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506 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
where many writers and media people settled. In many ways this novel
shows the progress of the angry young man of the 1950s to the reactionary
of the 1980s, with little left to fight for, but with much to complain about!
Some critics have accused Amis of misogyny and right-wing attitudes.
However, there is little doubt that he was a major figure in continuing the
tradition of social and comic realism which is one of the English novel’s
enduring strengths. You Can’t Do Both (1994) and The Biographer’s
Moustache (1995) were Amis’s final works.
Kingsley Amis’s son Martin is a quite different writer from his father, and
the differences are more than simply generational: Martin Amis’s language
and subject matter are violent, reflecting the collapse of the established
class system which the ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s could rail against. A
parallel moral and spiritual violence in his novels has caused some shock
– when his second novel Dead Babies (1975) was published in paperback,
the publishers preferred to retitle it Dark Secrets in order not to cause
offence. London Fields (1989) – its very title is paradoxically ironic – is an
exploration of morality and murder in the television age: its central character
Keith Talent can be seen as a symbol of the 1980s in the way that Jim
Dixon in Lucky Jim was of the 1950s: he is amoral, fascinated by television
(‘TV!’ is his favourite adjective of praise), and prepared to do anything to
achieve fame and fortune by appearing on television as a darts player.
I sidled up, placed my coin on the glass (this is the pinball etiquette),
and said, ‘Let’s play pairs.’ In his face: a routine thrill of dread, then
openness; then pleasure. I impressed him with my pinball lore: silent
five, two-flip, shoulder-check, and so on. We were practically pals
anyway, having both basked in the sun of Keith’s patronage. And,
besides, he was completely desperate, as many of us are these days.
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.
(London Fields)
Perhaps more than any other English-born novelist, Martin Amis
has forged a ‘new’ language: going beyond ‘old’ language, using new
rhythms, incorporating American English, street English, and minority
dialect Englishes, to give a representation of some of the range of
Englishes spoken in England at the end of the twentieth century.