London Fields

Nicola Six

Nicola Six is 34 and has always known she will be murdered before she turns 35. She has lived with this knowledge long enough to have made her peace with it and to have decided to engineer it — to choose the man, the time, the circumstances. She has the gift of knowing: she knows things that come true. This comes true.

Sam Young, an American writer in London on an exchange arrangement, witnesses the events and narrates them to us, with the awareness that he is watching something arranged. He has found Nicola’s diary. He knows the outcome. The novel is his account of the mechanics of a pre-arranged murder.

Keith Talent

Keith Talent is one of Amis’s greatest achievements: a man of comprehensive awfulness — he cheats at darts, defrauds his employers, beats his wife — who is also funny, and who has one genuine gift, which is darts. His relationship with Nicola, whom he plans to murder because she has led him to believe he should, and with Guy Clinch, the wealthy innocent who is also in love with her, is the novel’s triangle.

London Fields was published in 1989 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which it did not win — reportedly because two of the judges objected to its treatment of women. It remains Amis’s most structurally ambitious novel.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set London Fields apart: The formal conceit — a victim who arranges her own murder — is executed with rigour and not merely deployed as a trick; Keith Talent is one of Amis’s greatest characters: a darts-obsessed petty criminal who is both monstrous and oddly sympathetic; and The nuclear dread of 1999 London gives the novel a historical specificity that transcends its postmodern framework. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of London Fields give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The postmodern novel can use its formal self-consciousness as a vehicle for genuine emotion rather than as a substitute for it. The nuclear dread of the Cold War era was not abstract but ambient — it shaped the consciousness of a generation. A victim who chooses her fate reframes the entire genre of the murder mystery. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Martin Amis’s prose in London Fields is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The novel’s length and formal self-consciousness make demands on the reader that not everyone will find rewarded. Nicola Six as a character has divided readers — some find her agency compelling, others find her function as femme fatale retrograde. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary fiction readers who enjoy formal ambition and postmodern structure, and Amis readers who want his most complex and ambitious work.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Amis’s most structurally daring novel; Keith Talent is worth the price of admission alone.

A Dark Comedy of the End of the Century

Martin Amis’s London Fields is a sprawling, virtuosic black comedy widely regarded as one of his finest novels, a savage and stylish portrait of London at the end of the twentieth century. Set against a backdrop of millennial dread and looming catastrophe, it centres on Nicola Six, a femme fatale who foresees her own murder and sets out to engineer it, manipulating the men around her — the brutish lowlife Keith Talent and the hapless Guy Clinch — in an elaborate game. The novel is narrated by a dying American writer who stumbles upon this story and shapes it into the book we read.

Style as Spectacle

The pleasures of London Fields are above all those of language. Amis writes with extraordinary verbal energy, a dark, dazzling comic prose that relishes the grotesque and the satirical, and the book is a showcase for his gifts as a stylist and a social satirist. Its London is a brilliantly observed nightmare of greed, decay, and apocalyptic unease, and its characters are exaggerated to the point of caricature in the service of a larger comic and moral vision. Some readers find its cynicism and its treatment of its central female figure troubling, and the novel is deliberately provocative, but as a display of comic invention and a portrait of an era’s anxieties, it is a tour de force. Ambitious, funny, and unsettling, London Fields remains a defining work of late-century British fiction.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Martin Amis
• Money by Martin Amis — Full Review
• White Noise by Don DeLillo — Full Review

The Booker Exclusion

London Fields was published in 1989 and was not shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, despite being widely regarded at the time as one of the strongest novels of the year. The exclusion was attributed variously to the judges’ discomfort with the novel’s treatment of its female protagonist — Nicola Six as a female character constructed entirely from male projections of female sexuality — and to concerns about the novel’s narrator being a character within the story. The exclusion became a minor literary scandal and was discussed extensively in the British press; Amis himself attributed it to the composition of the judges. The episode contributed to his reputation in the early 1990s as a divisive literary figure.

Amis and the State of England Novel

London Fields belongs to a tradition of English fiction — sometimes called the “State of England novel” — in which the condition of a society is diagnosed through the symbolic properties of specific characters and their interactions. The dying Samson Young’s observation of Keith Talent, the darts player and petty criminal; Guy Clinch, the wealthy naïf; and Nicola Six, who has foreseen her own murder and is engineering it — provides Amis with a set of figures through which he can examine what England was in the period of late Thatcherism. Keith’s darts obsession, his television consumption, his specific form of masculine self-deception are rendered with a comic energy that is simultaneously satirical and diagnostic. The novel is set in a London that is slightly in the future from its 1989 publication date, with the impending millennium providing a millennial anxiety that the narrative absorbs.