The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  It is interesting that Nicola may be viewed as a postmodernist author who ultimately finds the doubleness of which Hutcheon writes intolerable, in a way that Amis seems not to. She, too, confronts the crisis of legitimation which, according to Jean-François Lyotard, is an effect of the ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that characterizes the postmodern condition.158 This incredulity is shown by her refusal to equate the narratives current in contemporary society with reality. Unlike most of the other characters in the novel, she is acutely sensitive to the baselessness of these messages: ’”[t]hey believe in each other’s lies just like they believe in television”’ (p. 342), she says contemptuously of Keith and his cronies. In contrast, she knows that the roles which she plays and the scenarios which she skilfully improvises have no underlying reality. A trained actress, she is also the most intelligent and successful of the author-figures who are competing to dictate the narrative shape of the novel which they inhabit: ‘[s]he outwrote me,’ writes Samson after completing the plot which she has designed by murdering her (in his unrealized version, Keith, not he, is to be the murderer). ‘Her story worked. And mine didn’t’ (p.466). She has more power and freedom than any of the other characters in manipulating and revising the ready-made scripts of society, but paradoxically the exercise of this freedom entails her own oppression … the plots which she orchestrates necessitate that she enact and parody the very roles which feminists have rejected as limiting and destructive: those of Madonna and whore, which she plays for Guy and Keith respectively. Her detached awareness that these roles do not express her essential identity and her cold-blooded ability to use these parts for an ulterior purpose do not, when all is said and done, liberate her from them. She exaggerates the two personas to such an extreme extent that she manages to heap parodic scorn on them, but she embodies them nevertheless. The only escape from this doubleness is death, not as meaningless extinction but as narrative closure, the ineluctable conclusion of a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom: ‘[i]t was fixed. It was written. The murderer was not yet a murderer. But the murderee had always been a murderee’ (p. 18).

  Amis is open to criticism for limiting Nicola’s options so radically. If the self is a social construct, why - in a time when women are struggling to fashion new, fulfilling identities for themselves - is Nicola restricted to only two unpalatable choices? It is true that the novel recounts formative childhood experiences which predispose her to choose these roles (pp. 15-21). But this simply raises another question: why did Amis decide to motivate her in this way and not some other? Perhaps this is tantamount to asking more generally why his point of view on humanity has to be misanthropic, why the novel’s vision has to be so thoroughly nihilistic. I cannot answer these questions, but I do contend that the bleakness of London Fields subserves a carnivalesque comic and satiric energy which, however, is implicated in the culture which it ridicules and attacks.159 □

  Where Holmes relates the concern with murder in London Fields to the notion of the ‘death of the author’, Peter Stokes’s 1997 essay ‘Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide’ contends that the problem at stake in the novel is ‘of larger proportion than the death of the author or the formlessness of the subject. Here those threats are compounded by others - the possible destruction of the literary archive, and possibly the destruction of the world.‘160 In the following extract, Stokes ingeniously argues that in London Fields the death of the author (Samson Young), his book, and Nicola Six represent ‘a simulated apocalypse in microcosm’, a sacrifice by Samson that supplants ‘global nuclear apocalypse’:

  ■ The narrator of London Fields is a failed American writer named Samson Young. Sam has arrived in London at the end of the millennium after securing an apartment swap with a successful English novelist, Mark Asprey, who signs his welcome note to Sam, M.A. Sam, who can’t - as he explains again and again - make anything up and thus flounders as a writer, soon grows jealous of the many trophies and awards decorating the Asprey home. Reading an Asprey text found around the apartment, Sam becomes demoralized by the incredible success a hack novelist like Asprey enjoys. Sam’s own writerly luck changes, however, when he chances upon a true story unfolding before his eyes. He uncovers some diaries that predict the end of the world. He then searches out the diarist and watches as the predictions unfold - and that story, which he records, becomes the narrative of London Fields. The story is, Sam assures his readers, a ‘true story’, but ‘unified, dramatic and pretty saleable’ (p. 1). At the novel’s end, after taking a fatal dose of pills, Sam reports feeling - much like John Self at the end of Money - ‘seamless and insubstantial, like a creation. As if someone made me up, for money’ (p. 470). Believing that he has once again failed as a writer, Sam appoints his rival, Asprey, as his ‘literary executor’, believing that Asprey will honor his deathbed request to destroy the manuscript, to ‘throw everything out’. And yet Sam goes to his death with a nagging uncertainty, and thus his suicide note to Asprey concludes with the question: ‘[y]ou didn’t set me up. Did you?’ (p. 468). Asprey is, Amis explains to Will Self, ‘an anti-writer’, successful but terrible - ‘really’, Amis continues, ‘a deflected parody of the hatred I feel aimed at me’.161

  The answer to Sam’s question then, of course, is yes. The ruse of London Fields is that it appears to be an appropriation - not merely plagiarism, but out-right theft - of another author’s work. As Amis’s remarks to Will Self indicate, Asprey is another version of himself, another M. A., and Amis has indeed set Sam up - and Sam is indeed a creation, made up, for money. At a variety of levels, then, London Fields works as a kind of joke about plagiarism, or text-theft. Amis, disguised as Asprey, appears to have stolen the novel from Samson Young. In London Fields, then, as in Money, Amis attempts to problematize the credibility of narrative authority en route to suggesting that such authority is essentially formless, insubstantial. As with Money, though, in London Fields that formlessness is once again valued positively. The text is free to travel, surviving even its author’s suicide. Because the author function is transfigured here as a composite author, the text is offered other means of finding its way into circulation, into print. Amis’s novel thus plays with the notion of text-theft in such a way as to suggest that disconnecting a text from its author is the best way to keep it moving, to get it read. Indeed, those disconnections take place at several levels in the novel.

  … for example, Sam has in fact stolen the narrative from someone else’s text - the diarist’s. In that way, the novel underscores the significance of this multi-authoring from the very start. The novel begins, then, in 1999 when Sam arrives in London where he fortuitously happens upon his true story - fortuitous because Sam, who has not written anything in years, assures his readers that he cannot write fiction. Staring out the window of his London apartment, Sam happens to see a woman - whom he had just seen earlier that day, for the first time in his life, in a pub called the Black Cross - throw out a bundle of diaries. Intrigued, Sam recovers the diaries, which turn out to be the property of Nicola Six, a mysterious woman living in London. As her diaries indicate, since childhood Nicola has had visions. In those visions she knows what’s going to happen before it happens. Or so it seems. Ever since she was a little girl, Nicola has seen visions of London with rings circling outward from the center - ground zero. As the novel begins, however, that event at least has not come to pass. Nicola’s life takes a new course when she has a vision of her own death. She ceases to record any more visions in her diaries and even throws the diaries away. Through the last of her recorded visions Nicola comes to know the minute, hour, and date of her death, as well as how it will be carried out - murder, involving a car, a car-tool and a dead-end street. Yet Nicola does not know who the murderer will be. She knows the certain end of her life’s story, but she does not know how her life will arrive at this end - just as she envisions the destruction of London by bombs without knowing how that end will be achieved. Her vision, ultimately, is one of her own mortality coupled together with
the end of the world. Entering the Black Cross one afternoon, Nicola encounters Keith Talent, a kind of over-grown Dickensian street urchin, a professional cheat and darts champion. Later that afternoon Nicola writes in her diaries, for the last time before throwing them away, that she has found her murderer: “‘I’ve found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him”’ (p. 22).

  As Amis describes it to Self, ‘London Fields began life as a novella. It was going to be a sixty-page story called “The Murderee”. There was going to be a Keith figure and a Nicola figure, just moving towards each other and then the deed would occur’.162 … Given the environmental and nuclear catastrophes threatening the world at the close of the 1980s, Amis began to wonder, ‘[i]s the planet the murderee?’.163London Fields, then, is a meditation on the possibility that the world -in an anthropomorphized sense - wants to die, with Nicola representing a kind of suicidal earth-figure, but a suicide in need of assistance. Originally Amis conceived of this assistance coming Nicola’s way through Keith. But as the story developed, Amis explains to Self, more characters were added, including, as Amis puts it, ‘the narrator’ - Sam - ‘who became a kind of actor’.164

  After discovering Nicola’s diaries, Sam begins writing out her prophecy-in-progress - indicating already that his authorial voice is a composite one. As the novel begins, the coming end of the millennium, a vague but quickly developing world crisis, as well as a fast approaching total eclipse, and Nicola Six’s self-prophesied murder all converge in one critical mass of apocalyptic suspense. As a low-life - if somewhat failed - street tough, Keith makes for a near perfect murderer. Coincidentally, Keith has the most prestigious darts final of his career on the same evening as Nicola’s prophesied murder, the eclipse of the sun, and the end of the world. By now the thoroughness of those metaphorical substitutions ought to be clear. As Sam writes, to Keith ‘[t]he whole world was darts’ [in the text, this is immediately followed by a qualifying statement: ‘well, maybe’], but then as Sam also notes, ‘the whole world - on certain screens, in certain contingency plans -was definitely a dartboard’ (p. 396). It makes sense then that Nicola, upon entering the Black Cross and seeing Keith for the first time, should feel that she had found her murderer. As Sam later emphasizes, however, Keith was not alone in the Black Cross that day. Sam was there, too. Nicola was right, she had found her murderer, but it was Sam, not Keith - Sam, who, as Amis indicates, entered the story to become a kind of actor. ‘Always me’, Sam writes at the close of his narrative, ‘from the first moment in the Black Cross she looked my way with eyes of recognition. She knew that she had found him: her murderer’ (p. 466).

  Yet Sam undergoes great struggles on the way to becoming an actor within his own narrative. Like Nicola, he knows how the story is meant to end, but he does not know - anymore than Nicola - how the story will get there. He is, of course, ambivalent about helping to bring the story any nearer its inevitable end by his own hand. He feels certain the world will end, but with his own health waning too, his patience begins to run out: ‘I’m not one of those excitable types who get caught making things up. Who get caught improving on reality. I can embellish, I can take certain liberties. Yet to invent the bald facts of a life (for example) would be quite beyond my powers’ (p. 39). As a result, the development of Sam’s story, of his documentary - as he decides to think of it - is stalled:

  I guess I could just wing it. But all I know for sure is the very last scene. The car, the car-tool, the murderer waiting in his car, the murderee, ticking towards him on her heels. I don’t know how to get to the dead-end street. I close my eyes, trying to see a way -how do writers dare do what they do? - and there’s just chaos. It seems to me that writing brings trouble with it, moral trouble, unexamined trouble (p. 117).

  Finally, Sam recognizes that if Nicola’s prophesy is going to come off, he will have to act himself, he will have to invent - to save his story. But the entrance of the author into his own apocalyptic narrative changes the course of everything.

  The eclipse comes and goes; Keith loses his darts final, and Nicola is murdered. But Sam has taken Keith’s place as the murderer. The car is Keith’s, the car-tool is Keith’s, but it is Sam who is waiting at the dead-end street. By appropriating Keith’s authorship of the murder Sam has changed the course of events - the course of the novei he is writing. Writing and invention are simply, despite Sam’s protestations to the contrary, the same thing. And when the future has to be written, when the future awaits being written, then the future is no done-deal but simply the blank space at the end of the page awaiting new inscriptions. The future, after all, like nuclear war, like the apocalypse, is a literary event - an ellipsis, a potential, a not-yet waiting to be written into existence. Sam recognizes that at the end of his narrative: ‘I’m in it’ (p.464), he remarks, more than a little surprised at the obviousness of the fact. Writing is an act of complicity, and in writing there are no safe spaces from which one may merely observe. In this action then - murdering Nicola and taking enough pills to end his own life - Samson, as his name suggests, pulls down the roof on himself and all that he has come to perceive as the enemy of his story: the future prophesied by Nicola Six.

  Rather than a global nuclear apocalypse, then, London Fields delivers a simulated apocalypse in microcosm - represented in the deaths of Nicola, the author, and his book. Thus Sam’s re-authoring of Nicola’s premise and his rewriting of her apocalyptic plot have the effect of supplanting global destruction with his own Samson-like sacrifice. Sam undertakes that sacrifice because he has learned over the course of the novel that Nicola’s inevitable end, and even his own inevitable end, are not the same as the end of the world. Before his suicide, then, Sam assembles his ‘Endpapers’ (p. 468) and leaves two suicide notes: one, to Mark Asprey asking him to destroy all records of these events and another to Kim Talent - the infant daughter of Keith and secret heroine of the novel who slowly comes to represent for Sam a hopeful alternative to the apocalyptic teleology [ending] of his own story - asking her nothing more nor less than to outlive him. And so the story ends, much as Sam imagined it would from the beginning, with himself and Nicola dead. Yet the story of London Fields survives him, because Asprey turns out to be Sam’s executor in several senses. Asprey does function as Sam’s literary executor, but he evidently acts against Sam’s instructions - he does not destroy the text, otherwise there would be no way to explain the existence of a document called London Fields. But Asprey is Sam’s executor in a second sense, in that he does seem - as Sam suspects before his death - to have set Sam up to die. Ultimately, Sam - like John Self in Money - turns out to be the dupe of an authorial conspiracy he had not foreseen.

  The conspiracy against Sam appears to have been co-authored by Asprey and Nicola. In the course of London Fields Sam learns to his surprise that Nicola is an acquaintance of Asprey’s - and a former lover. That fact more than any other exacerbates Sam’s jealousy of Asprey. His jealousy is somewhat assuaged when Nicola admits that Asprey’s writing is terrible - and she even confesses to having recklessly destroyed one of Asprey’s novels. At the close of London Fields, however, it becomes apparent that Asprey, Nicola, and Sam have all come to rely on one another in some rather complex ways. And it appears that an elaborate deal has been struck, one that necessarily includes setting Sam up. Nicola needs Sam for a murderer. Sam needs Nicola for her story. And Asprey needs the two of them to replace his destroyed novel. It seems, then, that Asprey agrees to provide Nicola with a murderer by swapping his apartment for Sam’s, so long as Nicola provides him with a replacement novel, to be produced by Sam. That arrangement explains why Nicola, after spying Sam for the first time in [the] Black Cross, throws away her diaries outside Asprey’s window - where she knows Sam is watching. The destruction of one book, then, produces another. And the destruction of one story does not mean that it cannot be replaced by another. Nicola’s vandalizing of Asprey’s text obligates her to replace it. Asprey provides Sam, who will produce the
book that Asprey - as a disguised Amis - will later pass off as his own. Thus the novel survives the death of its author, and circulates wherever it may.

  In this way London Fields carries on the work begun by Amis in Money of problematizing the authority and fixity of the author figure. In both novels Amis values that problematization positively - and thus, by transfiguring the author as a composite, the text is offered other means of finding its way into circulation, of being disseminated. Disconnecting a text from its author, then, appears to be one strategy for making sure that the death of an author need not require the death of the narrative. The novel functions as a critique of the easy equation between personal catastrophe and global catastrophe, between an apocalyptic mood and an apocalyptic catastrophe, between a discursive agent and discourse as an agent. London Fields is, after all, a novel with an argument. It argues that literary discourse has a part to play in redirecting the future of nuclear and apocalyptic discourse alike. It is important, then, that an argument such as that survive its author - and be thought of apart from the authority of the author figure - in order to emphasize that such authority really resides in discourses such as those that hold the power of scripting the future.