London Fields: Introduction by John Sutherland [Hardcover]

Martin Amis’s acclaimed novel—now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary hardcover edition—is a blackly comic murder mystery about a murder that has not yet happened.

First published in 1989, LONDON FIELDS is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded millennium approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, attempts to orchestrate her own extinction, choosing her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, LONDON FIELDS is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision. A comic murder mystery, an apocalyptic satire, a scatological meditation on love and death and nuclear winter...by turns lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic. —Michiko Kakutani,The New York TimesMARTIN AMIS is the author of fourteen novels, the memoir Experience, several collections of stories, and six nonfiction books. He lives in Brooklyn.

JOHN SUTHERLAND is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London and a regular columnist at The Guardian.Excerpted from the Introduction


I N T R O D U C T I O N

 Death is killing me.
 
. . .  this is London;  and there are no fields. Only fields of operation and observation, only fields of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, only fields of hatred and coercion.
 
London Fil“n