Finishing Things/100 Books To Read Poster No. 25

 

I have been finishing things like books and knitting recently and here's the first 'finished things' write up. It's the poster book, which has taken me weeks and weeks and as a couple of readers have picked up from Facebook, this was London Fields by Martin Amis. 470 pages of reading hell.

See, remember that thing your mother used to say about 'that's not funny and it's not clever'? Well this is sort of the reverse of that. It is funny if you have a particular sense of humour (I don't, grotesque caricature in an otherwise realistic setting just irritates the hell out of me) and it is very very clever. Meta fiction in spades. Honesty at one point I thought my whole review of this book would just be the word meta 50 times followed by (whimper...)

And overwritten much? There are paragraphs and paragraphs that are just lists of things being piled one on top of one another for no other apparent purpose than to illustrate just how many disparate things Amis can cleverly describe in one sentence. 

I don't object to authors laying games with their audience when there's a purpose to it that serves the narrative. I do object to it when the whole reason for dong it is to display to a (presumably awestruck) reader just how very much more clever than them the author is. Why bother? If we're all too stupid to appreciate your great cleverness why do you go to the trouble  to write such pearls and then cast them before swine? 

I think that Amis considers himself to be a bit of a modern Dickens; the grotesque people, the uncaring systems, the narrative technique of detail upon detail. Sadly he has missed, or is temperamentally incapable of grasping, the huge point of difference. Dickens wrote for may reasons, but he was possessed with both compassion for the characters he created and their real life counterparts, and a  burning desire to bring about some measure of social justice. Amis writes from a position of total contempt for his characters and their real life counterparts; if you aren't like Amis, - so if you're a woman, or working class, or titled, or American, or foreign in general really, or work in the city, or live on benefits, or live in a council flat, or not 'well educated', or overweight, or underweight, - or anything other than a white middle class Englishman, then Amis despises you. 

I have a friend who hates the expression 'check you white male privilege', possibly because he is uncomfortably aware that if he did he might not like what he sees, but Gordon Bennet if ever there were a reason to invent the phrase and try and get people to take it to heart it's this guy. Well, him and Laurence Fox.