London Fields

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

First published: 1989
Print length: 470 pagesVintage Books, 1991

Description

In a decaying London approaching 1999, terminally ill American writer Samson Young has gone two decades without producing the fiction he wants to write. Then he encounters Nicola Six, a woman convinced that she can foresee her own murder and determined to identify the man who will commit it. Around her move Keith Talent and Guy Clinch, men from sharply different social worlds who become possible actors in the death she anticipates. Sam enters their orbit as both participant and observer, treating the impending crime as material for a lucrative book. London Fields combines black comedy and murder mystery with a compromised narrator, asking what happens when a writer’s hunger for an ending becomes entangled with another person’s apparent fate.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Experimental · Ornate · Witty

Pace

Variable

Tone

Dark · Irreverent · Satirical · Unsettling

Structure

Framed · Nonlinear

Focus

Character · Mystery · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 5 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 5 / 5
Background knowledge: 3 / 5

Themes

AmbitionArt and creativityClassKnowledge and truthMortalityObsession

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter, and critic whose fiction made late-capitalist appetite, cultural decline, masculine vanity, and literary rivalry subjects of dark comedy. His prose is dense and verbally restless, driven by irony, coinages, elaborate sentences, and grotesque caricature. He often places compromised, self-dramatizing narrators inside plots that expose their efforts to control other people and their own stories. In Money, advertising director John Self’s compulsive spending and chaotic film project become a hectic study of consumerism and self-invention. London Fields turns an anticipated murder into material for a blocked writer, making narration itself part of the moral disorder. The Information uses one of Amis’s characteristic pairings, setting two novelist friends against each other as unequal success converts intimacy into sabotage. Such doubles give his large social satires a close personal pressure, while metafictional interruptions and borrowed genre structures keep their plots visibly unstable. His comedy repeatedly moves between verbal display and the damage done by appetite, envy, and self-deception.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780679730347

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.