From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/22/99
Time: 7:56:21 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
[Poster's note: After the cartoon comedy of *Money*, Amis fulfilled my worst fear by writing a serious book about a cartoon character. A cartoon symboloid named "Nicola Six". I knew that *London Fields* was doomed as soon as Amis introduced that character. You can't write a serious book about a cartoon cipher and then expect anyone to take the book seriously. Nicola's biggest victim was *London Fields* itself. She's the most crappily-conceived voidoid character since...oh...I guess I'd have to go back to Neely O'Hara in *Valley of the Dolls*. But be that as it may, I nevertheless think that *London Fields* contains Amis's best prose-style. It's a fluent streamlined machine. Smooth as a baby's bottom. With none of that knotty prose that limeys like to indulge in. It's pretty lucid too. Except for that metaphorical hooey about the orgasmic implosions and vaginal ground-zeros or whatever the hell it was. By the way, did you ever notice that Amis writes better when he's writing in character? When it comes to self-referential narrators, Samson Young was more fun than "Martin Amis" was in *The Information*. I found the following piece in *The Independent* newspaper. From September 29, 1990. Now I know why Hope & Lizzyboo's family name is "Broadener". It's simply because they broadened the book. Martin says: "But then there was also the Foil, a third character who had the effect of opening the novel out into a broader society."]
*SECOND THOUGHTS: CRYING FOR THE LIGHT* / BY MARTIN AMIS
This book started out as a false trail, or as a hysterical pregnancy. "About a hundred pages", I remember saying to my father, in 1983: "A novella. Called *The Murderee*." I imagined a quiet lying-in, an orderly parturition; I would stroll out of hospital with a spare but sinister little volume under my arm. In fact, I spent six years in the labour ward, purple-faced, and fully fretted out with back-splints and feeding-tubes. The baby, when it came, was of shocking dimensions. All the sisters bolted from the delivery room.
What happened? There was the Murderee, there was the Murderer; but then there was also the Foil, a third character who had the effect of opening the novel out into a broader society. The daemons of place and time, too, like additional characters themselves, harrassed me with their demands for space: London, at the end of the millennium. Once they are of a certain size, big novels just go on getting bigger. The ballast keeps asking to be added to. Although I was constantly cutting and squeezing and leaving things out, I suppose I fell in with the laxity and capaciousness of the larger form. The plot, or at least the hook, seemed secure; and to me (I suspect) plots are little more than a good excuse for writing sentences. Those six years were not without their interruptions, notably a book of short stories, a collection of journalism, and two babies, real-life ones, with their own unmistakeable cries and entreaties.
This column tempts a writer to grumble in print about his reviews, which he is naturally much too proud and grand (and hurt) to do at the time. When the book was published, I found myself in the unusual position of wanting, on the whole, to be taken less seriously---or more comically. Such an emphasis might have taken care of the feminist objection, which was never much more than a rumour (and was not reflected in my postbag). The book is now reappearing in 1990: i.e., post-1989 and all that. I am often asked if I would like to rewrite my novel with these updates in mind. But I would not. Nor would I welcome the Apocalypse as a good publicity stunt. Oh, and one final point: hardly anybody can spell *millennium*.
I now set myself the embarrassing task of giving my Second Thoughts about the quality of the novel. All writers spend a lot of their time doing a reasonable imitation of a non-total megalomaniac. The trouble being that they are total megalomaniacs. It comes with the job. Asked by a Spanish journalist where I thought I stood among my contemporaries, I was able to dispense, not only with modesty, but also with my translator. "Yo no soy marinero", I said. "Soy capitaine, soy capitaine." Long ago I read one of those entirely fanciful biographies of Shakespeare, in which the Swan was pictured as a dogged grafter by day and a Delphic fantasist by night. This sounded authentic. By day, I think *London Fields* is, if nothing else, unflagging. But by night its pages glow with a terrible beauty, a savage poetry, a godlike aspect, whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire on flick'ring Phoebus' front...