I listened to this book as an audiobook, and it was a VERY LONG book to be digesting in that format. The reader was good at the voices, though, and did add something positive to the experience, especially with respect to Kevin, whose dialect the reader did especially well.
This book is a classic noir-style thriller, and metafiction, with the characters hanging out with the 'author' of the book, a man named Sam, who has his own adventures as he tries to keep tabs on his characters. The femme-fatal, or in this book's terminology the 'murderee', has a lot to say about her role in the story and her appeal as a murderee to both the reader and the male characters in the story. At first Sam is fixated on the pending murder, seeming impatient for the murder and murderee to get on with the main action already, but as he gets to know the characters he gets distracted by all sorts of tangents and the characters begin to develop lives outside the parameters of the expected murder.
If you avoid books with foul language or graphic scenes, this may not be a good book for you. Otherwise, this was a clever novel, and I enjoyed the complexity of the fictional author and his more-fictional narrative. ( )

A hyperbolic sledgehammer of a book, vicious and vitriolic. It is a wonderfully inventive post-modern crime story, with a broad and vivid cast of London life, that sadly rings a little too true. I'm not a big Amis fan, but I loved London Fields.

While written in the late 80s, it still feels highly relevant today. Perhaps it would have seemed less so in the middle of Blair's premiership, but the new age of austerity suits book just fine. The dread of imminent apocalypse (a touch of JG Ballard there, particularly The Drowned World with its relentless sun), may have a different flavour these days but it still resonates - perhaps that's just the age I'm at. Certainly, despite the political backdrop, the real apocalypses tend to be personal. I think that's what makes it such a existential, misanthropic and desperate cri de coeur. The plot is clear and bleak (and telegraphed, in all the book's post modern flourishes), but the struggle with the modern human condition is a constant. Which, through the course of the book, you might become convinced is worse than the looming global catastrophe.

It may be slightly overlong, or at least I felt it sagged a touch in the middle middle. The repetition of one incident through three of the players' eyes didn't feel like it repaid the effort. That said, it does have the feel of a book that could stand a second run at it, so maybe that section would open up.

On a personal note, it is particularly interesting to read it, working, as I have been for the last 6 months, around Westbourne Park (I know exactly what he means, 20 years on, about the difficult junction by the canal bridge and bus station on Great Western Road). And my trips to the falafel stand on Portobello Road now have me looking out for Keith Talent-alikes, and Black Cross pub archetypes (it's not a fruitless search).

A good part of the enjoyment of London Fields derives from the cheerfully grotesque characters. The main figure is like a hyper-real Del Boy - bits of it read like an extreme reaction to Only Fools and Horses and the lovable cockney rogue archetype. I would have relished an adaptation featuring the casts and sets from that sitcom in its heyday.

Well, an astonishing searing hurricane of a book, that blows you away in the reading and leaves you feeling worn out and dessicated. That said, for me the final resolution didn't quite satisfy. Clearly you know that not everyone was going to play their roles as scripted, but the climactic switcheroo left some important arcs dangling disconcertingly and also felt a little implausible. I feel like I understand why Amis resolved it as he did, just that it could have been handled a little better. While it was all foreshadowed (a little too) neatly through shoals of red herrings, even that foreshadowing seemed a little too manufactured (a criticism that Amis deftly and disingenuously heads off by his narrator pointing out what he didn't go back and change the beginning to fit his resolution). While his murderee convinced, it was as if, despite the ingrained misanthropy on every page, he couldn't quite conjure up what would bring someone to murder. I guess that's somehow encouraging.

Despite my slight dissatisfaction at the resolution, this is one of the best and most engrossing books I've read. If you were to read only one Martin Amis book (and, honestly, I think that may be enough (though Money is a lot of fun)), make it London Fields.
( )

Contrived first person format that is clever but no more than that. I did not finish the book. Maybe it gets much better at some point. I listened to a recorded version. ( )

This is easily the worst book I read in 2022. Awful, just awful. It has relieved me of the need to read anything else by Mr Amis.Save yourself the bother.

I listened to this as I needed a book published in 1989 and the pickings were thin. An American author undertakes a house swop with an author based in London. He arrives and meets with 3 people who form the core of the book. They are Guy (an upper class nit), Keith (a neanderthal that can barely string a sentence together) and Nicola. Nicola is barely human, she seems to be, instead, a fantasy figure to each of the three men involved, such that she is utterly unconvincing. She has this gift/curse of being able to see the future, and so the events that happen are both pre-ordained and induced by Nicola's own actions. She also invents a scheme to extract money from Guy by searching for her childhood imaginary friend, Enola Gay and her equally made up child Little Boy. I found it impossible to believe that no-one twigs. She feels to be the object of different male fantasy, and each different fantasy is scrunched into one woman, but she is made inhuman by this creation.
Keith is into darts, has a harem of women, including an underage girl that he pays her mother for regular congress. Keith rips off everyone, leaving an old lady with very little and an exploding boiler while acting as a handman. Keith also abuses his wife, who then takes it out on their child - to whom Keith makes no effort whatsoever. There is also discussion of historic rape and violence and ongoing compensation for prior actions. He is a thoroughly unpleasant creation and spending 18 hours with him is not something I can ever recommend to anyone else.
Guy just seems to be somewhat dense. Not stupid, just rather naive. I'm not sure how he ended up involved, but he has his own problems that need attention that he had been spending elsewhere.
I can't decide if the author is writing these events, and there is a degree of uncertainty as to if they are real to the author or whether he is also inventing these people & events. It was the longest 18 hours listen of my life. Save yourself the effort, just don;t go there. ( )

This is the first Martin Amis I have read. I have heard that a lot of people hate him. Count me in. The story is about a woman (Nicola) who believes she always knows what will happen ahead of time and she knows she is going to be murdered. Instead of fighting it she decides to allow it to happen but she wants to control it. The book also is about the impending doom of the earth and mankind. It is set in London and the earth is zooming toward environmental and economic ruin not to mention the apocalypse. The author seems to be saying with this parallel that both Nicola and people of the earth feel that their demise is inevitable. Not only is the end inevitable but they are both engaged in very destructive behavior intended on speeding up the process. The book is carefully crafted every word seems especially chosen for that position on the paper; which for me made the writing tedious and overwrought. The book is not for the squeamish there is a great deal of blood and erotic sex; although I would have welcomed more sex and less verbiage. No recommendation from me.

Patron190 5/20/2010 10:34:19 AM ( )

What a large book with no likeable characters in it. The author clearly hates all of his mains. Most interesting stuff to me was: the disruption of the weather, shortened animal lives (including human), geopolitical cold war hotting up, the rejection of news (so different than our current drowning in it).
The word choice and writing is very good. Which makes me wonder why such a miserable book. Racist and misogynist, why yes. The madonna/whore is nonsensical but boy is she vindictive and full of the death drive.

After reading ~150 pages I skipped to the last few chapters. I'm glad I didn't give it any more of my time. ( )

Everything I read these days seems spot-on relevant to today's world (maybe that what great books do?) Published in 1989, London Fields could have been written in the time of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump and his crime family. Innit. Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio?

"It doesn't matter what anyone writes anymore. The time for mattering has passed. The truth doesn't matter any more and it is not wanted." ( )

Glimtvis genial, sproglig overlegen og (indrømmet) indimellem en intellektuel prøvelse. Det er sort humor når den er allermørkest. ( )

The story is about a murder that is going to happen, that book is about 450 pages (21 hours) leading up to that event. You know who is going to die, so that is not a secret. Nikki Six knows she is going to die and accepts that. She convinces one main character she is a virgin, while in reality being quite the slut. She has a fetish that she lets the narrator in on and in her own mind goes on to compare it as Cygnus X1, a binary star system in which one of the stars is now a black hole. One gives life, the other death. She relates this to her fetish by comparing the binary system to her own anatomy. She does it in such a way that it makes perfect sense in a very warped way.

The man who believes she is a virgin, is Guy. He has money, a wife, and a truly monstrous toddler. I mean, not just terrible twos. This kid has violence issues. Joining the mix is Keith (pronounced, Keef). He a drunk, criminal, and possibly even worse. He, too, has a wife and child and cheats on his wife regularly. From girlfriends to paying the mother pimping her under 16 year old daughter. Keith is scum, but apparently fairly good at darts. He mumbles half thoughts in a drunken, hungover, just woke up, incoherent way.

The narrator is a writer visiting London and staying at an acquaintance's house. His first exposure to London is Keith. He meets Nikki at the Black Cross Tavern and meets Guy also. He interacts with the characters, and knows a murder is going to happen. So much so that the book he is writing is about the future murder that he does nothing to stop.

What I did like in the book were some of the phrases and images. Airplanes were called crucifixes in the sky. Niki's lingerie was described as "candied vulgarity". The tv weathermen were described as the new combat reporters -- braving the elements to delivery the important story. The description and the getting into the mind of the characters is also done well. You will actually hate some of the characters, really hate them. What Stephen King does for horror, Martin Amis does for loathsome characters. All in all, a good read although the characters rose above the story for me. Three and a half stars, rounding up to four.


I listened to this book over the course of two weeks walking to and from work. I walk six miles each way so I have plenty of time to burn. I chose this as something lighter than the more classical book I have from audible.
( )

A story that grew on me the more I listened to it. Not for everyone and definitely not for the church library. But still some gems of great writing. ( )

I got as far as page 100. The characters didn't engage me and I saw no sign of the plot that sounded so good in the reviews. He's a clever writer but I guess that wasn't enough to hold me.

This is a story about writing in novel form in my opinion and is reported to be the author's best work. The story is about an American writer, Samson Young, in London, dying of cancer with a 20 year writer's block. It is also a story of a murder. The characters in this book are from various walks of life and feature city life. London, east end. They never really go to London Field.

This book was published in 1989 and is set in the future. This woman, Nicola Six, has picked November 5th as the day she will die. So we have an American author dying and we have Nocola who is going to die because she does not want to get any older, she is turning 35. "It doesn't happen yet, but it will".

There is really so much in this book. Samson Young is the narrator. He emphasizes that he is a "reliable narrator". Samson Young is a writer of nonfiction and can't seem to write fiction so he starts writing about these people from their real life; Nicola Six, Keith Talent, a criminal, dart player, Guy Cinch a rich banker, Marmaduke the rich banker's son, Mark Asprey (a successful British author). Samsonb uses Nicola's diaries, Guys short story, Keith darting diaries. Mark Asprey may be a play on words for the author Martin Amis and true life memoirs.

In this book, which in my opinion is about writing, we have the question of accuracy; reliable narrators, memoirs, tabloids, gossip columns, weather forcasters, etc. We have the TV with its fast forward, freeze frame and confusing realities.

As I said, there is really a lot here, even with the descriptions of darts and shafts, etc, etc, the word play, the theme of dying and writing block. There is also a theme of end times with mentions of Enola Gay and Baby Boy both alluding to nuclear weapons/holocaust. The American president's wife (Faith) is fighting for her life. So there is the dying of the individual as well as the dying of the world. There is the mockery of Keith's culture of cheap tabloids set against the high literary culture of Guy.

It's all very creative and well done but in the end, did I enjoy it? Can't say that I did. Did I appreciate it? I do appreciate the work and talent of this book. I've also read the authors Time's Arrow and Dead Babies.

5-Legacy: This book does fit the scope of books of the era. It does contribute to the novel.
5-Plot: actually at times dull but very creative
4-Characterization: some very unique characters representing life
2-Readability: not so enjoyable
4-Achievement: some important lists
2-Style: a whole lot of violence, not very favorable image of women, sex

Rating 3.67 ( )

Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he is telling, a story involving a host of memorable and very human characters, not to mention a couple of super-human characters: an Incredible Hulk-like toddler and one doozy of a MAN MAGNET, and, yes, indeed, that’s spelled with all capital letters. Meet the lady at the center of the novel’s vortex, Ms. Nicola Six – modern day Helen of Troy, X-rated femme fatale and manifestation of goddess Kali all rolled up into one – everything you always wanted and everything you never wanted, your most cherished dream and your most dreaded nightmare, complete with Eastern European accent, mysterious Middle Eastern origins, Ms. World face and figure, shiny dark hair and even shinier dark eyes. Oh, my goodness, what a gal.



London Fields is a loose, baggy monster if you are looking for a tight-knit murder mystery; but if you enjoy your novels with many characters finely portrayed in gritty, grimy detail along with generous portions of philosophical musing thrown in along the way, then you will enjoy taking your time with its 470 pages. Now, on one level, the men and women are stereotypes representing a particular social and cultural class, but on another level Amis fills out his characters with such vivid, visceral descriptions, their eccentricities, their passions, their intense emotions and desires, in a way, I almost had the feeling I was reading an epic with the streets of London standing in for the walls of Troy – modern city life as the ultimate human blood sport.

One major character – Keith Talent, low-class grunge par excellence, a 29-year old addicted to liquor, pornography and sex, has made a life-long career out of cheating and steeling. Any time Keith opens his mouth we hear an open sewer of words – thick, coarse, vulgar and garbled. If there was ever an example of Wittgenstein’s “The limits of your language are the limits of your world.”, Keith is our man. From what I’ve said, you might think Keith would be totally despicable, a character incapable of our empathy, yet, through the magic of Amis’ fiction, we feel Keith’s pain.

By way of example, here is a scene after Nicola, posing as a social worker, barged uninvited into his cramped, dirty, pint-sized home and accused Keith’s wife and Keith of being too poor and too ignorant to properly care for their baby girl. Shortly thereafter, Keith is at Nicola’s apartment and he looks at her and in his look he says: “Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there had been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probations officers – but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.”

Words are exchanged. Keith tells Nicola repeatedly she “shouldn’t’ve fucking done it”. Nicola replies “You didn’t want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.”. Keith says, “That’s so . . . That’s so out of order.” We understand the humanness of Keith’s plight – no matter how crappy and filthy his living conditions, to have his private space violated and be called a pig by such a woman.

Second major character – Guy Clinch, a wealthy, refined, well-educated gentleman with the heart of a love poet reminds me of the 1950-60s British actor Terry-Thomas. Here is Guy in Nicola’s apartment, letting her know how rude men can be about women and sex: “Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, and with his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, some previous exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? what about?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement.” Guy explaining the sexual dynamics of men and women to Nicola is like a university student explaining Machiavelli to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Talk about black humor.

Among the many other characters, one of my personal favorites is Marmaduke, Guy Clinch’s son who needs an army of nannies to keep him from tearing the house apart and wreaking havoc on adults, especially his mother and most especially his father. When his wife Hope was pregnant, Guy was worried about protecting his son from the world; after colossal Marmaduke’s birth, he’s worried about protecting the world from his son. Here is a taste of what our first-person narrator Samson has to say about the child: “Turn your back for ten seconds and he’s in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he’s the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you’ll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva.”

Lastly, a word about the novel’s structure: Samson Young is in the process of writing a novel about the very novel we hold in our hands, offering ongoing critique and color commentary on the art of his telling and the act of our reading. Metafiction, anyone? Nothing like heaping another layer (or two or three) on top of an already many-layered work of literary fiction.

( )

A frightful glimpse into the lower and criminalised middle class of London. ( )

It’s got Id, does London Fields, a novel by the renowned screenwriter for Saturn 3. I recommend it to Amish engaging in especially wayward rumspringa.

As for me, this was by turns a book I enjoyed and one that seemed not worth spit. ( )

I still can't quite tell whether I liked this or not. I loved the passing references to a global crisis, but didn't care for the main plot; Keith is a wonderfully grotesque creation, but is Amis too sympathetic to him? Are the other characters just cardboard cut-outs, a stupid toff and a sex bomb? Is the exploration of authorship interesting, or masturbatory? I'll see ... but I suspect that London Fields is a little too grimy to love. ( )

Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he is telling, a story involving a host of memorable and very human characters, not to mention a couple of super-human characters: an Incredible Hulk-like toddler and one doozy of a MAN MAGNET, and, yes, indeed, that’s spelled with all capital letters. Meet the lady at the center of the novel’s vortex, Ms. Nicola Six – modern day Helen of Troy, X-rated femme fatale and manifestation of goddess Kali all rolled up into one – everything you always wanted and everything you never wanted, your most cherished dream and your most dreaded nightmare, complete with Eastern European accent, mysterious Middle Eastern origins, Ms. World face and figure, shiny dark hair and even shinier dark eyes. Oh, my goodness, what a gal.



London Fields is a loose, baggy monster if you are looking for a tight-knit murder mystery; but if you enjoy your novels with many characters finely portrayed in gritty, grimy detail along with generous portions of philosophical musing thrown in along the way, then you will enjoy taking your time with its 470 pages. Now, on one level, the men and women are stereotypes representing a particular social and cultural class, but on another level Amis fills out his characters with such vivid, visceral descriptions, their eccentricities, their passions, their intense emotions and desires, in a way, I almost had the feeling I was reading an epic with the streets of London standing in for the walls of Troy – modern city life as the ultimate human blood sport.

One major character – Keith Talent, low-class grunge par excellence, a 29-year old addicted to liquor, pornography and sex, has made a life-long career out of cheating and steeling. Any time Keith opens his mouth we hear an open sewer of words – thick, coarse, vulgar and garbled. If there was ever an example of Wittgenstein’s “The limits of your language are the limits of your world.”, Keith is our man. From what I’ve said, you might think Keith would be totally despicable, a character incapable of our empathy, yet, through the magic of Amis’ fiction, we feel Keith’s pain.

By way of example, here is a scene after Nicola, posing as a social worker, barged uninvited into his cramped, dirty, pint-sized home and accused Keith’s wife and Keith of being too poor and too ignorant to properly care for their baby girl. Shortly thereafter, Keith is at Nicola’s apartment and he looks at her and in his look he says: “Home was his secret. Nobody had ever been there before. Oh, there had been ingress: rentmen and census people, the police, and cheating electricians and would-be plumbers and so on as well as real social workers and probations officers – but nobody he knew. Not ever. Only the dog, and the woman, and the child: the insiders. They, too, were secrets. Home was his terrible secret. Home was his dirty little secret. And now the secret was out.”

Words are exchanged. Keith tells Nicola repeatedly she “shouldn’t’ve fucking done it”. Nicola replies “You didn’t want me to know, did you, that you lived like a pig.”. Keith says, “That’s so . . . That’s so out of order.” We understand the humanness of Keith’s plight – no matter how crappy and filthy his living conditions, to have his private space violated and be called a pig by such a woman.

Second major character – Guy Clinch, a wealthy, refined, well-educated gentleman with the heart of a love poet reminds me of the 1950-60s British actor Terry-Thomas. Here is Guy in Nicola’s apartment, letting her know how rude men can be about women and sex: “Guy got to his feet and came forward. In no uncertain terms, and with his mind half-remembering some analogous recital, some previous exercise in illusion-shattering (when? how long ago? what about?), he told her what Keith and his kind were really like, how they thought of women as chunks of meat, their dreams of violence and defilement.” Guy explaining the sexual dynamics of men and women to Nicola is like a university student explaining Machiavelli to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Talk about black humor.

Among the many other characters, one of my personal favorites is Marmaduke, Guy Clinch’s son who needs an army of nannies to keep him from tearing the house apart and wreaking havoc on adults, especially his mother and most especially his father. When his wife Hope was pregnant, Guy was worried about protecting his son from the world; after colossal Marmaduke’s birth, he’s worried about protecting the world from his son. Here is a taste of what our first-person narrator Samson has to say about the child: “Turn your back for ten seconds and he’s in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he’s the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you’ll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva.”

Lastly, a word about the novel’s structure: Samson Young is in the process of writing a novel about the very novel we hold in our hands, offering ongoing critique and color commentary on the art of his telling and the act of our reading. Metafiction, anyone? Nothing like heaping another layer (or two or three) on top of an already many-layered work of literary fiction.

( )

“And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”

I just did not get it. I didn't care what happened to any of the characters or what they did. (I don't mind unpleasant characters but I have to feel some sort of at least tenuous connection with them). I worked out who the murderer actually was long before the end of the novel (Keith was far too obvious a choice) and being proved correct was probably all that kept me plodding on.

The book is a complete bag of oxymorons. The tale is set in inner city London well away from any fields, Samson Young, the narrator, maybe young but is weak and dying, Keith Talent is bereft of any talent, and that is but a few. But perhaps the biggest 'moron' is whoever decided that this should be put this on the 1001 list.

Set in London in presumably 1999 (the year is never actually stated but the Millennium is mentioned on several occasions) London Fields is supposedly a darkly comic interpretation of the triviality of Western civilization through the lives of four characters who come from different classes of English society.

Samson Young, a young but dying American writer visiting London, is writing his first novel but he lacks the imagination necessary to create fiction so he observes his acquintances and incorporating them into his novel. Nicola Six, is bored with life and all that it entails, has selected Keith Talent, a small-time racketeer to be her murderer at the same time luring Guy Clinch, a wealthy but unhappily married man, into her web of deceit.

Keith is married with a young daughter but commits adultery pretty well every day with his various lovers, none of whom he regards as anything other than playthings and sees them as somehow sub-human. He only cares for darts and the hope that it will give him an openning into the world of television and thus wealth. Keith cares for no one but himself. In contrast Guy Clinch longs for love, any kind of love, a love that he fails to get from Hope, his wife; Lizzyboo, her sister; or Marmaduke, his infant son. His restlessness leads him into an unlikely friendship with Keith. Guy thinks that he has found the means with which to fill the emptiness of his life when he meets and falls in love with Nicola. Guy is basically a good person. He is obedient, industrious, and uncomplaining until Nicola comes along. However, Guy is also gullible and believes Nicola when she tells him that she is a thirty-four-year-old virgin.

Most of the events in the novel are a result of Nicola’s machinations and by the end of the book I knew exactly how Nicola felt and I too had almost decided to give up the will to live. ( )

I didn't get on with this book at all.
I wanted to finish it.
It is 470 pages of nonsense.
I didn't like the characters totally unbelievable.
So glad its over.
I gave it half a star because I liked the cover. ( )

Please read my review here: http://realbooks4ever.tumblr.com/post/107950122849 ( )

Still my favorite of his. Darts. ( )

Sinfonia ricca e atonale, Amis gioca con cose grandi (sensualità, morte, ricchezza, squallore) e lo fa con sapiente follia. Come molte sinfonie, a volte più noioso, a volte leggero come cenere. Se fosse una parola, caleidoscopio. ( )

This is not your typical murder mystery. From the beginning of the book, you know that Nicola Six will be the victim (aka murderee) and someone from a very limited cast of characters is going to commit the crime. You also know the date of the crime, but what makes this book so different is that it is all going to happen in the future and each page races you toward the conclusion. But more than a mystery, it's a commentary on the social system in Great Britain - a conflict between the wealthy, well-educated upper class and the dregs of society. Very interesting and kind of humorous in a very dark twisted way. ( )

I see why Amis appeals to a lot of folks, but ultimately it's not my style. This is a pretty sadistic story filled with sleazy characters and little morality. A nice twist at the end. ( )

I'm so conflicted about Martin Amis--I love his writing so much, but oddly I tend not to like his actual books, and there's a lot about the story of this one that I found really problematic. But he's wicked talented, there's no doubt about that. ( )