London Fields

Martin Amis London Fields (1989)
Now I remember why I was supposed to avoid this one. All the characters are horrible and therefore lack relatability, or some other quality which people who don't actually read books doubtless regard as essential; and apparently Amis could learn a thing or two from Agatha Christie when it comes to plotting a murder mystery; and there are all those long, long words to consider…

It's all bollocks. Even in the event of relatability being an actual thing, the notion of these characters being horrible only truly works if you were expecting the cast of The Wizard of Oz, and whilst there's an argument to be had that Guy Clinch and Keith Talent are grotesques, I've actually known Keith Talent a few times, and mostly I quite like him for all that he's a bit of a cunt.

To start at the beginning, the story is that Nicola Six, a massively self-involved posh bird, foresees and orchestrates her own murder at the hands of a lover for reasons explained in the novel, albeit without yielding anything which could be distilled into a single tidy sentence. She's playing the sexual field, as is everyone else here, so it's probably going to be some crime of passion, leaving us with the question of whether it will be Guy or Keith; except not, because it doesn't really matter that much, this simply being the Christmas tree from which everything else is hung.

One might wonder how Amis came by the anthropological balls to write someone so resolutely of barely-working class stratum as Keith Talent whose dropped aitches and dedication to pub sports patently comes from something more immersive than watching a few episodes of EastEnders; and, for sake of qualification, I personally found Irvine Welsh writing about life amongst the betting shop clientele unconvincing and even slightly insulting. Amis, however, gets it absolutely spot on, even acknowledging the discomfort of the cheap holiday in someone else's misery with Sam Young, the author who is writing the book we're reading, hanging out with Keith, and trying not to let too much of himself or his alien values get in the way. In other words, it's complicated. Much of the narrative is a comment on this sort of anthropological exercise, notably the awful Crossbone Waters, the book within our book.

Amongst the most severely retarded of the critics seem to have been those taking issue with all the digressions, all that unfamiliar talky stuff going on in between the stage directions of someone walking across a room and then taking an object from a shelf. Woss 'e on abat nah? they ask. Woss'at got t'do wiv anyfink? Amazingly, all that extraneous word stuff is there to communicate the subject of the novel which, believe it or not, isn't primarily a murder mystery in the spirit of The Mousetrap. It's about determinism and free will, so far as I'm able to tell, with everyone set on a track seemingly leading to a particular inescapable destiny, much like the environmental collapse occurring in the background; and more than being subject to fate, the characters form the substance of their respective destinies - which I assume to be the reason for all the allusions to D.H. Lawrence, an author preoccupied with class and environment as inherent qualities of the individual, which is certainly true of Keith Talent. We tend to have forgotten about the approach of the millennium in 2019, but it was a big deal at the time.

The biggest surprises for me were firstly, just how funny this book is, albeit darkly funny and without cracking jokes; and secondly, how much of it reads like a significant influence on Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go, which similarly explores the end of days by chasing three archetypes along their respective intertwined destinies.

Servant of the Underworld

Aliette de Bodard Servant of the Underworld (2010)
Having something of an interest in Mesoamerican culture reaching beyond that which can be gleaned from Big Bird's Book of Aztecs, I've tended to avoid this sort of thing for fear of blowing a gasket. I can't help it. Rightly or wrongly, I take a proprietorial view of Mexican culture. I don't like the fact of it having been demonised as crude and lacking in any qualities beyond the sanguinary for the last few hundred years, and nor do I appreciate its ham-fisted appropriation by hack writers looking for something exotic and just a teensy bit weird with which to spice up their latest exercise in paying off a credit card.

Anyway, Servant of the Underworld was free, one of a big pile of paperbacks published by Angry Robot from which guests at a San Antonio science-fiction convention were invited to take their pick.

The appendix, an essay in which the author describes how she came to write this - her debut novel - and to which I first turned, should perhaps have rung alarm bells. Aliette de Bodard speaks of the inspiration drawn from Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, then from a series of French novels set in ancient Egypt, and at length describes the plotting and research of Servant of the Underworld. I raised a Paxmanesque eyebrow at de Bodard's renaming the ruler Itzcoatl as Ixcoatl, a revision which recasts the Obsidian Serpent as some bloke called either Face of a Serpent, Serpent Eye, or One Who Appears Like a Serpent; and then I read of her concerns regarding the setting of her novel, studying maps, struggling to work out the distance between certain places, and how the chinampa plantations of Xochimilco would have appeared. I wondered to myself why she hadn't just gone to Mexico City and had a look around, particularly as the chinampas are still there and the city even has an airport, no longer requiring one to endure a five day hike across the mountains on the back of a donkey.

Anyway, suspecting I was probably just being sniffy for the sake of it, I turned to the first page...

I'm not accustomed to reading murder mysteries, and I've no idea whether they're all like this, but the first few chapters, if not exactly bad, comprise little but plot textured with a wearying check-list of local details. The prose is functional and not much more. To be fair, I'm not sure I've ever seen the appeal of this genre given that most stories will necessarily be a variation on the theme of someone being murdered, leading to someone else deducing the identity of the killer; and I don't know why I should be excited about that. I suppose then it must be the mood and sense of place which draws the reader, except Servant of the Underworld has all the personality of a diagram littered with fiddly plot points laboriously picked out through characters for whom it is very difficult to care. There is no art here, no poetry, just narrative mechanism. The writing isn't terrible, but neither is it particularly inspiring, and it really isn't helped by interludes such as the little girl looking at our hard-boiled Mesoamerican investigator with eyes like liquid pools, as opposed to eyes like football pools, I suppose.

Has anyone ever in the entire history of everything just once looked into another's eyes and been struck by their resemblance to liquid pools, presumably liquid pools bearing no similarity to those of asymmetrical shape which form when you spill your beer in the kitchen whilst trying to fry an apricot at two in the morning? Aside from those composed of light, don't most pools tend to be liquid?

This wouldn't bother me were the detail - that which is supposed to distinguish Servant of the Underworld from any other recycled Agatha Christie - not quite so poor. Please feel free to skip the inevitable list which follows because I'm sure no-one else finds this stuff of any interest; but for the record, contrary to that which is suggested in this novel:

• The honorific suffix of a name is indeed -tzin, but it only really works when replacing the existing, usually applicative suffix -tl, -li, or -tli. The name Acatl with an honorific suffix is therefore Acatzin, not fucking Acatl-tzin, which is like prefixing someone's name with Mister Sir.
  
  
• The nahual or nagual is an animal spirit, usually twinned to a specific individual (regardless of whether or not they are aware of this) and can be of any species, not just a jaguar. It is entirely unlike a Dementor from Harry Potter.


• There was no priesthood dedicated to the Death Gods. This is not a quirk of regional government or preference so much as something which, were it otherwise, would contradict much of the existing theology. I appreciate that Aliette de Bodard admits to taking a few liberties in regard to this, but that really doesn't make it better.


• Mictlan is a region of the underworld, not the underworld in its entirety.


• There is a character called Ohtli. Ohtli simply means Road, which seems reminiscent of those people with exotic tattoos of Chinese characters which actually read shirts cleaned $5.


• Girls in Tenochtitlan were generally taught in the home, not in schools, as described in detail in Codex Mendoza.


• The priesthood was almost exclusively male. There were very few priestesses, and none of high rank that we know of.


• Marriages were arranged and not a case of the young girl going out and having a look for some eligible bachelor, as is also described in detail in Codex Mendoza.

There's probably more but I gave up at around chapter four. None of the nits picked above are exactly unforgivable, excepting possibly the thing with honorific suffixes and getting Itzcoatl's name wrong, but it all adds up with all period or theological detail seeming so sloppy and arbitrary and incidental to the almighty labyrinthine plot that the whole becomes difficult to take seriously; and everyone speaks as though they could have been cast in almost any murder mystery from any era with just the furniture shuffled around for the sake of local flavour, all pulling stern Bruce Willis faces and exclaiming what in the Fifth World is going on here?

I hate giving up on a book, and I've only done it on three occasions over the last five years, and never on the same day as I began reading the thing; but this is horrible, a cynical exercise in writing a by-the-numbers fantasy bestseller, and life is too short.