L&OD, a Key Porter imprint, has reissued Martin Amis' London Fields, first published in 1989. This highly satirical 'murder' novel is one of Amis' best, though readers have to be prepared that his language can be rough, and as in so many of his books, women readers have set aside their sense of being annoyed by the book's streak of misogyny.

There have been several books by Amis that admittedly I failed to enjoy such as The Information and Night Train, the latter is a failed detective novella with some terrible American dialog in Chandlersque imitation. This despite the author's long time spent in the USA. It just confirms what I have always felt, namely that the English have no ear for North American dialog. As for The Information, while it had its moments, it ultimately bored me. I did not really care what happened in it.

I cannot say this of London Fields, even though it is full of what has by now been called Amisian characters, names, and the writer's self-conscious, me-me voice. Like so much of his writing, London Fields has been tagged 'postmodern'. This is one of those empty philosophic expression that can mean anything or nothing at all. Instead, we should accept that Amis has a dark, sardonic vision of life and that perhaps, to get away from his father's fame, he adopted a trope that we haven't quite been able to place in any particular genre or voice.

Set in London around Kensington's Portobello Road area sometime toward the end of the 1990s, London Fields takes aim at both the upper middle and the lower classes of the city, and British society in general. It also looks darkly at Amis' own profession, which seeing he is successful in it, does not ring true. Still, for the reader, let the dark tone of the book amuse, and so abandon disbelief, which is needed here.

We first meet Samson Young, the narrator of the story, a writer who has come to London from the United States to unblock a 20-year writer's block. He calls himself a 'queasy cleric', a sort of put down of the writing profession. Sam, just a few days after arriving in London, comes to this conclusion: "If London is a spider's web, then where do I fit in? Maybe I'm the fly. I am the fly." One can take this in a number of ways as the story unfolds.

The other characters in this novel are the bad guy, Keith Talent; the heroine of the novel - or better said, the anti-heroine - Nicola Six (pronounced Seeks and often confused with Sex); and the fall guy or foil, the upper middle class Guy Clinch, whom the narrator describes as a nice guy, "who wanted for nothing and lacked everything."

If Sam is supposedly the fly, then Nicola is the spider, who wants to entrap Keith, or maybe Guy, into killing her. She is life-weary, afraid of growing old, but does not have the courage to kill herself. So, Amis pronounces her the 'murderee', not the victim in this strange crime novel. None of what I am revealing is a spoiler. Amis lays out the roles of his characters from the start and their purpose in the tale. That he manages to turn things upside down eventually comes as a surprise. Just what that is all about is for the reader to find out.