So it really is the painful outcome of the 1980s, soaked with then dominant concerns but very much projected onto the future – and onto a symbolical date that lends itself to one of the dimensions of his novel, the apocalyptic. He saw the work in progress expanding, taking different shapes over six years that were formative for the author, in the personal as well as the professional sphere. Martin Amis began working on it in 1983 and initially had in mind a long short story of perhaps a hundred pages. The novel had an unusually lengthy gestation period. This was the ideal setting for the creation of a novel such as London Fields, published in 1989 and set in 1999, and so embracing those numerical and temporal coincidences. The dissolution of the binary opposition (Washington/Moscow) in geopolitics was in some measure reproduced more widely, with a sense of merry catastrophe into the next decade – already seen as particularly crucial because of the numerical, temporal coincidences that beat the time of human existence. It was the year of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which paved the way for a new, unexpected world order, so much so that there was talk of the ‘end of history’. A pervasive fear of the atomic bomb remained palpable with the Cold War still in the background.Īt the same time, 1989 became instantly charged with global symbolism. We witnessed rising ecological awareness along with a succession of environmental disasters. The year 1989 came at the end of an awful decade for the environment. Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II John Sommerfield: Trouble in Porter Street Pamela Hansford Johnson: This Bed Thy Centre
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