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England’s Screaming: The Apocalyptic Prescience of Martin Amis’s ‘London Fields,’ 30 Years Later

In 1989, Martin Amis released a tragedy, a comedy, a murder mystery, a (class) war story, and the Great British Novel. Back then ‘London Fields’ read as a dystopian satire—now it feels like realism.

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Time takes from us with two hands.

A street thug, a femme fatale, and a feckless member of the landed gentry meet by happenstance at a downscale London pub. It sounds like the setup to a joke, and in a sense it is.

The diabolical chain of events that follow, which comprise Martin Amis’s finest novel London Fields, are frightening, funny, and prescient. It is a trickily plotted murder mystery, a meditation on death and self-delusion, and a portrait of an empire in slow and inexorable decline. In the 30 years since Amis published London Fields , the world has been radically transformed by technological innovation and the terror and promise of the electronic age. And so it is strange, in a sense, that the United Kingdom as portrayed in London Fields seems exactly the same. The investor class and the working poor have never been further apart, racial and class divisions never easier to exploit, the media landscape never more distorting and alienating. If the prismatic clusterfuck of Brexit struck English outsiders as a cold shock, London Fields is a retrospective corrective to that narrative and a prophetic snapshot of the divided West in its current fractious moment.

For Amis, the scion of the wickedly funny and sometimes reprehensible British literary titan Kingsley Amis, London Fields is a best-case-scenario novel—a vehicle for an author uniquely qualified to report with one foot in the door and the other foot in the gutter. Like his father before him, it is safe to say the younger Amis knew both pubs and privilege. A lacerating satirist who, in certain works, can visit an almost uncomfortable degree of sadism on his characters, Amis is at his most humane in rendering London Fields ’ three major players, which is not the same as saying their sundry destinies aren’t uniquely cruel.

Indeed, the capacity for human cruelty and the expression of self-inflicted violence at a micro and macro scale is the novel’s great theme. In another timely gambit, London Fields is set against the backdrop of a mysterious but imminent ecocatastrophe, and the terrifying potential consequences create a painful irony against the intimate gyrations and machinations of Keith Talent, Guy Clinch, and Nicola Six. At the Black Cross pub, Nicola Six has met the man she hopes will murder her. It’s a good plan, but Earth is running out of time. Did I mention that London Fields is a comedy?

Darts is what the Brits do best in the afterglow of empire.

The crucial thing to know about Keith Talent—pub champion of the Black Cross, low-level criminal, and aspiring professional dartsman—is that he is truly a man of the people. But Keith isn’t above cheating the people, which is how he makes his living. He simply doesn’t put on airs in the process. Whatever combination of petty theft, home invasion, loan-sharking, fencing of counterfeit goods, and gypsy cab extortions he relies upon to drum up income is accomplished with the humble persistence of a simple lad doing what needs to be done in a dog-eat-dog world. This, anyway, is how Keith Talent views himself.

So, Keith is not an exemplar of self-awareness. A low-functioning heel with strangely high charisma, he is London Fields ’ id, objectionable in the extreme, but also exhaustingly likable within the frame of his comedic foibles. He has other problems besides his revolving-door relationship with jail and law enforcement: He is a sex addict, an alcoholic, and a married father who tends to forget he is married. Keith is stuck in a functional caste system with a fourth-grade education, but he is also movingly aspirational. He knows he is poor. But he watches wealthy people on TV and, by some complicated bit of psychic transference, convinces himself that he too might enjoy the too-sweet nectar of posh privilege … if he can get on TV. He slowly but surely makes his way through a citywide darts tournament (this requires some cheating), the finals of which are broadcast over the air.

As an anticipation of the ever-escalating, never-ending nightmare of the-rich-and-poor divide as played out on contemporary social media, Keith’s resentments are understandable and perhaps even galvanizing. He knows enough to know that those born of noble stature will never regard him as human. He feels the heat of disrespect acutely and often. When Guy Clinch walks into the Black Cross, Keith Talent immediately intuits the charged frequency of the smoke-filled air, which is changed by the obvious and anomalous fact of Guy’s wealth and access. When the lines of class are crossed, like unexploded munitions or electrified wires, the potential for danger is tangible and immediate.

The murderer was not always the murderer, but the murderee was always the murderee.

When Nicola Six walks into the Black Cross, on the other hand, Keith Talent immediately identifies her as a prospective addition to his ceaselessly spinning sexual roulette wheel. In this apprehension, Keith Talent is both right and wrong. Unlike his countless relatively low-stress assignations in London’s tenements and brothels, it might happen with Nicola, but it won’t be without additional complications. It’s all in how far he’s prepared to go and what he’s prepared to do. Keith Talent is a bad man, but he has limits, too.

Nicola Six—breathtaking, exhausted, exquisitely cultured, sexually ingenious—has been the psychological undoing of too many lords and barons and sheiks and captains of industry to ever be fully counted. And now, for reasons only hinted at, she has decided to call game on her glamorous life and be murdered. If you think you can’t just make anyone murder you, well then you just aren’t using your imagination. No character in literature this side of Macbeth is better at getting murdered than Nicola Six.

Nicola’s closest literary cousin is Phyllis Nirdlinger, the self-annihilating agent of chaos in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity , whose signature commingling of sex and slaughter similarly represent the polarities of Nicola’s preoccupations. In both instances, we do not know how these women arrived at this space, and in both, we have few leads to go on. But we have an inkling. At a certain juncture, at an impressionable age, you may treat yourself as others have treated you. And if something were allowed to happen—say you were in danger and no one protected you—then total revenge is all that’s left.

Guy Clinch had everything. In fact he had two of everything.

Relative to Keith Talent, Guy Clinch is a good man, and while that is a very low bar, it counts for something in a world where cheating others in some form or fashion is increasingly the vocation of choice for wealthy and poor alike. Guy is not a cheat, but he is importuned. Things are not going well in his personal life, and this is what causes him to screw up his courage and enter the Black Cross, where very soon things will start getting incalculably worse. In briefly indulging his desire to live like common people, he has provided access to the otherwise impregnable ramparts of his social standing, and the assault forms immediately. Outside of the Black Cross, Guy possesses material resources to deal with any problem. Inside the hellish socioeconomic labyrinth of the Black Cross he is utterly helpless— helpless like a rich man’s child.

Guy is a wealthy heir—tall, well mannered and irritatingly handsome—with a key role in the family business. He doesn’t know exactly what the family business does anymore—at some point finance is just an abstraction—but he accepts his role just the same. The nagging issues that compelled him into the Black Cross in the first place are understandable enough: a wife who doesn’t love or maybe even like him, and a monstrous infant named Marmaduke who reigns over their lives with the temperament of violent dictator (in a story that contains significant violence, it is a tribute to Amis that 10-month-old Marmaduke is by far its most overtly frightening character).

Within the framework of London Fields ’ escalating contest of skulduggery, Guy is almost pathetically overmatched, a glaring target for con artists, career criminals, single-minded sociopaths, and a femme fatale so acute in her capacity to generate desperation in men that it is almost a cause to feel sorry for Guy. But not quite.

Anyway, in one regard, Guy really has the jump. A genuine aristocrat with huge financial resources, he has access to the actual truth. The Americans are halting immigration. The major markets are no longer trading. The problem is worse than we thought. Horrorday.

This was the fifth of November. This was Horrorday.

Governments won’t admit it and newspapers won’t report on it and those unaffected live in a hardened, even acrimonious state of denial. And yet, in truth, everyone can tell: The Earth is sick. In distant places it is throwing up its oceans and growing tumors on its land masses. Long predicted, the mass shortages and the attendant wars have begun in earnest. First-world countries labor to limit the mayhem to third- and fourth-world countries. In America, the Pentagon hopes that limited war will help to stem the shortages: “Cathartic war” is their chosen term of art. They know there will be something else new, another coinage: “superwar.” Even in London and New York, far from the carnage, deep down, people know something’s off. The sun is too close. The weather is too strange. The Earth is really dying.

On August 22, 1914, in the Battle of the Frontiers, 27,000 French men died in one day of fighting. How’s that for efficiency? How’s that for technological advance? And the atomic bomb: 150,000 evaporated. The events of Horrorday will make all of this look like small beer. The pain will be so acute and the deprivations so real that benign modes of death will be the most searched for topic by the living. Cruelty and despair in metric tons. Borders sewn shut. Hordes of needy turned away. This is the passion play London Fields is dress rehearsing. And London Fields is a comedy. The real thing won’t be remotely funny.

There are one or two things left to write.

Like any good mystery writer, Amis threads plenty of red herrings and startling surprises and diabolical misdirections throughout London Fields . Like any serial withholder, he dangles the keys to the mystery straight down to the bitter end. And for the major players, the end is bitter indeed.

And then there is this: a final mystery ultimately more consequential than the collective fates of dumb Keith Talent and dense Guy Clinch and doomed Nicola Six. There is the mystery of innocence. Two different infants figure prominently in London Fields. There is Marmaduke, a scientific study in untrammeled malevolence who makes it impossible to employ a nanny for more than a week without the threat of litigation. And then there is Kim, the spawn of Keith Talent who is temperamentally wondrous—a loving and engaging girl who does not have—at least not yet—the context for the misery she is being raised in.

Amis is having fun here—the heel has the golden child, the hero has the golem—but in truth, both creations are remarkable. They are life forces that must be protected at any cost. If London Fields is facially an indictment of an old world (one maybe not worth saving), it is also a subtle prayer for those still born into it. The next Brexit vote is December 12.

Did I mention London Fields is a tragedy?

Elizabeth Nelson is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist, television writer, and singer-songwriter in the garage-punk band the Paranoid Style.

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Review: London Fields by Martin Amis

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Succintly put - i liked this review!

Your review is also very interesting. I also felt the urgency to understand more about the novel. What about that terrible toddler or the First Lady's ill-health, for example? Martin Amis is a sort of a puzzle, sometimes.

It's terribly interesting isn't it Stefania? Marmaduke is quite a puzzle, he provides Guy and Keith's families with a nice symmetry, but there is surely more to his oedipal character than that? I've heard it suggested that he represents America - the unruly spawn of an ailing British nation but I think a little more thought is necessary on my part before I can get my head round him. Any interpretations welcome...

This is a very good review of what in my opinion was the last of Amis' truly great works. I have always reacted unevenly to Martin Amis. Either I love his books or I hate them. Money which pre-dates London Fields is when he really started to lose me (although he briefly got me back into the fold with London Fields). Unfortunately he followed Fields up with Time's Arrow which did nothing for me at all and then followed he followed that disappointment up with others.

Yes, I get the feeling that a lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Martin Amis and his fiction. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed Money, in fact I would rank it as one of the best things I have ever read. But I'm still new to the Amisian world, and preparing myself to hit a brick wall when I get past his most acclaimed titles. Still, fingers crossed I'm either ignorant enough to enjoy them or smart enough to find something the masses have missed. I wouldn't put my money on the latter.

I always welcome comments...

Analysis: The Outsider by Albert Camus

Analysis: Money by Martin Amis

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1001 Book Review: London Fields by Martin Amis

Murder mystery where the victim manipulates the murderer…

London Fields  by Martin Amis Published in: 1989 Reviewed by: Book Worm Rating: [★★★]

Blurb from the back of the book: There is a murderer, there is a murderee and there is a foil.

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story.

But the murderee – Nicola Six – is searching for something and someone else; her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means she just doesn’t know the man.

Book Worm’s Thoughts: I read the blurb and thought yes! this sounds like a unique and fun kind of novel promising a twisted narrative, unfortunately the book didn’t live up to the blurb.

This book is very much a book of its time and I found a lot of the humour with regard to racism and rape made this an uncomfortable read. This may be my fault and I may be reading too much into it but the age of #metoo has really shone a light on the appalling way victims of rape and sexual assault were treated in the 80s & 90s police reports were not followed up on and in a lot of cases the women were made to feel like they were to blame for what happened. So for me having a central character who goes around boasting about the women he has forced into sex (which is not the same as rape apparently as they didn’t report him) just doesn’t appeal to me.

What did appeal to me about the book was the way the narrator was part of the story he meets his characters in the pub and begins to interact with them on a daily basis. As he gets to know them better his idea of a straightforward murder story goes of the rails and he becomes caught up in their lives in ways he never expected.

There are a lot of funny sections and I enjoyed the word play and the casual mentions of several classic writers whose names you would not expect to come up in the scenarios that they did.

Nicola Six was an interesting character as she was the only female character who seemed to be in control of her own life and because she was the ones pulling the strings. The various men might think they were in control but really they were all being manipulated for her purpose.

When he was not “chasing skirt” Keith was also an interesting character I liked his working class background, the way he genuinely appears to believe that crime is an acceptable way of improving your situation in life, I like the way he would speak random words and how he commentated on his own life and any sporting situation, I also enjoyed the way he thought about numbers – given any number he would work out the best way to get to that number using a dart board it was interesting to watch his mind work.

I also liked the over the top way the London of the 1980s was portrayed, the conmen conning conmen, the builders you couldn’t trust and the surfeit of burglars. I could relate to all these things and see how they had been taken to a humourous extreme. If only the book could have avoided all the sexual connotations and stuck with darts and pubs I probably would have enjoyed it more. That said if I had read this before #metoo I may also have appreciated the sexual humour, who can say…

Quotes – “Only parents and torturers and janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.” page 33 and already the way humour is used is beginning to feel uncomfortable.

“”Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars and doing the same back.” Page 276 I did find this section amusing.

In summary I don’t feel that this book was for me but I can appreciate that it is cleverly constructed and does make the reader think.

Who would like this? I would recommend this to anyone who likes black humour and won’t be upset by the use of rape and sexual assault as a tool for humour. Just because this book wasn’t for me doesn’t mean it won’t be for you.

We want to hear from you! Have you read this book? What did you think? 

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Thank you for the review. I am in the middle of reading London Fields and one of the things I am finding prescient given it having been written in the 80’s, is the background theme of both natural and manmade diasters that threatens to overwhelm the day to day events of the book. The “crisis” is never explained but is evidently political and nationalistic in some way and the weather and the sun are both behaving very strangely with monsoons and heatwaves in London. It does remind me of climate change disasters bearing down on us while “we” go about our day to day lives as best one can. I will comment further once I have finished reading the book.

I listened to this, and I think it affected my perspective differently. I took it as a tongue in cheek detective noir-style, and every character was a caricature. I actually liked this, because it had more layers than I expected. And I like a book with an unreliable narrator- which we certainly got!

I think that is part of my problem with the rape aspect of the book the fact it was treated tongue in cheek and as something amusing I guess at the time it was written we didn’t understand how rape victims were being treated and how much was just swept under the carpet and dismissed.

If we could have left that aspect out of the book I think it was very well written and entertaining.

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Jen’s Rating system

★ Hated it & no redeeming additional qualities noted. Recommend avoiding it. ★★ Disliked it, may have 1 redeeming quality (writing style, novelty, etc). ★★★ Liked it or may have a few interesting qualities. ★★★★ Really liked it & it has at least a couple interesting qualities. ★★★★★ Loved almost everything about it. Only a few, if any, minor limitations noted.

Book Worm’s rating system

★ Bah I really hated this would not even pass this to my worst enemy ★★ I really didn't like this but would consider giving it to my worst enemy for vengeful purposes ★★★ this was an enjoyable way to pass the time not great not horrendous ★★★★ really enjoyed this book there was something about it that made me think ★★★★★ wow I loved this book I am now out recommending it to all my friends, will keep to re read even though I have banned re reads

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Literary Review

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20th Century , Fiction , London

Disease, Decay, Death

Get rich quick, six of the best, london fields, by martin amis, jonathan cape 448pp £11.95.

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters : Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth . In his essay ‘Thinkability’ he wrote that ‘the theme of nuclear weapons resists frontal assault. For myself I feel it is a background which then insidiously foregrounds itself. This is an apt description of London Fields where at some stage in the near future a nuclear and an ecological crisis are proceeding behind the personal crises of the characters in the main story.

Yet this is no Ben Elton or Raymond Briggs. It is unmistakable Martin Amis: deadly serious and very funny. The jokes are just blacker and further apart. And if it is about love and death instead of success and money it is still about being a writer as well.

An American author, Samson Young, is suffering from ten years of writer’s block. He swaps flats with a more successful English writer whose initials are MA and then discovers a real life plot going on in front of him which he merely has to write down as it happens. This narrative is what we read, as Samson

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London Fields

Martin amis. harmony, $19.95 (0pp) isbn 978-0-517-57718-9.

Reviewed on: 01/30/1990

Genre: Fiction

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Review: In ‘London Fields,’ Sex, Apocalypse and Writer’s Block

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

• Oct. 25, 2018

“London Fields,” directed by Matthew Cullen and adapted from Martin Amis’s 1989 novel , is, quite simply, horrendous — a trashy, tortured misfire from beginning to end.

In limbo for years because of a number of legal disputes, this laboriously bizarre picture is narrated by Samson Young (Billy Bob Thornton, drained and dispirited), a dying, creatively stalled American writer who has swapped apartments with a celebrated British author (Jason Isaacs).

“There was no book without the girl,” Samson intones as his mysteriously mourning muse, Nicola Six (Amber Heard), appears in black veil and a cloud of pheromones. The year is 1999 and some kind of worldwide catastrophe is unfolding, but Nicola’s main problems seem to be a lack of outerwear and the ability to foresee her own murder. Whether her lover-cum-killer will be the besotted banker (Theo James), the cretinous criminal (an odiously mouth-breathing Jim Sturgess), or Samson himself is a riddle we could not possibly be less interested in solving.

The arrival of Johnny Depp as a ludicrously dressed gangster with an entourage of weirdos does nothing to reverse that position. (It does, however, signal that the movie’s costume designer was having much more fun than any of its stars.) Failing to even glancingly approximate the book’s trippy energy or linguistic dazzle, Cullen ricochets between Heard’s slow-motion, perfume-ad close-ups and lurid, comic-book noir. The result is alienating and bogus, as senseless as the image of Nicola’s floating, diaphanous panties.

“I’m pretty worried that the critics are going to call you a male fantasy figure,” Samson frets. Done.

Rated R for vulgarity, violence and smutty voyeurism. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

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Ever since Martin Amis published his 1989 novel London Fields , most of its readers have said two things about it—that his trippy and oh-so-meta murder mystery meditation was one of the finest works of his entire career, and that it was written in such a specific and unique manner that it would be all but impossible to transform it into a film. Of course, this has not stopped people from attempting to bring it to the big screen over the years. But not even the likes of David Cronenberg or Michael Winterbottom —each of whom has had past success with films based on books deemed impossible to film with, respectively, “ Naked Lunch ” and “Tristram Shandy”—were able to figure out how to do it. Now, at long last, the film version of “London Fields” has finally emerged after a long delay—it began filming in 2013 and has been mired in legal difficulties ever since it was pulled from the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival at the last second—and if it does anything, it proves once and for all that it is a property that should have been left on the page. A boring and garish mess that even fans of the book will find nearly impossible to follow, this is easily the most embarrassing film with which Amis has ever been even vaguely connected.

Set in 1999, the film opens as Samson Young ( Billy Bob Thornton ), a blocked and terminally ill American author, arrives in London—which is itself teetering on the edge of anarchy for vaguely explained reasons—to stay in the luxurious apartment belonging to wildly successful writer Mark Aspery (Jason Issacs), who has taken his crummy New York hovel in exchange. At a local pub, he meets three people who will prove to have a great impact on his life and work over the next few weeks. The first is Keith Talent ( Jim Sturgess ), an obnoxious cab driver and would-be darts champion who spends his days drinking heavily, running petty scams and abusing his long-suffering wife ( Cara Delevingne , who spends about as much time on screen as it took me to type her name). Next is Guy Clinch ( Theo James ), a blandly handsome upper-class type who feels trapped in his life with a cold and unfeeling wife (Jamie Alexander) and a vile creep of a young son ( Craig Garner ). Last, but certainly not least, is Nicola Six ( Amber Heard ), a femme fatale type who attracts the attentions of practically every man she comes across and claims to be clairvoyant as well.

This latter point is significant because Nicola specializes in seeing when people will die and that includes herself as well. She knows that she will die on her rapidly approaching 30th birthday (on Guy Fawkes Day, no less) and even the type of implement that will be used to do it. The only thing that has eluded her is the identity of her murderer but after the pub visit, she is convinced that one of the others will be the one. Rather than try to alter her fate, Nicola instead tries to assure that her killing will come off as planned by running concurrent scams on Keith and Guy—she uses her considerable wiles to spur Keith on to make it to a big darts championship where he will compete against Chick Purchase ( Johnny Depp ), who is both his greatest rival and the guy to whom he owes a lot of money while posing as a pure and innocent type to Guy in order to get thousands of pounds out of him that will supposedly go to a Burmese refugee by the name of Enola Gay and her son, known only as Little Boy. As for Samson, it turns out that Nicola lives in the flat right above his and he gets her to agree to let him follow her around during what are presumably her final days and use her death as grist for his next and presumably last novel.

“London Fields” more or less follows the parameters of the book, but the plot is one of the less important aspects of the source. What made the book so great was the way in which Amis told his story—a darkly funny meta-fictional construct in which the reader could never be sure that what they were reading was actually happening. Unfortunately, while director Matthew Cullen (the auteur of numerous Katy Perry videos) and screenwriter Robin Hanley have used large chunks of dialogue and narration taken straight from the novel, they never manage to find a cinematic equivalent to Amis’ authorial voice. The end result is a film that contains scenes that readers will recognize from the book, but which seem to have no dramatic or emotional relation to each.

The cast is almost as ill-served as the book. Heard is essentially asked to do two things—portray a character who can effortlessly move from one persona to another in order to get what she wants and model a lot of lingerie. Granted, the script is so formless and confused that the role would stymie any actress, but she just does not project the kind of mystery and allure that a character like hers needs. As her two rivals, Sturgess overacts monstrously as the loutish Keith while James is so nondescript that he barely makes any impression at all. Billy Bob Thornton, on the other hand, seems to have realized early on that this was going to be a stinker and just coasts through the proceedings with the minimal amount of energy required to keep him propped up. As for Depp, his cameo is yet another one of the self-consciously bizarro turns that has defined his career as of late but at least he gives the film a couple of sorely needed jolts of energy. (As for Depp and Heard, who made this film before beginning their short-lived marriage and eventual ugly split, they have one scene together that will leave most viewers thinking “Ewwww.”)

“London Fields” is a terrible movie but perhaps the worst thing about it is that it doesn’t even have the dignity to be an interesting terrible movie—the kind of jaw-dropping disaster like “ Candy ” or “Myra Breckenridge” that is so uniquely awful that it somehow generates a perverse sort of interest that keeps one watching. This, by comparison, is just a top-to-bottom dud that will enrage fans of the book and perplex those unfamiliar with it. There is no doubt a long and sad story of how such a great book became such a lousy movie. If/when that tale is told, I can almost guarantee it will probably be funnier, stranger and more outrageous than "London Fields" itself. 

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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Film credits.

London Fields (2018)

Rated R for sexual content/nudity, language throughout, some violence and drug use.

118 minutes

Amber Heard as Nicola Six

Theo James as Guy Clinch

Jim Sturgess as Keith Talent

Billy Bob Thornton as Samson Young

Cara Delevingne as Kath Talent

Jaimie Alexander as Hope

Jason Isaacs as Mark Asprey

Lily Cole as Trish Shirt

Gemma Chan as Petronella

Johnny Depp as Chick Purchase (uncredited)

• Mathew Cullen
• Martin Amis
• Roberta Hanley
• Fred Fouquet

Director of Photography

• Guillermo Navarro

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England Is Mine by Nicolas Padamsee review – battle lines are drawn

Two teenage boys come of age in a divided and radicalised London in this politically charged debut

T he perilous porousness between our online and offline worlds is the spark for Nicolas Padamsee’s tinderbox thriller about two teenage boys. Deeply astute and devastating in its commentary on immigrant communities, England Is Mine joins a new generation of politically charged novels – including Megha Majumdar’s A Burning and Priya Guns’s Your Driver Is Waiting – in exposing the power and pitfalls of online platforms.

Two youths, David and Hassan, whose intertwined tales are told by turns, are students at the same school in east London. David is a strict vegan and has few friends. He doesn’t plan on going to university (“There would be no reading novels anyway, he thinks. There would only be criticising novels for their heteronormativity, their whiteness, their Europeanness, their whateverness”). As an Anglo-Iranian, he perpetually feels the burden of the question “Where are you from?” His parents are divorced. Between caring for his vulnerable father on the one hand, and bickering with his overbearing but well-meaning mother on the other, he is forced to flit between two houses but rarely feels at home.

He puts all his faith and teenage angst into music – and his hero, Karl Williams, reminiscent of Morrissey from the Smiths. A series of bigoted comments get the singer-songwriter in trouble, and, soon enough, he is cancelled. The news further unmoors David. Slowly at first, then very swiftly, he begins to lose himself to the far-right corners of the dark web – full of trolls, rows and racists.

Meanwhile, Hassan, a West Ham fan, dutiful son and diligent student, is drifting apart from his childhood friends, who care less about grades and more about drugs and drinking. He finds it hard to shrug off comments that reveal “the way white people in Britain see Muslims”, and is determined to defy false perceptions and get into Goldsmiths. But a violent, racially motivated encounter in a park involving both boys radically alters their life trajectories.

Scarred by this event, David begins to lose his sense of self. He lets himself fall prey to – and eventually participate in – the anti-Islam rhetoric to which he’s exposed online. Hassan, who was an innocent bystander, becomes his enemy and therefore his victim. In the pages that follow, he is reduced to nothing more than “the Muslim” in David’s mind; David becomes “the Aryan”. Now, there’s no room for nuance.

The pace, which is skilfully sustained through 300 pages, quickens as notifications from Twitter (now called X) and YouTube pile-ons keep phones buzzing, then steadies as the two boys face violent moments in the streets. Whether David is in the mosh pit at a gig or caught up in Call of Duty, whether Hassan is playing online Fifa or volunteering for a Muslim Youth Centre helpline, the novel never loses sight of the reader, whether they can relate to gamer and football culture or not.

Padamsee tackles difficult issues – cancel culture, freedom of speech, online radicalism and neo-nazism, masculinity, racial identity, and herd mentality – with a deftness rare for debuts. For his second-generation immigrants, seeking some semblance of belonging in an alienating world, the stakes get ever higher.

As the two teenagers come of age – their beliefs hardened, their hearts broken – we are left questioning our politics and ethics. Who draws the lines between right and left, right and wrong, and what happens when those lines are redrawn, or entirely erased? England is mine. England is  mine. England is mine . When the country you call home doesn’t consider you one of its own, who or what will you live – or die – for? Sometimes all you’re left with are desperate, hollow cries in the dark.

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