper class English twit whose devotion to Nicola requires a level of naivete that makes no sense to me. (This devotion also requires odd patches of ignorance, since erudite Guy, who knows his Keats, is unable to place the name Enola Gay.) Here, my theory is that upper class Guy makes sense to the English reader. But it doesn't translate for Americans. Bottom line, the subplot featuring Guy goes beyond satire for this Yank and feels like a cruel cartoon.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book. But I'd place it in the Amis queue, where it becomes a must-read for those who have enjoyed Mart's total brilliance in other novels. I wonder, by the way Was Amis going through a rough patch in his own life when he wrote "London Fields", since the book shows men hopelessly entangled with evil women.
Amis at almost his best. The portrait of Keith Talent and his world, including the Black Cross pub, comes off well rather than simply being the sort of obnoxious prole that most would cross the street to avoid, he has some redeeming features and even a certain dignity, and his self - defeating life as a cheater ( and constantly being cheated himself ) has a horrific fascination. Other characters are less well fleshed out and the unlikely ménage of Hope, Lizzyboo and the awful baby Marmaduke is too grotesque to be more than a caricature Amis ( who is certainly from a similar affluent background ) finds some sympathy for them but not enough as its Keith who forcibly grabs our attention and keeps it.,
A mistress of seduction, having `come to the end of men' and a belief in the possibility of love, seeks her own murder--and sets about ruining the lives of two very different men in order to bring it about. The narrator of the novel--a self-described failure at art and love--is terminally ill and now rapidly failing at life, too; he's set himself the task of chronicling the rather ignoble efforts of Nicola Six and her pyrrhic dual seduction. The proceedings are set against an ominously looming worldwide crisis of nuclear and climactic proportions.
That, in maybe an eggshell, is the plot of *London Fields.* A nice enough hook, but as in any Amis novel, it's the execution that has you swallow the line and sinker, too. No one writes like Martin Amis. No one. Pity, too. It's poetry, in great parts, his style--an epic metropolitan voice as if Homer had been reborn in London with a wicked sense of humor, both castle and gutter, and a penchant for writing about deadbeats, sex-obsessed middle-aged guys, and a world gargling down the toilet-tube.
How even a sub-intelligent reader can possibly run his eyeballs over this novel and see in it only cynicism, nastiness, disgust, and mocking hatred is beyond comprehension. Are they paying attention to what Amis has actually written right there on the page in black and white--or only what has been written *about* him?
*London Fields,* like much of Amis' work is a deeply-felt and elegiac novel that is actually quite heartbreaking in its inimitable way. Rude, often crude, scalding and scornful, relentlessly, unrepentantly bleak--yes, that's all true, thank God, but Amis' style...and what a style!...is a corrosive that strips away all self-serving illusion and sentimentality to expose the skeleton of the last honest humanism still possible.
Here is Amis on one of his characters in *London Fields*
`In the book, she stood for something. In the flesh, she was pointless a complete waste of time. Or not quite. In the flesh, she broke your heart, as all human beings do. I watched her, an older man, failed in art and love. Fat ankles. Dear flesh.'
A waste of time that breaks your heart. In a sense, that sums up Amis' view on life, love, history, and existence itself as presented in *London Fields.* But the vitriolic comedy and famous disgust that Amis directs towards and lavishes upon everyone and everything is, in fact, the lament of the idealist who sees how very very far short human beings fall from anything even a kissing cousin of humanity.
His exaggerated characters, yes, arguably caricatures, are nevertheless uncomfortably familiar and that's precisely what makes their misdeeds and misadventures so uncomfortably compelling--and, I suspect, arouses so much wrath in those who consider the truth to be bad taste. These are, indeed, people we `know,' and sometimes even love; worse still, if we could stop the automatic monkey finger-pointing for five minutes, we realize these people are *us.*
Five stars, if that's all I can give it. *London Fields* deserves at the very least a small constellation of them.
I've read several Martin Amis books (Money being my favorite, and considered his best, it appears), but I can't finish this one. Started out great, very exciting, and Amis is a master of the English language (but beware, he can get "wordy"). But it's just dragging on and kind of stuck at this point (I'm about 2/3 through). Frustrating. I wanted to like it. I love the character development and Amis nails the late '80's ennui and sterility, but I feel like the wheel is just spinning...
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