Reading the London Novels: London Fields by Martin Amis

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...

Reading the London Novels: Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

I have decided to read as many novels set in London as I can, then write about them. And here is the first one:

My A-Z claims to provide '29,800 streets in your pocket' and whilst that may nowadays be more numerically accurate there's no denying that Hamilton's version is a lot more poetic, contrasting the limitless possibilities that the capital is supposed to offer with the mundane, anonymous reality that usually greets those who come in such of them. For Hamilton's London is a dirty, booze-sodden, treacherous temptress, whose inhabitants are condemned to be forever disappointed and miserable, whether it's Bob, the waiter of the Midnight Bell pub around which the trilogy centres, who falls for a local prostitute and ends up losing both his money and his sanity to her, or Bella, the pub's barmaid who yearns for Bob but instead has to deal with the embarrassing attempts at seduction of her comically grotesque middle-aged suitor, Mr Eccles, or Jenny, the prostitute whom Bob falls for, who we later learn to have once been a mild mannered servant who went out one night and succumbed to the temptation of alcohol, which before she knew it had sent her on a downward spiral that included being involved in a fatal car crash, waking up in a strange man's house, losing her job and ending up working the streets.

In Hamilton's world the districts of the city are characters in themselves, and he uses the associations with them to colour the narrative: Chiswick represents well-to-do suburban mundanity, Soho is a sleazy blend of bright lights and half forgotten dreams disappearing in an alcoholic haze and Hampstead Heath represents escape from London and its problems, being above the city and looking down on it. No one turns the prosaic into the poetic better than Hamilton did.

So is this one of my favourite London novels? Why, yes, I do believe it is. And having found the best London novel so far I'm going to celebrate with a drink. Why, I shouldn't be surprised if, by this time tomorrow, I've lost every penny I have and/or metamorphosed into a fully-fledged prostitute...