Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63438 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 470 pages

The Word
'Great characters and leaves you laughing uncomfortably'

Synopsis
The narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is to write it as it happens. Taking a small pocket of time and a richly diverse part of London, Martin Amis dissects the nature of a society as it hurtles towards the millennium.

About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and five collections of non-fiction. His memoir, Experience, was published by Vintage in 2001.

Customer Reviews

Darts rocks
This book is truly brilliant. Admittedly not much happens, but the characters (Keith Talent in particular) are so superbly evoked that you just can't help enjoying it. Amis is the great British talent of the late 20th century and writes with a passion and fury far beyond McEwan or Barnes. Everything in life is here. I put it down and started re-reading it the next day - first time I'd done that since A-level English in the 80s. Wonderful!

The thing about Marty
The thing about Marty, vis a vis Marty, is that the content is a bit variable. Or variegated. Or perhaps another word, a something-other word that sure as hell he'd have an opinion on. Yes Marty's a forest gump of an author (let's yawn while you remind yourself that you never know what you're going to get next) but the point is - you never really do - latterly while as the master chocolatier he's created a few lemon-soap-creams, they only serve to highlight what a truly fantastic tongue-drop London Fields is.

It may be the point of Martin Amis that while he's basically my favourite author ever, you still want to fizz him in the mush sometimes. Clearly this would interfere with the dentistry and he wouldn't enjoy it. But books which are not good Amis make you angry when you have such regard for his abilities. The less good list includes Time's Arrow, The Information and Night Train. How do you know they're not that good? Only by juxtaposing the Holy Trinity of Amis; Dead Babies, Money and London Fields. In the former, good books written by a great writer who didn't quite connect. In the latter, three books written over a long time period by a great writer who just tapped into the universe. Unbelievably good literature. Unbelievably good......

London Fields is not the book with which to take issue with Martin Amis. It is a magnificent sprawling epic of a book that I can still pick up and read snatches of for sheer enjoyment many years on. Other commentors are exactly right - for heaven's sake do NOT start your Amis career with London Fields - it's too big, too challenging and too f*cked up. When you're into him, take it on with a sense of challenge and gusto. This is an amazing book. Whatever Amis's bugbears and demons, this is the book which rewards far beyond its cost price. Just find it when you know a little of him first. London Fields is the "long book / long novel" acknowledged by Amis as the book that took the most out of him. But it's worth it all in a way that I can't possibly adequately describe. It's just London Fields....London Fields......

London Fields
London Fields was the first substantial piece of Amis's work I had read and my jaw dropped at the standard of his prose, and the combination of his sense of humour, story telling technique, and the unique perspective through which Amis tells the story/stories. At the time I started reading this, (around Christmas 2003), the darts was on the television and I associated Keith immediately with one of the darts players, so this might have made the story coincidentally more vivid for me in the scenes with Keith. I think that for the days after finishing reading London Fields my heart sank when I thought of Nicola Six, as she doesn't just end up by breaking Keith and Guy's hearts but also that of the reader. I haven't read anything since London Fields one year ago that has been as memorable.. I've tried buying other Amis novels such as Time's Arrow, Other People, and Yellow Dog, though I haven't read any of these in full, but The Information seems like the best candidate for finding another novel by Amis as good as London Fields; (that is what I am hoping from having read the first dozen or so pages). It could well be that London Fields is Amis's tour de force, and Amis is one of the most technically skilled, artistically talented, insightful, and cool writers of present times as far as I know/can tell, so London Fields is a really great novel. I think there was a slight case of 'the right novel at the right time' when I read it, so maybe you won't appreciate how good the book is if it doesn't emotionally touch you at the time. I think that the final great thing about Amis is that he is conscientious about the environment et al, which just adds to the enjoyment and credibility of his moving writing. This is the kind of literature to be published as a classic in 2100, not least because it reflects modern times just as Dickens' writing reflected Victorian times, hence it is an important historical document as much as anything else; it gives the real character of the times, (and the place, aka London), which no history book can really do. Also, Amis's philosophical insights are impressive and his use of hyperbole is delightful.