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...

Toilet Humour

I have decided to branch out into obscene cartoons, and this is my first effort...

The End of the London Paper

Now that the wind has carried the last solitary copy of thelondonpaper off the streets of the capital forever I can't help but wonder what will happen to distributors of the rival London Lite; with no one to talk to as they hand out papers in the wind and rain, will they grow despondent and eventually wither away and die? For whilst I had for a long time harboured a fantasy of one day seeing a fight between vendors of the rival papers, I eventually came to realise that they were more comrades than competitors, because although the papers themselves were rivals the overwhelming majority of commuters took copies of both. So this must have been a lonely week for distributors of London Lite as they returned to their pitches to ponder a solitary future as, after three years, the Freesheet Wars are over; London Lite has triumphed and thelondonpaper has closed.

Thelondonpaper will forever have a place in my heart as it was on their pages that I saw my name in print for the first time when they ran the now-classic 'Warning: Big Bum is Imminent' column (which you can read at the start of this very blog). Not having seen a copy of the paper that day, I didn't even know the column had appeared until almost ten at night, at which point I dashed to the nearest tube station but failed to find a copy until one came almost mythically floating down the staircase towards me, a copy so gnarled and twisted that I had to untangle it before tearing through it to find my piece.

And there it was: my name in print. I stood and gasped in disbelief. Thousands would have read my words. I was a printed author, and fame and fortune surely beckoned. Would I even make it home without being chased down the street, Beatlemania-style, by an adoring crowd? As it happened, I did. But that didn't stop me from being on a high for the next few days.

I sent a few more pieces in, and another one was printed, but then Time Out started to run things I'd written and so by then it was no longer my main focus. Still, I'll never forget where it began, and the excitement of seeing my name in print for the first time, knowing it was only a matter of time before the masses were inspired by my ideas to take to the streets and start a revolution (and whilst, strictly speaking, this hasn't happened yet, I imagine it will at some point in the very near future).

Thelondonpaper is dead.

Long live thelondonpaper.

In Cyberspace, No One Can Hear You Scream

For a while this blog only contained my published pieces, and I toyed with the idea of leaving it like that, retaining its purity and making it surely the only blog in the world where every entry had previously appeared on the pages of a reputable journal. But after a while I relented; after all, it was hardly in keeping with the whole spirit of blogging and, anyway, with Time Out's Big Smoke section being axed, taking my weekly column with it, and with the imminent closure of the London Paper my current writing outlets will have vanished within a few weeks of each other and exiled me, for now, to a life on the web.

But in cyberspace there are no rules: no word limits, no deadlines, no editorial changes, no requirement to make a point and certainly no requirement to actually write anything good. Indeed, doesn't the whole concept of blogging highlight one of the major problems of the internet, chiefly that whilst in theory anyone in the world can read your work, in practice there are so many millions of blogs out there that many of them are read by no one other than the authors themselves?

And hasn't the internet been somewhat overrated in this regard? We're always being told about how it's a great way to get yourself noticed but every time someone like Lily Allen or Sandi Thom is supposedly discovered on the web it inevitably turns out they already had publicists and record companies behind them and it was all a publicity stunt. It's the same with any blog that supposedly becomes a word of mouth success; invariably it's been written by a journalist or author with a book to promote and whose PR has spent a huge amount of time and money to create that word of mouth success.

To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I'm well aware of the irony of using a blog using the medium itself, but that doesn't change the fact that I've used my first blog to not only attack the system that supports it but to declare that, by and large, blogs are a waste of time. And that's not a very optimistic start, is it?*

* No, not really.

Meddling Middle Management

Originally Published in the London Paper on 27th April 2009 as 'The Middle Men Caused This Mess'

As I travelled to work one morning in a crammed tube carriage with my head wedged into the armpit of a man I was sure I recognised from Channel Five's The World's Sweatiest Man I glumly reflected on my situation and realised that we were squashed together because our middle managers insisted we all start work at the same time, and we were stuck in a tunnel because TFL management had once again failed to prevent delays from occurring. But as I thought about it more I came to a startling conclusion: far from simply being an irritation as we go about our working lives, middle management are in fact responsible for virtually everything wrong with the world today.

To illustrate this, consider the following examples: first, there's the breakdown in law and order, which has largely come about because police officers have become so bogged down by quotas and paperwork set by managers that they no longer have time to chase criminals other than ones who can be easily convicted, meaning that muggers go free whilst prisons fill up with those insane criminal geniuses who put the wrong kind of plastics in their recycling bags. Then there's the economic crisis, which is usually blamed on bankers until you remember that it was triggered by the collapse in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and that came about because estate agents ran out of financially reliable people to sell mortgages to so started lending to inbred yokels in order to meet the never-ending targets set by their managers. The crisis then spread when middle managers across the world reacted with their traditional herd mentality: instead of devising original, long-term solutions to the problem they simply made people redundant so it looked like they were doing something.

It's the same if you look at any other situation, like how the NHS became more concerned with chasing targets than actually curing people, which raises an important question: why is it that the only people who can't see that middle managers do very little except obsess over irrelevant statistics and pointless rules, are the board of directors, the only ones who can do anything about them? Well, unfortunately I didn't have time to think of an explanation: when I got to work it was 9.01 so I had to spend the next two hours in a disciplinary meeting and then write a 10,000 word report on my unacceptable lateness...

Warning: Big Bum is Immiment

Originally Printed in the London Paper, 11th March 2009

If you’re feeling guilty that we’re barely two months into 2009 but your New Year’s resolution is already a vague and distant memory then you should take comfort in the knowledge that this is traditionally the time of year when the government’s annual attempt to get the British public to lead healthier lives also fizzles out in cloud of disinterest. Each year it seems that the finest minds in Whitehall spend months racking their brains and then end up doing the same thing they do every year, namely producing a series of annoying TV ads and posters at bus stops that politely ask us to be healthier without offering any real incentive or assistance. Judging by this year’s efforts they have once again squandered a budget running to several hundred pounds so I’d like to offer the following suggestions of how they should spend next year's money if they really want to improve the nation's health...

First, if packs of cigarettes can carry health warnings and pictures of their effect on your health then why can’t fast food do the same? Hamburgers could come in wrappers saying ‘WARNING: EATING THIS CAN LEAD TO YOU DEVELOPING HEART DISEASE, CANCER AND A BIG, FAT, SAGGY ARSE’. This could be accompanied by a picture of a diseased heart, congested arteries or (as I suspect would be more effective) a big, fat, saggy arse.

Second, the number of smokers could be massively reduced with two simple TV adverts. The first would target young people who think smoking is cool by featuring uncool celebrities such as Cliff Richard and Anthea Turner praising the habit (possibly whilst enjoying a post-coital smoke together) and telling viewers that they can be as cool as them by smoking, and the second would be run during the break in the Jeremy Kyle Show and feature Gary Glitter lighting up whilst smiling knowlingly at the audience, guaranteeing a massive drop in smokers of a tabloid reading nature. With these two cheap but effective adverts a huge burden on the NHS would be lifted overnight.

My third idea is perhaps the most controversial: instead of launching another inane ad campaign the government could do something really outrageous like subsidizing leisure centres to the extent that it's not more expensive to go for a swim than it is to stuff your face in McDonald's. But that really is a crazy idea, isn't it?