I approached this book with high hopes, having been led to believe it was one of the Great London Novels but after reading a few hundred pages I began to feel something was lacking from the book. Hmm... What was it? Oh, yes - a plot!
Call me fussy, but if I read a 470 page novel then I kind of expect something to happen in it other than endless chapters about a man going to his local and playing darts. So, somewhat disappointed, I skimmed the rest of it then went on Wikipedia to see what happens in the end. I was, however, in for something of a surprise, as what I'd thought to be a fairly uneventful tale of a darts player who gets drawn into a murder is in fact (apparently) a chilling portrait of a broken and dystopian society on the cusp of a new millennium and the verge of apocalypse (and so on...) Which is to say that, as far as I could see, the critical opinion of this book bears very little resemblance to the book itself.
The main problem with London Fields, and most of Amis' work, is that he spends too much time thinking about how to tailor his work to the critics (by having predictably post-modern bits such as the narrator meeting the characters) at the same time as trying to scandalise his middlebrow audience (like calling one of his books Dead Babies - how very shocking!) He does this, however, at the expense of any emotional core; great art should come straight from the heart with little interference from the brain but this book is little more than a display of literary cleverness and the end result is that it's a largely cerebral and ultimately empty exercise.
And as if that wasn't disappointing enough, it isn't even set in London Fields, instead being mainly based around the oh-so-trendy trustafarian/tourist district of Portobello Road. The title's probably a metaphor for something, but a metaphor for what? Oh, who cares...
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