The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  ■ So why isn’t he on that prize list? … Perhaps the trouble is that Amis … writes about sex. Quite a lot about sex, as it happens. [London Fields] is awash with sex, sleazy, nasty sex, involving lots of black stockings, panties and things too dreadful to mention here … And this is where Amis starts to get into difficulties. His exclusion from the shortlist, it is rumoured, was insisted on by the two women judges on the panel, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil.130 □

  After the Booker Prize had gone to Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘the Japanese Englishman’ on October 2 for his novel The Remains of the Day (1989),131the debate over the exclusion of London Fields from the shortlist - and the shortlist of the Whitbread Prize - continued to rage. A column in the Liber section, devoted to European literature, of the Times Literary Supplement reported on 15 December 1989:

  ■ After [Salman Rushdie’s] The Satanic Verses (1989), the book most argued over in Britain continues to be London Fields……The talk is about why the novel … has met resistance, and in particular the reputedly decisive resistance of two women judges, the novelist Maggie Gee (Booker) and a journalist, Val Hennessy (Whitbread). Amis’s fiercely comic fantasy about (among other things) environmental and moral apocalypse involves the enactment of some grotesque sexual fantasies, in which she is seen conniving, of the central woman character [Nicola Six] by the narrator [Samson Young]. Critics of the book are accused of having mistaken satirical realism for moral turpitude, of confusing the story with its narrator and of being blinded to its merits by feminist or otherwise ‘extra-literary’ concerns.

  To this, Maggie Gee - herself a powerful and distinctive novelist, and by background a literary academic - replies that there is a strong formal, purely ‘literary’ case against London Fields, and that it was in these terms that the Booker judges argued. She says, for example, that Amis ‘has tried for effects that aren’t quite worked out. There’s a confusion in the book about the function of the narrator. On the page where he gives benediction to the child he seems a normative centre, but two pages earlier he has bludgeoned Nicola Six to death’. She points out that some male critics have disliked the book for similar reasons. On the other hand, she wonders whether debate over the very notion of extra-literariness has not gone to sleep in Britain, and concedes that matters discounted by most of the critical establishment - sexual politics, for one, and untutored, or anti-tutorial, gut reactions, for another - have an inevitable place in judgements of taste……Gee is a keen admirer of much of Amis’s work, and describes him as ‘a very, very good comic novelist’. All the Booker judges agreed that London Fields is very funny. Another good reason, his supporters argue, for taking it seriously.132 □

  The debate remained active into the 1990s. Not all the Booker judges, it seemed, had wanted London Fields excluded from the shortlist; as the novelist and critic David Lodge wrote, in an essay published in 1992:

  ■ In 1989 I was chairman of the judges for the Booker Prize, Britain’s premier literary prize. We read, or at least scrutinized, over a hundred new novels. The great majority of them were written within the conventions of fictional realism. I should say that it was a matter of great regret to me that Martin Amis’s London Fields was not shortlisted, due to the strong objections of two members of the jury. Had it been, our list would have looked somewhat different, for there are important metafictional and fabulatory elements in this novel. None of the six novels we ended up with could be said to deviate from the conventions of modern realistic narrative.133 □

  Lodge does not address the issue of sexism here, but back in 1989 Jane Ellison, in the article quoted earlier in this chapter, had offered a vigorous defence of London Fields against that charge, thus provoking the ‘avalanche of correspondence’ mentioned by Melvyn Bragg. Ellison’s case is still worth hearing:

  ■ It is a shame that Amis has become the object of feminist outrage. It is also quite unfair on him. Why single him out for opprobrium? To claim that a work of fiction is ‘sexist’ is one of those tricky objections that tends to rebound on the critic. What about Updike? Lawrence? Tolstoy? Why stop there? You can see fiction itself as a great conspiracy of ‘sexist’ malignancy towards women …

  At its least, ‘sexist’ writing is not exactly monopolized by Amis. Women are expert practitioners in this field, too. Look at the work of Jeanette Winterson, a fashionable writer of contemporary fiction with a strong line on magic realism and gender-crossing. In her latest work, [Sexing the Cherry (1989)], not only does she make sledgehammer feminist jokes but - in the memorable words of the [Sunday Correspondent] -‘[m]en get their willies bitten off. Makes poor old Martin look pretty tame.

  But there is no need to plunder the pages of the ‘literary’ novel for the worst examples of sexist writing. Wander into any WH Smith and there are the shelves brimming with [Ambition, Pearls, Destiny, Lace, I’ll Take Manhattan]. What do all these fat volumes have in common? Yes, lots of passages of pornographic sex. And they’re all written by women……Women cannot complain about their treatment in male fiction when it is women themselves who write these trashy, lurid blockbusters just to earn themselves a vast publisher’s advance……

  You may not like the sort of sex that Amis writes about, but it is not pornographic. It is not thrown into [London Fields] at a ratio of one paragraph to every five pages, it is not written purely to keep the reader salivating (it is far too nasty for that). For real pornography we must look instead to women like [Julie] Burchill and [Celia] Brayfield, the champions of real ‘sexist’ prose. History will judge whether the Booker judges were right about the shelf-life of their shortlist (in fact, prize-winners tend to become rapidly consigned to oblivion). But history may also judge that they kept Amis out for the wrong reasons.134 □

  Whatever the judgement of history, there can be no doubt that London Fields has proved it can continue to attract the serious attention of literary critics, both male and female. An excellent example is provided by Penny Smith, whose essay ‘Hell Innit’, published in 1995, considers the controversial representation of Nicola Six in the context of the presence of the millennium in three contemporary novels - London Fields, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, and Shena Mackay’s Dunedin (1992) - all texts in which, Smith suggests, ‘there is a sense that as we approach the year 2000 we find ourselves looking not forward but back, to the catastrophe that has cast its shadow across the second half of the twentieth century, the Second World War‘135 - a particularly interesting comment in the light of the way in which the Holocaust becomes the theme of Amis’s next novel, Time’s Arrow. This is her insightful account of London Fields:

  ■ Where Alasdair Gray is a better writer than he sometimes seems, Martin Amis sometimes seems to be [a better] writer than he actually is. The most common criticism of Amis’s work is that the parts are better than the whole, a contagious style ultimately failing to make up for lack of content. At the same time, there is no doubt that London Fields is both an indicator of the Zeitgeist [spirit of the time], as well as an influence, and no discussion of the millennium in contemporary British fiction can afford to leave it off the list.

  Amis’s text shares Lanark’s sense of there not being much time left: ‘Oh, Christ, no, the hell of time … Time takes from you, with both hands. Things just disappear into it’ (p.239). As the Note to London Fields explains, an alternative title could have been Millennium. However, as ‘M. A.’ (the text is a prolonged tease and we’re never sure whether we’re in the hands of Martin Amis, real author, or Mark Asprey, fictional creation) explains: ‘everything is called Millennium just now’. So London Fields it is: ‘This book is called London Fields. London Fields …’ (Note, after Contents page).

  Although the year is supposed to be 1999, 1989 is how it reads, with the bubble of the Eighties about to burst and recession immediately around the corner. London is at crisis point - although it is difficult to identify what form the crisis will actually take. Certainly the weather is behaving very oddly, there are cyclonic winds (killing ‘nineteen people, and thir
ty-three million trees’ (p.43). The animals are dying (p. 97), and rumour has it that there is to be massive flooding, cosmic rays, and the Second Coming (p. 118). The natural world is on fastforward, rushing toward catastrophe with the political situation racing to keep up. There’s danger of ’”[a] flare-up. A flashpoint somewhere”’ (p. 105). The international situation is mysteriously linked to the ill-health of Faith, the First Lady (p. 207), and the ‘new buzz word’ is ‘[c]athartic war’ (p.417). The sun is daily sinking lower as the earth tilts on its axis in anticipation of a full eclipse on November 5, at which point, so the rumours go, two nuclear bombs will explode, ‘one over the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, one over Marble Arch’ (p. 394).

  It’s the end of the century and the planet is braced for impact (p. 197) because while previous millenniums didn’t really mean the end of the world (‘Nobody had the hardware’, p. 369), this time things are different. But when November 5 does come around, there isn’t a bang but a whimper. The comet doesn’t hit, the bombs don’t explode, the sun returns to its normal position. A woman, however, is murdered, arid we are back with what we were promised on the novel’s first page: ‘This is the story of a murder’ (p. 1).

  London Fields is a murder story, popular fiction dressed up as high art, a text that functions as much as a textbook (designed for the undergraduate seminar requiring neat examples of the metafictional and postmodern) as a novel… London Fields is … multi-layered, the commentary of the narrator, Samson Young, sandwiching the fiction he is writing. The commentary, of course, tells us that this fiction is ‘real’ (‘This is a true story but I can’t believe it’s really happening’): a woman - Nicola Six, ‘the murderee’ (p. 1), - dumps her diaries in a London rubbish bin (p. 26) and an author finds a ready-made story. At the same time Nicola Six finds her murderer. Or, rather, potential murderer for while, in Lawrentian terms, a murderee is always a murderee, ‘[t]he murderer was not yet a murderer’ (p. 18) [‘Lawrentian terms’ refers to D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (1921), in which Rupert Birkin, one of the main characters, says: ’”[i]t takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee“‘136]. A murderer has to be made, and so Samson Young describes how Nicola goes to work on Keith Talent who, although ‘a very bad guy’, working class, petty crook, wife-beater, rapist, is not yet ‘the very worst ever’ (p.4). It is up to Nicola to turn him into that, and in order to transform Keith into what is required she plays him off against Guy Clinch - upper class, nice guy, handsome, rich (p. 27).

  Nicola Six (a blend of sex and an Apocalyptic 666) has from an early age always known ‘what was going to happen next’ (p. 15), and in the case of her own murder is playing both prophet and author. Why she wants to die is another matter: ‘[i]t’s what she always wanted’ (p. 1). Nicola Six is a heart, and ball, breaker: ‘[s]he pauperized gigolos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers’ (p.21). For Guy, Nicola plays the virgin, teasing him into a state whereby he loses dignity, sanity, family. For Keith she’s the whore. Nicola is all things to all men……it is easy to see how the depiction of Nicola Six invites accusations of misogyny, even though Amis’s apparent intention is for his female character to be read as a symbol of her age rather than a sign of her gender. Nicola is self-destructive, compelled not just to cancel love but to murder it (p. 21), a perversion of emotion which, according to this text, is reflected in a predilection for sodomy: ‘[i]t was the only thing about herself that she couldn’t understand and wouldn’t forgive’. But while Nicola can’t quite comprehend her own desires she is aware that ‘[literature did go on about sodomy, and increasingly’ (p. 67). Joyce, Lawrence, Beckett, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Naipaul (p. 68), compiling her list of (male) writers she is tempted to see sodomy as a ‘twentieth-century theme’ (p. 67), and Nicola ‘would be perfectly prepared to represent her century’ (pp. 67-68). Sodomy, for Nicola, is about negation - ‘That’s what I am, she used to whisper to herself after sex. A black hole. Nothing can escape from me’ (p. 67) - and that too is the motto of the suicidal last century of the second millennium.

  The twentieth century has ‘come along and after several try-outs and test-drives it put together an astonishing new offer: death for everybody … ’ (p.297). At the end, however, death calls only for Nicola, who barely whimpers. This doesn’t mean that the big bang won’t happen, but is more a recognition that it has happened already. We’ve already seen the big one, and are living in its aftermath. The big one was the Second World War and what it unleashed, the possibility of nuclear holocaust. Just as Nicola has known since childhood what was going to happen next she’s been accompanied by an invisible companion:’… Enola Gay. Enola wasn’t real. Enola came from inside the head of Nicola Six’ (p. 16). As part of her effort to humiliate Guy, Nicola extracts large amounts of money from him on the pretext of trying to save Enola Gay and her little boy, stranded in south-east Asia as a result of the Cambodian war. But just as Enola Gay isn’t really a refugee in Thailand or Burma, she isn’t a fantasy either:

  ‘Enola Gay’ was the plane that flew the mission to Hiroshima. The pilot named the aircraft after his mother. He was once her little boy. But Little Boy was the name of the atom bomb. It killed 50,000 people in 120 seconds (p.445).

  Nicola has been able to con Guy because, like the vast majority, he hasn’t known one of the most important facts in his sad century’s history. Similarly, Keith has to be told that the bikini Nicola dons is named after the Bikini Atoll:

  ‘What American men did there - one of the greatest crimes in human history. If you got the world’s most talented shits and cruelty experts together, they couldn’t come up with anything worse than Bikini. And how do we commemorate the crime, Keith?’ She indicated the two small pieces of her two-piece. ‘Certain women go about wearing this trash. It’s very twentieth-century, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah. Diabolical’ (p. 127).

  So diabolical in fact that it’s as if the Second World War never really ended: ’ … it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running the century - Hitler, the great bereaver’ (p.395). History ended mid-century and what we are caught in in London Fields is the hell of the perpetual present.

  Nicola Six, the murderee, walks in the shadow of Enola Gay, and so too does her murderer. When Nicola appears in the Black Cross pub Samson Young leaps to the conclusion that she’s recognized her murderer in Keith. But this is one of those whodunnits in which the unwitting narrator turns out to be the ‘who’. ‘She leaned forward. “You,” she said, with intense recognition. “Always you …”’ (p.465). Nicola had known him from the start (p. 466). And Young should have known too because he and Nicola are linked by the fact that they’re both as good as dead already (p.260). However where Nicola, representative of a self-destructive century, wills her own death, Young has had his willed on him as a legacy of the work his father did, in London Fields, on High Explosives Research (pp. 120, 161).

  Samson Young is ‘pre-nuked and dead-already’ (p. 323). So when Guy is about to kill Nicola, Young can make a deal with him and take his place because he has nothing to lose. ‘[A]fter the first blow she gave a moan of visceral assent’ (p. 467) and the narrator is left to take a suicide pill. A murder and a suicide and everything goes back to normal. Which is the problem with London Fields because, ultimately, any political message there is about the destructive temperament of the century, the madness of things nuclear, is lost as the skies clear and the novel, like other of Amis’s novels, concludes by valorizing class and gender.137 The woman gets what she’s asking for and her death is, ultimately, engineered by Guy who beats up the already-humiliated Keith and reasserts himself as the dominant, upper-class male. The post-war, postmodern, postmillennial world gets back to normal.138 □

  The apocalyptic, millennial aspects of London Fields identified by Penny Smith are also discussed in Brian Finney’s essay ‘Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields’ (1995). But as in his account of Other People in the s
ame essay (see pp. 49-54 of this Guide), Finney’s major concern is murder and its relation to narrative. This extract starts by linking London Fields with Other People:

  ■ Both novels can be said to be centered on murderees - women who ask to be killed. In both the narrator turns out at the end to be the murderer. It is this responsibility of the narrator for the eventual elimination of the female protagonist that distinguishes and connects both books … Even the time scheme of Other People and London Fields turns out to be similar. Other People is about a timeless present - one reviewer suggested that ‘perhaps everything happens in a single instant’.139 So too, according to Amis, is London Fields a book ‘about the present’, despite its futuristic setting.140

  By situating his novel at the end of the twentieth century, Amis is able to make overt many of the issues underlying contemporary life. Maybe he has made them too overt. But the imminent collapse of modern civilization, even the planet itself, what the book refers to as the Crisis, is an integral part of the fabric of the book as a whole. Nicola Six (pronounced ‘seeks’, but also misheard as ‘sex’), the (anti)heroine, has decided to end her life rather than enter middle age knowing that love is dead for her - and soon for everyone else, Amis suggests. ‘The death of God was possibly survivable in the end. But if love was going the same way … ’ (p. 132). Nicola’s death wish parallels that of the planet. As a femme fatale or ‘Old Nick’ (but a female devil) she opts for sodomy - the way of foolproof sterility. A personalized black hole, she draws men into her destructive magnetic field just as the black hole of physics threatens to swallow up our planet, our solar system, into its negative energy: ‘[s]he had the power … to receive [men’s] love and send it back in opposite form, not just cancelled but murdered’ (pp. 20, 21). So at the start of the novel she decides to have herself murdered either by Keith Talent, a working class yob (the English version of a jerk) and petty criminal whose only talent is for darts and pornography, or by Guy Clinch, a rich, nice but hopelessly romantic ‘fall guy: fool, foal, foil’ (p.240). Keith represents ‘reptile modernity’; Guy is handicapped by an ‘archaic heart’ (p. 192).