London Fields

London Fields Martin Ami Penguin 1990

The end of the millennium has been on my mind a lot lately. Indeed, I don't think it's presumptuous to say that it's been looming dark over society's collective consciousness for a while now. In two years and four months, the clocks will hit zero and we'll all be left scratching our heads and asking the same thing: What now?

Martin Amis' 1989 novel, London Fields captures all of our mass hysteria and uncertainty, exposing the most sinister, the most destructive, and the most ridiculous of our pre- millennial obsessions.

The story revolves around three men who become unknowing characters in a drama scripted by Nicola Six. From the moment she was able to think, Nicola has always known what was going to happen next. And there is one thing that is fixed and written: For all of Nicola's 34 years she has been waiting to meet the right manher murderer.

Then, finally, one dayafter an afternoon of funeral crashingshe walks into a seedy pub full of pimps, hookers and cheats. That night, she writes the final entry in her diary. "I've found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him."

"Him" is Keith Talent. A cheat whose hobbies include whoring, thieving, extortion, rape, wife-battering, and darts. But Keith isn't the only one in the Black Cross that day. There is also Guy Clinch, a staid, honest, upper-class family man who has wandered into the Black Cross in an effort to escape a life of days spent sitting uselessly at his desk at the family firm and evenings and weekends spent fighting to survive the demonic antics of his Rosemary's Baby-esque son, Marmaduke. If Keith is fated to be Nicola's murderer, the Guy must be her dupe.

Both Keith and Guy are instantly enthralled by Nicola, whose potent combination of sex, beauty, and class is not a common sight in the Black Cross. Also enthralled is Sam, the narrator of the story. An American writer who has come to London to write a best-selling novel and then, well, die. Sam feels an instant kinship with Nicola, and when he retrieves her diaries from a dustbin outside his apartment later that same day, he knows he has material for a novel that would be a publisher's dream come true.

So Sam and Nicola join forces. She tells him everything and he writes it all down. He gets to know Guy and Keith and their families. He becomes a quiet, constant, and necessary part of all of their lives.

But he also documents the city. For the chaos of London as it speeds toward the millennium is as much a character as any of its inhabitants. At the age of four, Nicola "saw the warnings, and the circles of concentric devastation, with London like a bull's-eye in the centre of the board. She knew that would happen, too. It was just a matter of time." Just as Nicola, the murderee, is speeding towards an inevitable encounter, so are we all headed towards the apocalypse.

For all of its bleak premise, London Fields is, perversely, one of the funniest books I have ever read. Unlike some of Amis' other works, such as Time's Arrow, the novel is both structurally brilliant and engaging on a human level. His characters are so vivid, their depiction so unashamedly honest and their world so like a hyperreal, accelerated version of our own that it's impossible not to become a little bit obsessed with them all, yourself.

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