London Fields

Set in a London approaching the end of the millennium, the novel is narrated by Samson Young, a dying American writer who has swapped apartments with Mark Asprey, a successful English playwright. Samson declares from the opening pages that he has a ready-made murder story: He knows the murderer, the victim (whom he calls the "murderee"), the motive, and the time of death. He presents himself as a mere chronicler of events he cannot stop, writing against a deadline imposed by his terminal illness.

The three principals converge in the Black Cross, a pub on the Portobello Road. The first is Keith Talent, a petty criminal and aspiring professional darts player from West London, whom Samson designates as the murderer. Keith has failed at serious crime before settling into non-violent cheating: airport limousine scams, fake perfume sales, and three-card monte. He earns well but loses everything at the betting shop. His great ambition is darts; he has advanced to the late rounds of the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, an interpub competition whose televised final might launch him into celebrity. Keith is married to the exhausted Kath and has a baby daughter, Kim.

The second figure is Nicola Six, the murderee, a 34-year-old woman who has possessed since childhood a premonitory gift: She always knows what is going to happen next. She grew up with an imaginary friend she named Enola Gay, lost her parents in a plane crash at 19, and has spent her adult life inspiring intense love in men while returning it in destroyed form. She has always known she will be murdered on her 35th birthday. On a calculated morning, she attends a stranger's funeral, then enters the Black Cross in mourning clothes. Keith drops his dart into his own foot, and Guy Clinch freezes at the pinball machine. Nicola writes her final diary entry: She has found her murderer.

Guy Clinch is the third figure, the "foil," a wealthy, good-natured man who possesses enormous resources but experiences a pervasive lifelessness. His marriage to the intelligent, American-born Hope has been devastated by the birth of their son Marmaduke, a spectacularly hyperactive and violent child. Guy wanders the streets of Ladbroke Grove seeking authentic experience and enters the Black Cross out of a desire to confront fear. When Nicola appears, Guy is emotionally undefended.

Samson cultivates all three characters. He befriends Keith during a taxi ride from Heathrow, ingratiates himself with Guy through pinball, and recovers Nicola's abandoned diaries from a rubbish heap near Asprey's apartment, where she has deliberately placed them. He reads and photocopies the diaries, then develops a relationship with Nicola as her confidant and chronicler. Their alliance becomes the engine of the novel.

Nicola deploys opposite strategies to manipulate the two men. With Guy, she performs the role of a sheltered, otherworldly woman: She fabricates a history of orphanhood, tells him she is in love with him, and claims to be a virgin. She invents a lost Cambodian friend named Enola Gay and a child called Little Boy, asking Guy to help trace them. Guy has no knowledge that these are the names of the plane and the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and he throws himself into researching the catastrophe, consumed by the excitement of distant suffering. With Keith, Nicola adopts a different persona, giving him money and videotapes of herself undressing, framing everything as serving his darting ambitions. She plays for Keith a recorded telephone message she has sent Guy breaking off contact, demonstrating how thoroughly she controls Guy's emotions.

References to a vague international crisis accumulate throughout the novel, involving nuclear weapons verification failures and emergency broadcast messages on television. Samson tries to ignore the world situation but finds it seeping into everything.

Guy provides Nicola with a large sum of money, ostensibly to fund an underground railway rescuing Enola Gay and Little Boy from Cambodia. Nicola stages carefully controlled physical encounters with Guy: country walks, incremental kissing sessions, and a "night of love" in which she performs the role of the nervous virgin, achieving intercourse at dawn but stopping Guy before climax. When his desire threatens to overwhelm her choreography, she injures him through claimed instinct, once punching him in the face and once striking his groin, framing her violence as evidence of uncontrollable passion.

Keith's financial situation becomes desperate. He has been borrowing from three loan sharks, each to pay the interest on the others, and they threaten to break his darting finger. Nicola provides money funneled from Guy's accounts, transforming Keith's appearance with expensive clothes and grooming. Keith advances through the darts tournament to the final.

Nicola infiltrates the Clinch household by appearing under the name Enola Gay as a prospective nanny. She subdues the violent Marmaduke through a "Pinching Game" in which she pinches the child back harder than he pinches her, and Hope hires her immediately. When Guy grows suspicious about Keith's visits to Nicola's flat, Nicola stages a "poetry lesson" with Keith, providing him cue cards so he can discuss Keats's "Bright Star" with apparent scholarly insight. Guy watches on a monitor from the bedroom and is convinced that Nicola is innocently tutoring Keith.

Samson, who visits Keith's flat to care for baby Kim, discovers that the child bears bruises and cigarette burns. He initially suspects Keith but realizes that Kath, driven to desperation, has been hurting the child.

Guy confesses to Hope that there is someone else; Hope strikes him, and he checks into a hotel. Nicola sends Guy to America, insisting he visit his father and Hope's mother before their relationship can be consummated. While Guy is abroad, Nicola installs Keith in her flat for intensive darts preparation. A television documentary about Keith is filmed at Nicola's flat, presenting him as a successful businessman with Nicola as his assistant.

On November 5, Guy Fawkes Night, a full solar eclipse plunges London into darkness. Keith endures a catastrophic day, cutting his darting finger on his car's smashed window. On his return flight, Guy reads a war memoir about Hiroshima and finally discovers that Enola Gay and Little Boy are the names of the plane and bomb that destroyed the city, realizing Nicola's entire Cambodian story was fabricated. He arrives at her flat and finds evidence of Keith's habitation: a dartboard, beer cans, Keith's darting shirt, and ruined bedsheets.

Keith's darts final against his old associate Chick Purchase takes place in a sterile television studio rather than a pub. Nicola arrives provocatively dressed. When both Guy and Keith insist she is leaving with them, Nicola publicly humiliates both by placing her hand on the groin of Chick Purchase and declaring she is going with him instead. Keith loses the match catastrophically.

The final twist overturns the novel's apparent structure. It is not Keith who waits on the dead-end street but Guy, driven to violence by Nicola's systematic destruction of his life. Samson persuades Guy to leave and takes his place in the car. Nicola approaches as she has always foreseen, her heels clicking on the pavement. She sees Samson's face and says, "You. Always you." Samson kills her.

In his final pages, Samson acknowledges that Nicola outwrote him: Her story worked and his did not. He realizes she had always planned for him to be the murderer. He takes a suicide pill and writes two farewell letters: one to Mark Asprey, asking him to serve as literary executor and posing a final question about whether Asprey orchestrated the entire situation; the other to Kim Talent, expressing Samson's love and hope that the child will be protected. As part of his final arrangements, Samson ensures that Guy will take financial responsibility for Kim's welfare.