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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...

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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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Martin Amis: London Fields (1989)

Carla Scura

London Fields , often regarded as the strongest of Martin Amis’s novels, is commonly considered as the middle part of his London trilogy, along with Money (1984) and The Information (1995). It’s been an enduring success, and there have been several attempts to adapt the novel for film. It is innovative, a state-of-the-art literary work, which reflects Amis’s clairvoyant vision of London.

The year 1989 came at the end of an awful decade for the environment. We witnessed rising ecological awareness along with a succession of environmental disasters. A pervasive fear of the atomic bomb remained palpable with the Cold War still in the background.

At the same time, 1989 became instantly charged with global symbolism. It was the year of  the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which paved the way for a new, unexpected world order, so much so that there was talk of the ‘end of history’. The dissolution of the binary opposition (Washington/Moscow) in geopolitics was in some measure reproduced more widely, with a sense of merry catastrophe into the next decade – already seen as particularly crucial because of the numerical, temporal coincidences that beat the time of human existence.

This was the ideal setting for the creation of a novel such as London Fields , published in 1989 and set in 1999, and so embracing those numerical and temporal coincidences. The novel had an unusually lengthy gestation period. Martin Amis began working on it in 1983 and initially had in mind a long short story of perhaps a hundred pages. He saw the work in progress expanding, taking different shapes over six years that were formative for the author, in the personal as well as the professional sphere. So it really is the painful outcome of the 1980s, soaked with then dominant concerns but very much projected onto the future – and onto a symbolical date that lends itself to one of the dimensions of his novel, the apocalyptic.

The Plot in Outline

Samson Young, an unsuccessful American writer, swaps houses with Mark Asprey, a fashionable British writer who lives in Notting Hill. We are in 1999, and Samson Young sets foot in Europe after having been away for ten years. He’s looking for some inspiration for his last novel – he’s seriously ill after radiation exposure – so he manages to make friends with three people he meets by chance in a pub in Portobello Road. He also manages to develop the relations between them, who didn’t know each other well. He parasitizes the complex plot hatched by beautiful Nicola Six against rich Guy Clinch, from whom – by way of her erotic and intellectual appeal – she’s able to steal a huge quantity of money after inventing two characters in distress in Cambodia. To help with her plot the hooligan Keith Talent comes in handy, not least because he can be easily manipulated. All three characters seem to have motive for killing the dark lady, who has always known that she would die on the day of the 35th birthday – November 5th, 1999. Meanwhile, both the weather and the political situation in London are on the verge of catastrophe …

There were earlier examples of ‘visionary’ London fictions, of course. Among the more recent  precedents, Mother London by Michael Moorcock and The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie were both published in 1988 (it was in 1989 that a fatwa was issued against Rushdie). Moorcock’s novel describes a fantastic London that is turned towards the past, absorbed in listening to the voices of its own ghosts. Nonetheless, with its jabs into four different periods of the twentieth century city – including a London destroyed by German bombs in World War Two – Mother London displays an almost cinematic view of the city, in a manner  reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis . Rushdie’s Satanic Verses foreshadows a post-metropolis, since London, centre of the former Empire, ‘Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville’, is the fulcrum of the magical world of the novel and of History.

The other 1980s visionary account of the city was Alan Moore’s revolutionary graphic novel V for Vendetta . This has recently enjoyed much attention and was made into a very popular film in 2005. Moore set his dystopian London in the 1990s, following a nuclear war in the infamous 1980s. It was published in instalments from 1982 through to … 1989.

So, London 1989. Or rather London Fields, 1999. London Fields is the name of a railway station on the Cambridge line (and which, in one of those bizarre coincidences of life and art, serves the area where another key London writer and visionary, Iain Sinclair, lives). It’s a district of Hackney redolent with history and old-time pleasures: sixteenth century botanists explored it, the diarist Samuel Pepys practiced archery there, and cricket has been played on its fields ever since 1789. Its residents played up this heritage when their neighbourhood was seen in a less-than-positive light thanks to  Amis’s novel – though he was not the first to resort to such an evocative, oxymoron-like name: there was a 1983 precedent, a London Fields written by John Milne.

Yet Amis only borrowed the place name. His novel is set entirely in Notting Hill several miles away on the other side of central London, in the districts of W10 and W11. The area is sketched out with topographical precision by the movements of the main characters: Golborne Road’s skyscraper, Portobello Road, Lansdowne Crescent. Setting the novel in Notting Hill not only added to the author’s ‘folklore’ (he lived there for many years), but in a very limited space basically offers a setting that characterizes the city, an extraordinary compression and contiguity of extremes ranging from the luxurious Victorian town houses of Notting Hill proper to the village atmosphere of Portobello Road and the low-cost, down-at-heel buildings near the canal. As far as the plot goes, this allows the otherwise unlikely meeting in a local pub of such disparate characters as The Foil, The Murderee, The Murderer, and the American writer.

‘[T]here are two kinds … two orders of title … The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page’. It becomes evident as you read the novel that Amis went for the latter option, reinforcing this by way of an almost poetic reiteration of the title in the closing words of the introduction: ‘So let’s call it London Fields ’. This introductory note contains the coordinates of the novel: London/end of century, each the epitome of the other.

Time, Space, Point of View

After the time coordinates have been provided, we are presented with the space coordinates. London is mentioned in the second page, after New York, thus fuelling the reader’s expectation. ‘Not a whodunit. More a whydoit. I am … a queasy cleric … an accessory before the fact’.

From the beginning, the narrator addresses his own status as writer and artist, the nature of literary fiction, and the product he’s allegedly writing in real time. This speculative aspect is a constant companion to the unfolding events: and as far as the plot is concerned, the final comment in this chapter – ‘If London is a spider’s web, then where do I fit in? Maybe I’m the fly’ – offers a sense of foreboding.

The novel has a neat structure. Chapters are divided into two sections: the first is plot based and told by an invisible, omniscient, and third person narrator – conventional storytelling, with a few passages of interior monologue and direct speech. The narrator, Samson Young, takes the floor in the second section, which has a more meditative aspect. Entire sequences are retold, sometimes more than once, taking on the points of view of the different parties, or revisiting one thread of the story from varying viewpoints. This well organized structure mirrors a complex, web-like plot, a real stratification playing with time and points of view.

The effect of this constant adjustment of focus is heightened by frequent flash-forwards and pauses, introduced courtesy of the narrator. Most of these are false trails, as the reader will find out. The surprise, and role reversal, at the end brings you back to the prologue: ‘not a whodunit, more a whydoit’ – or rather it disavows this statement, and by doing so revives the murder story at the core of the book which had apparently been diminished, ridiculed and disregarded.

So London Fields , with totally disintegrated unity of time, elects end-of-century London – and more exactly Notting Hill – as a consistent unity of place.

London and its counterpart

The location of the novel is proclaimed in the prologue, as if a programme:

Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as a cobweb. … It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniac worry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. London’s pub aura, that’s certainly intensified: the smoke and the builders’ sand and dust, the toilet tang, the streets like a terrible carpet. … I always felt I knew where England was heading. America was the one you wanted to watch…

The newly-arrived American writer represents the city with words that point to the senses – sight, smell, touch. It couldn’t be an inch more negative. London’s inadequacy is highlighted by comparison with its antagonist across the ocean, New York. The two worlds – the north European and the north American, the most advanced hubs of civilization – are contrasted dialectically, while no other geographical realities are considered save for vacations in Spain and in Venice (which play out as expensive and unhappy experiences for the characters).

The city of London, illumined by a strange light owing to an abnormal inclination of the Earth’s axis, menaced by mysterious ‘dead clouds’, and subject to mass evacuation measures, interacts in several ways with the plot and the characters. The storyline unfolds from a very precise spot, The Black Cross pub on Portobello Road, ‘on a day of thunder’ when, still unknown to each other, the male characters are drinking there:

If London’s a pub and you want the whole story, then where do you go? You go to a London pub. And that single instant in the Black Cross set the whole story in motion.

With her entrance, the female character and Murderee works quite literally as a catalyser, attracting in her orbit, and more precisely in the web she will patiently weave over the following months, the other main characters. Well into the novel, the narrator discloses he was there too, and relates how he was gradually welcomed into the pub’s small community. Of course, Keith Talent (‘The Murderer’) will play the role of a bizarre Virgil for the narrator – still unnamed, by the way.

The primary plot – the murder story proper – runs alongside at least three parallel sub-plots, which all have consequences for the three male characters. Such a web-like plot fits well with the urban setting. The female protagonist, however, has no secondary storylines – the numerous flash-backs apart – as this character is totally absorbed by the main storyline, which is literally her destiny. Indeed, she moulds her destiny: ‘We’re not all puppetmasters like you’, the narrator comments. As soon as Nicola Six – who is always aware what will befall her – enters the fatal pub, she knows she has finally met her murderer (‘I’ve found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him’). She only has to induce him to do it, because ‘[t]he murderer was not yet a murderer’.

The author’s ability lies in having the reader believe that the victim knows who will be her murderer, without her ever coming clean about his identity. Indeed, the narrator orients the whole story to spread false trails and wrong assumptions. The real narrator, then, is Nicola.

Breaking all narrational codes and contradicting his own role as witness, the narrator seeks vengeance on the ‘Murderer’ and the ‘Foil’ and finish off his leading character, who has cooked the books once the book was written. The scene that has appeared throughout the novel is thus resolved:

The black cab will move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. She will walk down the dead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; its lights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger door swings open. His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see shattered glass on the passenger seat and the car-tool ready on his lap. ‘Get in.’ She will lean forward. ‘You,’ she will say, in intense recognition: ‘Always you.’ ‘Get in.’ And in she’ll climb…

This passage, a flash-forward (note the future tense) rich in potentially misleading details, recurs in at least four other places in the novel, highlighting the sense of impending destiny. The scene is visually striking, bearing the traits of a noir film. Expectation is fuelled, because ‘his face will be barred in darkness’ until the actual ending, when the Murderer will have understood he’s the one at last, and the scene will be told, for the last time, in the first person and the past tense: ‘My face was barred in darkness’.

City, Love, Catastrophe

This intriguing plot is deeply rooted in the city, a dejected London set in the semi-future. An on-going global crisis is repeatedly mentioned, but no explanation or context is provided so its nature remains irritatingly obscure. We can only infer that it’s something to do with both politics and the weather. This emphasizes a sense of disintegration in the texture of the metropolis.

Changes in weather and time have led to local phenomena such as ‘people growing up and getting old in the space of a single week. Like the planet in the twentieth century, with its fantastic coup de vieux. Here, in the Black Cross, time was a tube train with the driver slumped heavy over the lever, flashing through station after station’, or ‘the recent convulsions … Particularly the winds. They tear through the city‘.

Amis offers another, distinctively British, example of decay:

There was no one in the telephone box. But there was no telephone in it either. There was no trace of a telephone in it. And there was no hint or vestige of a telephone in the next half-dozen he tried. These little glass ruins seemed only to serve as urinals … Vandalism had moved on to the human form. People now treated themselves like telephone boxes.

There’s mention of emergency measures: ‘Shepherds Bush cordoned off again…’; ‘Contingency plans. Partial evacuation of Central London’. These warnings come unannounced to the reader, as if a state of emergency were customary.

Besides these snapshots of the city, the sense of an impending catastrophe is conveyed by two principal images, rain and the so-called ‘dead clouds’. The former, ‘the unwholesome rain’, recurs constantly, as it will in many other works by different authors over the next two decades: ‘Ten o’clock, and it was dark outside. … Even the rain was dark’; ‘The rain made toadstools of the people on the street. … as the wet souls converged at the entrance to the underground, faceless stalks’ (an inevitable reference to T.S. Eliot); ‘The rain is terrible. It wouldn’t look so bad in a jungle or somewhere, coming like this, but in a northern city, suspended from soiled clouds. … These gusts of rain’; ‘diagonal arrow showers of reeking rain’; until –

[o]utside, the rain stopped falling. Over the gardens and the mansion-block rooftops, over the window boxes and TV aerials, over Nicola’s skylight and Keith’s dark tower (looming like a calipered leg dropped from heaven), the air gave an exhausted and chastened sigh. For a few seconds every protuberance of sill and eave steadily shed water like drooling teeth. There followed a chemical murmur from both street and soil as the ground added up the final millimetres of what it was being asked to absorb. Then a sodden hum of silence.

This beautiful view of the wet city offers a classic urban image, combined with a tense, foreboding vision.

Dead clouds, allegedly a by-product of the reckless exploitation of the Earth’s environment, loom over already worn-out cities. In London Fields , the narrator ‘ saw a dead cloud not long ago. I mean right close … The dead cloud came and oozed and slurped itself against the window. God’s foul window rag. Its heart looked multicellular. I thought of fishing-nets under incomprehensible volumes of water, or the motes of a dead TV’. The objective gaze of a virtual camera watching London describes them as follows: ‘a dead cloud collapsing into the fog of dark rain’; ‘The weather has a new number, or better say a new angle . And I don’t mean the dead clouds. … The weather really shouldn’t be doing this’;

Shaped like a top-heavy and lopsided stingray … a dead cloud dropped out of the haze and made its way, with every appearance of effort, into the dark stadium of the west. … Dead clouds made you hate your father. Dead clouds made love hard.

From one image to the next, the author’s theory becomes clearer: in London Fields , objects and phenomena are always symbolic, and a crucial connection is established with the theme of the death of love.

There is one more symbolic form of the planet’s implosion, a less obvious but very loud one: the Nicola Six character. Not only does she significantly live in a dead-end street, but her sex preferences are expounded in a chapter where syllogisms and literary parallels are also drawn: ‘With her, light went the other way… The black hole weighed in at ten solar masses, but was no wider than London. … That’s what I am , she used to whisper to herself after sex. A black hole. Nothing can escape from me ’.

If love in 1999 is no more – one of the novel’s alternate titles was to be The Death of Love – then sex turns into a black hole, an entropic, deadly process.

(Re)presentation of a city

By way of a set of literary devices and a wide-ranging vision including extensive use of the fourth dimension, the London of London Fields is far from a conventional representation of the city. Martin Amis shaped a London less virtual than you would have imagined in the 1980s.

With this novel, we see an apocalyptic city, possibly the best representation of the feelings and states of mind at the turn of the millennium. It is a city with a stratified, multi-directional texture that the reader can only access through a forever partial and ultimately treacherous perspective. In this ‘not a whodunit, more a whydoit’, the oppressive apocalyptic imagery is relieved by the comic quality of the social satire, which draws on Amis’s talent as observer and humorist. His city is deeply rooted in the existing topography but can be transfigured into a visionary metropolis – all through a very small but highly symbolic shift in time, from the 1980s to 1999. His powerfully sharp vision of London manages to pull the capital out of its narrow geo-political borders and creates a universal, post-contemporary metropolis.

Carla Scura , PhD, wrote the book Dove comincia il tempo. La Londra di fine millennio nel cinema e nella letteratura (‘”Where time begins”: London in film and literature at the end of the millennium’) NEU, Rome 2007 – it includes a longer version of this article.She is a media professional, translator, content curator, and producer.

References and Further Reading

Victoria N. Alexander, ‘Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov’, The Antioch Review , Fall 1994

Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (New York: Viking Press, 1986)

James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995)

Brian Finney, ‘Narrative and Narrated Homicide in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields ’, Critique , 37, 1995

Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993)

Dmitrij S. Lichacev, ‘Le proprietà dinamiche dell’ambiente nelle opere letterarie’, in J. Lotman and B. Uspenskij (eds), Ricerche semiotiche (Turin: Einaudi, 1973)

Elisabeth Mahoney, ‘The People in Parentheses’ in D. B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997)

John Milne, London Fields (London: Heinemann, 1983)

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988)

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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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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Farf Looks At Books

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• Mar 6, 2020

Book Review: London Fields by Martin Amis

I started reading London Fields because it was recommended in an article on The Ringer. I’m familiar with some of Martin Amis’ short stories (and have loved what I read), but have never tackled a novel. After finishing this book, the results are…mixed.

The reason this was recommended in the Ringer article is that although this novel was written in the 80s, it sounds even more prescient today. The story revolves around a poor small-time London criminal named Keith who is devoting his life to women and darts (“Darts innit!”) in order to get on TV, a milquetoast upper class waste of space named Guy, and the seductress named Nicola who plays them off of each other. (Sidebar: Her full name is Nicola Six, and is sometimes referred to as Nikky. Is that a Motley Crue Easter egg? Did one influence the other?) The first reason this novel is such a reflection of our time is that these are easy stand-ins for Brexit voters, with Keith the stand-in for the uneducated and vaguely racist Brxiteers (“Heritage!”), Guy the out-of-touch Remainer, and Nicola kind of person who doesn’t even bother to have an opinion.

The second reason this is a reflection of our times is that as the story transpires, the environment is collapsing in the background. The sky is falling, the sun seems too close, and it all leads up to an eclipse on November 5th (Horror Day) with dangerous consequences.

So undoubtedly this is a meaningful book for this period of time. But is it enjoyable? Well…somewhat. The main characters are fine – pretty well developed, although each with attributes that park right next to the absurd. But each of these characters have several other characters orbiting around them, such as fellow regulars at the Black Cross Pub (Shakespeare, Zbig One, Zbig Two, F*cker), Keith and Guy’s respective families, Keith’s side pieces, etc. There are a LOT of characters in this book. At one point at the end, a revelation is made about a character called Richard…and I have no memory of a character named Richard being in the book (which may actually be a joke by Amis).

Not only are there a lot of characters, there are also a lot of actions (as opposed to story) in this book. There are a ton of things going on, but I can’t really tell how much of it was actually necessary to the story – it feels like it could have been condensed by half. Keeping in mind that the story is given away right at the beginning – even before the main characters meet, the book gives away that Nicola is going to be murdered, and tells you that Keith will be the murderer. Yes, there are twists and turns to get to what that ending becomes, but I can’t say that most of them actually move the plot forward.

Also, bear with me here: There is a narrator in this book. The narrator is the author of the book. The author is not named Martin Amis. The narrator is staying in London in the apartment of another author (with the initials MA) and is freely interacting with the other characters. Which he admits in the beginning he created, as it is his novel. Sound confusing? I thought it would make more sense as the novel kept going, but halfway through the book when the narrator is talking to Nicola about her thoughts on her upcoming murder it still feels awkward.

The story concludes on Horror Day, as the world seems to collapse on the same day Nicola’s murder is to happen (and, also, Keith’s darts championship). It was well set up (but seemingly more by the previous 30 pages than the first 300) and well executed. There is a late twist that does make some sense but is not 100% earned, but the ending is definitely the highlight of the book.

One other note: This is a book from the 80s. There is some racist language that I think represented Keith’s way of thinking but wasn’t well distinguished from the author’s. Nicola straddles the line between riot grrl and Bowie’s “China Girl” and can be problematic at times. Reading about some of Keith’s harem of women can be troubling, and there are issues of child and spousal abuse that come up in the second half of the book that don’t seem to get as much attention from the characters (or narrator) as they should. In essence, it was a different time, and if you can’t look past that, there’s no reason to proceed.

I can’t say that this was a BAD book – the main characters were well done, there were many funny moments, it’s a perfect encapsulation of our time (just written 40 years ago), and the ending mostly works. If it seems like I’m being too negative about the novel, it’s more disappointment. I took a writing class at the New School about 20 years ago, and after reading one of my short stories one of my classmates said I reminded her of Martin Amis. After reading his collection of short stories I was elated. Now, after reading his most impactful novel, I guess I expected more of myself. Five out of ten hot dogs.

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From the Proxy series , Vol. 2

by Alex London ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2014

Corrupt powers, budding romance, an epidemic and grisly action synthesize to sate sci-fi fans. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

It’s a grave new world when the revolution a reluctant hero inspired could mean the death of everyone he tried to save, including himself.

In this sequel to Proxy (2013), radical groups form in the wake of the Jubilee. The Reconciliation staunchly endorses tech-free purity, while Machinists demand a renaissance of the networks. Reluctant 16-year-old hero Syd is paraded as a political puppet, labeled a savior by supporters and marked a target by the opposition. His importance as a mascot for the Reconciliation necessitates a bodyguard, 17-year-old Liam. Liam is strong (he has a killer metal hand), silent (too shy for vocal eloquence) and will do anything to remain near Syd for reasons other than professional integrity. Amid political upheaval, an illness begins to spread, rendering victims’ blue blood black and diminishing their mental faculties. Syd has been a hesitant political figure but knows he is the only hope for ending the illness. Proxy should be read first to fully comprehend this sequel’s complex conflict and characters. Though Book 1 established Syd’s homosexuality, he experienced only unrequited crushes. Here, Liam’s affection for Syd and Syd’s reluctance to perpetuate emotional attachment (“everyone I ever cared about has died”) is more foreground than back story. Don’t assume for a second that romance takes away from the volatile action and high-stakes tension. 

Pub Date: May 29, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-399-16576-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Philomel

Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT DYSTOPIAN FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Alex London

IF ONLY I HAD TOLD HER

by Laura Nowlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A heavy read about the harsh realities of tragedy and their effects on those left behind.

In this companion novel to 2013’s If He Had Been With Me , three characters tell their sides of the story.

Finn’s narrative starts three days before his death. He explores the progress of his unrequited love for best friend Autumn up until the day he finally expresses his feelings. Finn’s story ends with his tragic death, which leaves his close friends devastated, unmoored, and uncertain how to go on. Jack’s section follows, offering a heartbreaking look at what it’s like to live with grief. Jack works to overcome the anger he feels toward Sylvie, the girlfriend Finn was breaking up with when he died, and Autumn, the girl he was preparing to build his life around (but whom Jack believed wasn’t good enough for Finn). But when Jack sees how Autumn’s grief matches his own, it changes their understanding of one another. Autumn’s chapters trace her life without Finn as readers follow her struggles with mental health and balancing love and loss. Those who have read the earlier book will better connect with and feel for these characters, particularly since they’ll have a more well-rounded impression of Finn. The pain and anger is well written, and the novel highlights the most troublesome aspects of young adulthood: overconfidence sprinkled with heavy insecurities, fear-fueled decisions, bad communication, and brash judgments. Characters are cued white.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781728276229

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE

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by Laura Nowlin

INDIVISIBLE

by Daniel Aleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.

A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.

Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

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Leigh Francis: My First Time review – cacophonously unfunny with the emphasis on cack

London Palladium The comic revives Avid Merrion, Keith Lemon and others in a scatological set of unimaginative jokes

I s he funny, or is his comedy the nadir of western civilisation? Not being a close follower of the storied TV career of Leigh Francis, AKA Keith Lemon , I arrived at his maiden live show an agnostic in this lively critical conversation . Reader, I am agnostic no more. My First Time is not a show for the comedy connoisseur, nor for anyone whose sense of humour occasionally strays above the waistband. Francis’s comic enthusiasms are perhaps best distilled in the words of his Urban Fox alter ego shortly prior to engaging in vulpine sex: “I love a shitty bum bum.”

Lest I understate the 50-year-old’s range, I must concede: he also loves a wank joke. The show revives an assortment of characters, usually rubber-masked, from Francis’s small-screen output, from celebrity stalker Avid Merrion , visiting the present day from 2004, via Keith Lemon himself, to Amanda Holden’s supposed gran Myrtle. These personae, like Francis’s celebrity impressions (David Dickinson, Stephen Mulhern, Louis Theroux), variously burp, fart, drink “bin juice” and talk porn. Joe Wicks appears, and shits himself. Dec “bums” Ant with a TV award. James Corden licks Adele’s arsehole.

It’s all cacophonously loud, with the emphasis on cack. Francis is a capable performer, brash, slightly bullying, without charm or subtlety. Video interludes book-end each sketch. As two audience members are invited on stage to “fuck a balloon”, and another to recite a smutty children’s story, I began to think: is there more to this than there seems? But contorting myself to give credit to Francis’s creative project, to situate his scatological vision somewhere on the spectrum between Ubu Roi and The Human Centipede, didn’t get me very far. The jokes were still predictable, repetitive and unimaginative.

Flickers of interest? There were a few. Hostile audience booing at the idea, as expressed to the time-travelling Merrion, that “there’s a lot you can’t say and do any more” in 2024. Some musical mimicry by Jess Robinson , one of Francis’s two co-stars. The show briefly being stopped while unruly audience members were made to leave. To really punish them, they should have been made to stay.

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Critic’s Notebook

Welcome to the London Book Fair, Where Everyone Knows Their Place

If you want to understand the power map of the publishing industry, just look at this event’s floor plan.

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By Rosa Lyster

The critic Rosa Lyster attended the fair, and a few associated parties, in London.

Everybody knows that the publishing industry is a rigorously stratified world, characterized by a reverence for hierarchy and a near-fanatical observance of ritual. Or maybe we suspect as much — but for those who would like to have those beliefs starkly confirmed, I would recommend a visit to the London Book Fair, which took place in the city’s Kensington district this week.

The fair, which this year had over 1,000 exhibitors and something like 30,000 visitors, is one of the biggest events of the international publishing calendar. For three days, agents, editors, publishers, scouts and many other people whose jobs are harder to explain gather in a frenzied fashion, primarily to sell and buy foreign rights for English-language books, but also to take temperatures, observe prevailing winds and scheme.

For those who weren’t there to close deals, the fair offered the opportunity to map out the minutely graded power structure of the publishing industry.

Just inside the doors of the cavernous Olympia exhibition space, the Penguin Random House stand was on the right, its entrance staffed by a row of tightly smiling assistants. The HarperCollins stand was on the left, with assistants gently standing guard over the editors inside, who were taking one meeting after another at little white tables, standing up every half an hour to greet another delegation of international publishers, smiles unflagging, notebooks poised.

Beyond that was Simon and Schuster, and a pavilion with all the French publishing houses collected together, then Macmillan to the left, across the aisle from the German Pavilion, which faced Hachette. Everything radiated outward from this central core across two carpeted floors, in diminishing order of importance: the slightly smaller publishing houses, then the ones whose best years are behind them, then the niche ones, then the flatly obscure. The positioning of the national pavilions followed the same brutal logic.

The ghostwriting firms were on the second floor; the logistics firms were on the first. Literary Translation Center: second floor, but in a good position. Academic publishers: first floor, but out of the way. Distribution and print management: first floor, right near the stretch of corridor where people tended to abandon their umbrellas. Some small publishing houses had forgone a stand, and their editors were conducting meetings while sitting on the floor, or leaning against siding with signs imploring “Do Not Lean on Me, Please!”

Eva Ferri, the publishing director of the Italian house Edizioni E/O and its British offshoot Europa Editions (and one of the few people who knows who Elena Ferrante is, although she wasn’t telling), said “I publish books from all over the world not because I think I’m going to get rich, but because I think it’s an important and beautiful thing. It’s the only thing that gives you the energy to be in a space like this, with people literally walking on you — on top of you .” Her publishing house didn’t have a stand this year, and she laughed as she described trying to compete with bigger, richer players: “My strategy is to inspire pity. You know, like a stray dog.”

At the very back of the hall on the first floor, patrolled by zealous security guards and visually demarcated by its own special color of carpet (lurid purple as opposed to the more industrial blues and greens), there was the International Rights Section, where the deals are hammered out. Against this profoundly purple backdrop — I really cannot emphasize this enough: I have never seen a carpet that color before — agents pitched books to foreign publishers, making their authors’ cases with unfeigned enthusiasm.

Walking between the rows of tables, I noticed that it no longer seems to be enough for an agent to say that they love a book. They must be in love with it. They must look into the eyes of the Spanish publisher they are pitching, and they must say that they are “so, so, so in love with this book.” They have to mean it.

On the first day of the fair, the chatter in the rights center was about an eight-way auction for Missouri Williams’s “The Vivisectors,” which had been closed in front of a Caravaggio during the HarperCollins party at the National Gallery the night before. The significant presence of American film and TV executives added a glossy sheen, as did the constant discussion of who had been invited to which party, and who had stayed out latest.

Heady as they were, these moments of high glamour were counterbalanced by the frankly poignant spectacle of hundreds of people in business-wear sitting on the floor, tapping away on their phones, whispering urgently to one another and eating chicken Caesar wraps. On the first day of the fair, I spotted a well-dressed woman fully asleep on the floor, her blow-dried blonde hair spilling over the handbag she was using as a pillow. It was 3 p.m., but it looked like an airport in the middle of the night, or some kind of conference center Fyre Festival.

As an indicator of who mattered, or how much money they had, the floor plan was an excellent guide. As an indicator of why many thousands of people from all over the world had gathered in this strange space, with its terrible food and its weird acoustics, to conduct conversations that could plausibly have taken place over email, the floor plan was of no use.

What were they all doing? What were they all talking about, in meeting after meeting, sitting down and standing up and hugging each other as they cried “So good to see you!” in the air near each other’s ears?

The publishing industry may be enamored of hierarchy and ritual, but it is possibly even more enamored of gossip, of chatting and hanging out, and it seemed that this was what everyone had come to the London Book Fair to do.

Alex Bowler, the publisher at Faber, said “I first started coming here in 2004 as an assistant, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. No one told me. It took me a few years to realize that you’re just here to talk to people.” Asked to elaborate, he rolled his eyes amiably. “Triangulating,” he said. “Gathering intelligence”

Coming together seemed to be almost an end in itself, whether the meeting took place at a wobbly white table in Kensington, or at the Canongate party, held this year in a tropical-themed pub.

“We’re all just here to see our friends, really,” said a young literary agent who asked not to be named, because she had just given the game away. Simon Prosser, the publisher at Hamish Hamilton, put it in terms that bordered on the life affirming. “The fact that we’re all together in this way convinces me that what we do has a meaning,” he said. “Why else would we do it?”

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