Martin Amis by Richard Bradford

Author:Richard Bradford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849018500
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

9

Dystopian Visions

In 1984 shortly after the birth of his first son, Louis, Martin began work on his most ambitious novel yet, eventually to be called London Fields. London Fields is real enough, five minutes by train from Liverpool Street and within the Borough of Hackney. Presently it is undergoing the process of gentrification experienced by Notting Hill around the time that Martin began the book. Then, it was a less than endearing location, its late-nineteenth-century buildings defaced by post-war attempts at renovation and overlooked by 1960s tower blocks, the sort of places in which real-life replicas of Keith Talent might spend time left over from darts, boozing and minor criminality. The blocks could at a stretch be glimpsed from the window of Martin’s studio in Leamington Road Villas. I ask him if the place had any specific associations, if he had visited it for any reason. ‘No. I used to pass it on my way to the New Statesman printers in Southend.’ The name stays in the mind, as spectacularly inappropriate. It derives from the sixteenth century when the whole area was largely uninhabited, upland pasture used by drovers to keep their cattle just before taking them to market in the City of London, and slaughter. All of the sinuous nuances of the novel are caught in this charmingly incongruous pairing of history and nomenclature: meadows cultivated for the final days of their non-human residents replaced centuries later by the crowded cityscape of concrete, traffic and takeaways.

Martin adds: ‘I remember also driving through it on my way north. I was going to Enfield to do an interview for the Observer in 1987.’ The interviewee was Keith Deller, accompanied by his wife Kim. Keith was the 1983 World Darts Champion, or as Martin puts it ‘for a while the great white hope of darts’. When he met him, Keith ‘showed that in darts it is hard to do your ageing one year at a time’.1 Martin was halfway through London Fields and it is no accident that one of its triumvirate of tragicomic characters is called Keith Talent, darts enthusiast, nor that his firstborn is named Kim.

It would have suited my preconceptions if I had found Keith half-drunk in some roadhouse, smothered in tattoos and darts magazines. On the contrary: Keith and his pretty wife, Kim, awaited me over their Perriers in the ante-room of a pleasant businessman’s restaurant. There was talk of the gym, and countryside rambles with dog Sheba. No alcohol and no nicotine. It was I who felt like the true darter of the company, with my drink, my roll-ups, my North Circular pallor.

Keith is genial, straightforward, considerate, clear-eyed. He is also charmingly uxorious, constantly deferring to Kim, who, for her part, is fully abreast of Keith’s darting hopes and fears.2

There is something slightly unctuous in this verbal portrait. I have never met Keith Deller, only witnessed him on TV, and can only take Martin’s account on trust, but even figures such as Bellow did not receive such generous patronage as this.

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