From the introduction to a reissue of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields, which was published in November by Vintage, in Britain.
The curse of Englishness is something whose magnitude we are still taking the measure of in our time. The English habit of not finding others as real as themselves forms a substantial part of this curse. It has fallen on numerous English writers; it fell heavily on Martin Amis. Many of these writers were perhaps not aware that it was a curse, for it surprisingly often and for long periods wore the guise of a gift. But Amis was aware of it.
Amis’s father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, was one of the twentieth century’s great chroniclers of his fellow countrymen. Kingsley Amis was gloriously witty, drunken, bigoted, anti-intellectual, and profoundly lacking in empathy and self-awareness: he was something of an embodiment of the national character. Among the many things Kingsley Amis despised was the notion that a writer might regard himself as an artist. So Martin Amis arrived on the literary scene preternaturally aware of who he was and where he stood. Amis the younger had to shout to be heard. His discovery of the “other,” of that which was not himself and his literary heritage, was therefore especially charged, and the habits of caricature and satire—along with a high degree of authorial self-consciousness—that flowed from this discovery came to define his writing. Martin Amis both suffered from the curse of Englishness and became its archest commentator.
In 1989, a little flurry of scandal gave some edge to the Booker Prize proceedings: the two women on the jury threatened to resign if Martin Amis’s London Fields, which their male counterparts wished to short-list, were included. Their reason, at least according to the prize’s chair, was Nicola Six, the novel’s central female character. The judges found her portrayal unfeminist—in other words, offensive to women. Better, badder, and harder than any man, Nicola Six might almost in fact pass for a comic-book feminist hero. Yet her unbreachable superiority to men is a superiority formulated according to male sexual and intellectual values. It is also her superiority, by the same values, to all women: it was this, presumably, that the judges found to be unfeminist. Still, a truly feminist act might have been to award the Booker Prize to a woman—the overlooked genius Sybille Bedford was on the short list. But London Fields was indeed excluded.
In its day the novel did not in fact seem to reflect a number of contemporary concerns—politics, regionalism, the search for equality and social justice—or to address historical realities. With its energy and length and noise, it was, if anything, an American novel—but an American novel that stubbornly concerned itself with something that most English novelists carefully avoided: the “no-fly zone” of social class in contemporary Britain. This Britain was undergoing a violent phase of evolution. The years of Thatcherism both exposed class divisions and inflamed them; money, and the scramble for it, also created a new kind of equality, the equality of opportunism. These were the years in which capitalism shed its pitiless light on the absurd British soul, with its deep striations of caste and station, its postcolonial taint, most of all its perverted emotional core, full of love and loathing for its own extremes of domination and servitude.
Who, then, were Martin Amis’s readers, the readers to whom in 1989 his novel addressed itself? I myself, aged twenty-two, was certainly not among them. To me, it was clear that Martin Amis wrote for men—or, more accurately, for boys. His humor I understood to be puerile, full of the kind of gratuitous line-crossing that young, educated males insecure in their masculinity reveled in. That he was the child of Kingsley Amis merely reinforced that impression: he was the perennial son, the enfant terrible, with the emphasis on enfant. His aura of paternal domination may indeed have constituted some of his allure: the boys I knew referred to him affectionately as “Martin,” or even—a nickname I feel sure he would have appreciated—“Marthole.” When I was a little older I read Money and The Information and found myself becoming more interested. Whether or not I cared much about their content, the openness—the shamelessness—of these books was striking. There was also the question of style, of the effort to entertain: a characteristic of the American novel of that period that its English equivalent largely lacked. The spirit of transgression that runs throughout Amis’s work seemed continually to hearken to that which lay outside English literature’s parameters. This transgression was not, importantly, intellectual: it was more a kind of naughtiness, a daredevil showing off that either thrilled or infuriated its onlookers, who could only wonder what kind of trouble the perpetrator would get into. Whatever else Amis’s writing did, it woke people up: to themselves, to their secret pruderies or prejudices, to their cultural conservatism. Amis treated imagination not as a refuge from reality but as a maniacal enlargement of it, and if in doing so he also inadvertently enlarged himself, the brazen tone of his novels suggested that he didn’t care.
In the Black Cross pub, the novel’s narrator, a failed and terminally ill American writer called Samson Young, mingles with his protagonists: Keith Talent, Guy Clinch, and Nicola Six. Like Dickens’s, Martin Amis’s character names are a clear signifier of parody: these are “types,” human representations of current social phenomena, with Keith and Guy—the aspirational thug and the idiotic aristocrat—as the pivotal pairing in Amis’s portrayal of a nation (and its masculinity) in comic decline. Their interdependence and mutual miscomprehension is an illustration of the deep roots of British class perception, a mode of ordering the world whose concealment beneath the junk of modernity belies its extraordinary tenacity. These men, in other words, don’t know why they act the way they do:
Class never bothered Keith; he never thought about it “as such”; part of a bygone era, whatever that was, class never worried him. It would surprise Keith a lot if you told him it was class that poisoned his every waking moment.
Guy, like many a doomed aristocrat before him, mistakes Keith’s brutishness for a simpler, more honest masculinity: with his sexually crippling romanticism, he misreads this new alliance for an entry into a greater truth. The women standing behind these men—the ghostly, tragic Kath Talent and the factual Hope Clinch—have far greater contact with reality, yet far less capacity to determine its outcomes. The reason is their duty of motherhood, and one of the unusual facets of London Fields is the weight it attributes to babies, to their power of limitation and disturbance, most of all to their power of innocence. Even the wealthy mother, Hope Clinch, cannot control the monstrous possibilities of birth; the intelligent mother, Kath Talent, is broken in her turn by the self-sacrifice required for the preservation of innocence. In Nicola Six, Amis imagines a woman free of these constraints, her power of sexuality intact, her contempt for men progressively honed by her independence from them. The fact that this woman can retain no interest in living—that as the author of her own story she has no alternative but to arrange her own death—lies at the ambiguous core of London Fields.
Amis’s rendering of the world of the Black Cross is one of the novel’s achievements: steeped over time in the rancid deposits of male habit, the traditional British pub is rarely so accurately described. In the fog of cigarette smoke, the rituals of maleness are blearily, incoherently performed, their basis in evolution long since lost from view; broader social changes—multiculturalism, the speed of technology—are diffidently incorporated into the mulch; slow processes of decomposition and fermentation have replaced the line of history. In the pub, the one discernible truth remains the truth of gender: what men have in common is women. The pub is first and foremost a refuge from women, occasionally a place to display them, more often a scene of affirmation in the business of subduing them.
Amis’s intentions with Nicola Six are harder to read, since she is one of the few figures in the book whose caricature isn’t meant to produce laughter. He insists that she fully uses and exploits her femininity, yet the degree of pleasure this offers her is unclear. She is clever, cultivated, beautiful, hard-drinking, sexually predatory, and her one weakness—as she sees it—is a penchant for sodomy. The most important thing about her, in the milieu of London Fields, is that she is not a victim: it is she who has victims, who outplays the strategies of men, but to what end?
Nicola was amazed . . . by how few women really understood about underwear. It was a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shopping decision? In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms and cabins and boudoirs and powder parlors, and watched debutantes, predatory divorcées, young hostesses, even reasonably successful good-time girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses and ballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long johns, Y-fronts. . . . To ephemeral flatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to other under-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped the underwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months later the ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger.
Nicola’s ennui, her wanting out from life, is supposedly the consequence of all this strategic knowledge: it’s too easy; it makes life no fun. Her interest in Keith lies in her conviction that he, in his stupidity and violence, will be the man to murder her. Amis tries to forestall the criticism that Nicola is merely the stuff of male fantasy by making Samson Young, his narrator, immune to her attractiveness. Samson isn’t just terminally ill—he lives in a different register of love and longing. He isn’t afflicted by the curse of Englishness, with its inflexible binaries, its violent categorizations of humans, its shaping even of their most secret and shameful desires. If Nicola Six is a fantasy, in other words, she is a culturally determined one. The woman Samson Young pines for is an unyielding executive at a corporate American publishing house, whose soft emotional center he once briefly glimpsed.
The politics that made London Fields possible have changed—but not that much. Amis’s caricatures retain their links to British reality; his observations about class, gender, and money still find their mark. One significant change from the tabloid-era London that is the novel’s setting is the evolution of contemporary media and the explosion of social information it brought about. If anything, the present-day equivalents of Amis’s types are more familiar to us than they would have been to the novel’s first readers: we see and hear them all the time on our screens. Amis eventually left the United Kingdom, found other subjects, perhaps to try to free himself from the maddening obligation his bristling sensibilities toward the English put him under. One wonders what kind of writer—what kind of poet, even—he would have been had he been born elsewhere.
