Yeah Cheers for London Fields

Into the Heart of Berkness with Martin Amis’s masterpiece

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

When did you realise novels could be fun?

I should say when did you remember. If as a kid you read of your own accord, you were reading for pleasures. Those of narrative pull, the proxy fast-friendships of fictional characters which somehow made you feel nostalgic already, the allure of exotic settings (anywhere that wasn’t your bedroom or classroom felt exotic), the pleasures of laughter or of being scared, depending on how a book fit with your hardening psyche.

This changed with adolescence. I don’t quite blame school. I’ve never bought the idea the books we got ‘made’ to read at school put us off them for life (if school was trying to make us it didn’t work; hardly anyone did read them, and I was no exception. I bluffed my way through English GCSE having gotten a sufficient idea of the set texts from eavesdropping on our lessons). The ideal of education, you’d hope, would be to not pander to a kid’s tastes but connect their nascent feeling for books with even better books out there. As I wrote in a post on the Best of ’22:

read weird books young. Not because there’s anything morally improving in doing so. But so…