Wicked Quotes from Martin Amis’s London Fields
I read to 1) find and revel in funny, beautiful, thought-provoking phrases, 2) dwell on profound paragraphs that contain useful truths about life and human nature, 3) lose myself in the lives of exceptional characters. Few authors deliver these gifts, at least in abundance. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marquez, several others…these giants set the standard.
With London Fields Martin Amis unwraps the first, and looks pretty large on the second. What a great fucking read. Loaded with choice phrasing, laughs and Rothian wrangling between narrator and characters, the book is a dirty pub crawl through the bedrooms and backstreets of London at the turn of the apocalypse, where cheats cheat the cheaters . It’s also a ‘compelling’ page turner, a hungry anticipation of carnality and death with Nicola Six, the sexiest suicide this side of Marilyn Monroe.
Amis has an infectious, cigarette-smoking addiction to writing and language. He paints, as he himself has said, with primary colours. The Van Gogh of contemporary fiction.
As MA puts it in the foreword to The War Against Cliché, a book containing his literary criticism, "You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue. "
With this in mind, I will shut my mouth and direct your attention, with awe and humility, toward these spectacles…these fresh, energetic, wicked, reverberating quotes:
…traffic jams that routinely enchained his day
…when you look at the human wreckage she left in her slipstream, the nervous collapses, the shattered careers, the suicide notes, the blighted marriages (and rottener divorces) – Nicola’s knack of reading the future left her with one or two firm assurances: that no one would ever love her enough, and those that did were not worth being loved by.
The dead woman was not being populously farewelled.
So this was all you got: the zooty sideburns and masturbator’s pallor of an old Ted (*) in a black suit, and the secular obsequies.
Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?
In a modern city, if you have nothing to do (and if you’re not broke, and on the street), it’s tough to find people to do nothing with.
Never before had his unreliability and heartless neglect been seized on and celebrated as the core of his appeal.
He thought of her often – while inspecting a shop window in Oxford Street, while haring after his scattered urges in the last moments before sleep, while finishing himself off with Trish Shirt.
Now I had no choice but to end that chapter right there. I too had to drop everything. Maybe I can go back later and soften the transition, if there’s time.
I played a mild hunch. That’s what writing is, a hundred hunches, a hundred affronts to your confidence, a hundred decisions, every page.
She smelled of tragic sleep and tobacco.
When Nicola walked the streets she was lit by her personal cinematographer, nothing too arty either, a single spotlight trained from the gods.
They wanted the white lie of virginity.
Nicola saw at once with a shock…that the capacity for love was extinct in him.
The prisoner hated the child molester, not just because he needed somebody to look down on, not only out of base sentimentality either, but because it was the one place left for his parental feelings. So when you striped the short eyes with your smuggled razor you were just showing the lads what a good father you were.
Marmaduke (Guy’s toddler) had cobwebbed both lenses with a skilful stab of the sugar-tongs.
People now treated themselves like telephone boxes, ripping out the innards and throwing them away, and plastering their surfaces with sex signs and graffiti…
On a floor that smelled and felt to the foot like a wet railway platform…
…shouldered his course through the day with the usual grim ambition.
Describing the weather: …months, entire seasons sweeping by in less than thirty seconds. And great heat. The clouds sped, and not just laterally either. They seemed to bounce and romp and tumble. Yes, there was definitely something puppyish, something almost faggy, going on up there, when like plays with like.
On God going out with Nicola: He had slept with her once, and once only: she did that to show Him what he would be missing for ever and ever. In bed, Nicola had made him do the act of doubledarkness: the doublebeast with only one back. Then never again. God cried on the street outside her apartment. He telephoned and telepathized. He followed her everywhere. His gaze imparting that fancy blue nimbus. God got Shakespeare and Dante working as a team to write her poems…
It seems to me that writing brings trouble with it, moral trouble, unexamined trouble. Even to the best.
I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet’s mistress.
…a restaurant of world-historical costliness
…but 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. Only force fields.
…with Tolstoy, Keith Talent thought of time as moving past him while he just stayed the same.
The tapwater, she knew, had passed at least twice through every granny in London.
Swarthy, and mean of forehead.
Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn’t awake.
* (defined in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang as ‘a member of a youth cult in the 1950s characterized by a particular style of dress [a long drape or waisted jacket worn with drainpipe trousers and thick crepe-soled brother-creeper shoes] )
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