[In the following essay, Smith comments on the influences of World War II in Mackay's Dunedin, Martin Amis's London Fields, and Alasdair Gray's Lanark.]

While it can be argued that mere fin de siecle inevitably courts disillusionment, the recognition that there is to be no brave new world just around the corner, it is useful to keep in mind that ‘for most of human history the idea of the millennium itself has been essentially hopeful’ (O'Toole, 29). After Apocalypse comes judgement, and thereafter the thousand-year rule by Christ and a panoply of saints. As we approach the third millennium, however, any belief in resurrection has increasingly become the province of suicidal cults: for the rest of us the dancing on the Berlin Wall is over and we watch in growing alarm as the spectres of civil war, genocide, and nuclear vandalism slouch across the landscape of a disintegrating Europe. According to the historian Eric Hobsbawm:

the European 20th century has already ended with the collapse of the last great utopia of communism and the return of the map of Europe to a shape similar to that before the first world war.

(cited O'Toole, 29)

If, then, the millennium has already encroached into the European consciousness by a couple of decades might it not be that the state of mind that we have come to describe as postmodern is actually better understood as being ‘postmillennial’? (A possibility that postmodernism, with its underlying sense of ending and crisis, has long been hinting at anyway.) And might it not also be possible that the end of the twentieth century can be pushed back even further than Hobsbawm suggests? As far, say, as the mid twentieth century? For in the three texts to be discussed here, Lanark (1981), London Fields (1989), and Dunedin (1992), there is a sense that as we approach the year 2000 we find ourselves looking not forward but back, to the catastrophe that has cast its shadow across the second half of the twentieth century, the Second World War.

I

If the period since the war has witnessed the occasional preemptive obituary of history, the death of the novel has been hailed with even greater regularity. What call for the novel when narrative has leapt from the printed page to the computer screen? In the last decade of the twentieth century the once-upon-a-time reader is transformed into either a hero/player, negotiating/narrating a path through levels of increasing difficulty, or a writer/programmer disappearing into the variable choice that is the hypertext, where it is guaranteed that no readings can ever possibly be the same. Whereas narrative as was, on the page, on the stage, on the cinema and television screen, did (despite readings translated through gender, race, class, age, sexuality) have a certain, albeit fragile, stability, we are now faced with the possibility of endless instability, of no shared readings being possible, or desirable.

Postmodernism supposes the predominance of the electronic media, but it is also apparent that narrative is demonstrating a determination to survive in a resurgence of oral tradition and in the novel's own ability to incorporate, and even to thrive on, instability. Readers can no longer be entirely sure of just where they are, or when the next leap—in genre, difficulty, faith—will be necessary. Alasdair Gray's Lanark—‘possibly the first Scottish metafiction’ (Imhoff, 75)—is a prime example of this.

The fragmented text that is Lanark reflects, however, not only contemporary pressures on narrative but, more specifically, the fragmented consciousness of the protagonist(s), Thaw/Lanark, and the state of late capitalist society. We begin with what appears to be a realist text, as a man of about twenty-four sits on the balcony of a bohemian cafe in what might be any decade, in any city, of the twentieth century. Realism, however, quickly lurches into science fantasy: the man sits staring out into the darkness not in hope of enlightenment, but in the hope of catching a glimpse of sunlight. The city he finds himself in is Unthank (a fact not discovered till the next stage of his journey, this piece of information being kept secret by the civic authorities for ‘security reasons’, 31). Unthank is a thankless place, where it is always dark, it is impossible to keep track of time's passing, and people are afflicted with attacks of ‘dragonhide’ (from which Lanark suffers), ‘twittering rigor’, ‘softs’ or ‘mouths’. Comparing his symptoms with those of Gay, a woman patron of the cafe, Lanark is appalled when she unclenches her palm to reveal a mouth, through which Sludden, the leader of one of the cafe's cliques speaks to him. Gay is Sludden's mouthpiece, in every sense, and Lanark suddenly realizes where he is: ‘… this is hell!’ (45).

Up till now he hasn't been sure. He's arrived in the city on a train, nameless and with no memory (something he's made sure of by throwing away the papers and diary he discovers in his knapsack). All he is sure of is that he craves sunlight, that he couldn't be an artist—when Sludden suggests this occupation he says he has nothing to tell people (6)—and that he has arrived in a place where people randomly disappear when the lights (the electric variety) go out. Some individuals refuse to disappear quietly: her last lodger, Lanark's landlady informs him, ‘left a hell of a mess … And his screams!’ (13). But when Lanark's turn comes he goes voluntarily. A giant mouth (or vagina) opens in the ground at his feet announcing ‘I am the way out’ (47), and Lanark leaps in. Only to find himself reborn in an even stranger place, the institute.

For the reader the institute links the worlds of Lanark with our own: Lanark is tended by a doctor who informs him that this is an establishment which has ‘been isolated since the outbreak of the second world war’ (53), and his supply of reading material includes Our Wullie's Annual for 1938 and No Orchids for Miss Blandish. What we have, then, is a parallel universe, a fracturing of the world as we know it that occurred during the war. This connection with our own here and now is subsequently made clear in the story Lanark hears from the oracle in the Prologue and Books One and Two (the novel begins with Book Three). The connecting passage between the parallel worlds is death: Lanark, Duncan Thaw in his previous life, commits suicide and so finds himself as the nameless man on the train, shunting into an alternative existence.

Or does he? Douglas Gifford argues that the only consistent way to read Gray's novel is as hallucination resulting from mental breakdown (Gifford, 111). But while such a reading is certainly consistent with the realist characterization of Duncan Thaw, the text as a whole strains against such consistency. Lanark, with its disrupted chronology and structure, self-reflective notes, allegorically-laden illustrations (see Lee), extravagant layout and typography, not only demands but also deserves an exuberant suspension of disbelief. Duncan Thaw is reborn as Lanark. Lanark does find himself in the institute, where he falls in love with Rima, with whom he travels through time and space. To read Lanark's adventures as hallucination confines Hell to that small area within Duncan Thaw's tormented psyche, whereas the whole point of the novel is that Hell is vast and we are in it. Unthank is Glasgow is the industrial, post-war world.

The institute, still running after having been set up during the war, represents a fragmenting of space and time, and Thaw's childhood world is fragmented in much the same way, and for the same reason. Book One begins with Chapter Twelve: ‘The War Begins’. It's 1939 and Thaw's working-class family is evacuated from Glasgow. Thaw's view of the war is the view from boyhood: he can play at German spies on the beach and confidently announce to the local minister that he doesn't believe in Hell. To which Dr McPhedron prophetically replies: ‘When you have more knowledge of life you will mibby find Hell more believable’ (143). Young Thaw doesn't know it but Hell starts here and at a later date he will be able to point out its exact landmarks to his father:

‘Look at Belsen!’ cried Thaw. ‘And Nagasaki, and the Russians in Hungary and Yanks in South America and French in Algeria and the British bombing Egypt without declaring war on her! Half the folk on this planet die of malnutrition before they're thirty, we'll be twice as many before the century ends, and the only governments with the skill and power to make a decent home of the world are plundering their neighbours and planning to atom bomb each other. We cooperate in millions when it comes to killing, but when it comes to generous, beautiful actions we work in tens and hundreds.’

(295)

Social and industrial decline follow the war. Thaw's father can only find work as a labourer and his friends leave school for jobs which are boring, and dangerous: ‘… this business of being a man keeps you happy for mibby a week, then on your second Monday it hits you’ (215). One half of the planet's population dies of malnutrition while the other half thrives: ‘Men are pies that bake and eat themselves’ (188). A metaphor that, in the institute, becomes fact; Lanark discovers that the patients who aren't cured are used as fuel and food, despite many sections of the institute being owned by decent people ‘who don't know they are cannibals and wouldn't believe it if you told them’ (102).

Lanark is a study of the way power, particularly political power, works, and how it is fuelled by greed, hate, separation, and the inability to love. When, in the Epilogue, Lanark encounters his maker, the author/conjurer Nastler, he is told that: ‘The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason’ (484). Thaw, the schoolboy who doesn't believe in Hell, goes on to become Thaw the adolescent, wracked with asthma and eczema and the awareness that ‘Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact that nullified all others’ (160). Thaw the art student struggles against class, poverty, and an inflexible education system; but his most important failures are his own. He is a man who, like the society around him, is bad at loving. A man who, in his final breakdown, believes he has—and in fact might have—killed Marjory, the woman he loves but who doesn't love him back.

Duncan Thaw throws himself into the sea in 1956; toward the close of the century Lanark is an old man who has ventured into alternative worlds, and across time zones, in an unsuccessful attempt to save Unthank from destruction. Lanark's, however, is a different failure from Thaw's because, although inept and easily manipulated, he is capable of love. ‘I never wanted anything’, he tells Nastler, ‘but some sunlight, some love, some very ordinary happiness’ (484). He saves the life of Rima (once Marjory) in the institute, and is willing to risk his own life to save their son, Alexander. Love does triumph. And Alexander's existence confounds Lanark's creator:

The conjuror stared and said, ‘You have no son.’

‘I have a son called Alexander who was born in the Cathedral.’

(498)

Lanark's final chapter is simply entitled ‘End’. Nastler warns his character that ‘my whole imagination has a carefully reined-back catastrophic tendency’ (498) and when Lanark demands to know what will happen to his son, his creator simply replies: ‘I can't change my overall plan now. Why should I be kinder than my century? The millions of children who've been vilely murdered this century …’ (498-99).

Time has run out. In Unthank people pay for what they need now by pledging their futures (437), and there is no future left: ‘let us thrill the readers with a description of you ending in company. Let the ending be worldwide, for such a calamity is likely nowadays’ (496). There is a promise of a catastrophe of biblical proportions, although at the last the immediate threat abates, leaving Lanark aware of his own approaching death but relatively at peace with himself: ‘a slightly worried, ordinary old man but glad to see the light in the sky’ (560). Around him, however, a war continues to rage and there is little doubt that Unthank will finally succumb, swallowed by the creature which is otherwise manifested in the power structures known as as the institute, the council, the foundation (409).

II

Where Alasdair Gray is a better writer than he sometimes seems, Martin Amis sometimes seems to be better a writer than he actually is. The most common criticism of Amis's work is that the parts are better than the whole, a contagious style ultimately failing to make up for lack of content. At the same time, there is no doubt that London Fields is both an indicator of the zeitgeist, as well as an influence, and no discussion of the millennium in contemporary British fiction can afford to leave it off the list.

Amis's text shares Lanark's sense of there not being much time left: ‘Oh, Christ, no, the hell of time. … Time takes from you, with both hands. Things just disappear into it’ (239). As the Note to London Fields explains, an alternative title could have been Millennium. However as ‘M.A.’ (the text is a prolonged tease and we're never sure whether we're in the hands of Martin Amis, real author, or Mark Asprey, fictional creation) explains: ‘everything is called Millennium just now’. So London Fields it is: ‘This book is called London Fields. London Fields …’ [p. vii].

Although the year is supposed to be 1999, 1989 is how it reads, with the bubble of the Eighties about to burst and recession immediately around the corner. London is at crisis point—although it is difficult to identify what form the crisis will actually take. Certainly the weather is behaving very oddly, there are cyclonic winds (killing ‘nineteen people, and thirty-three million trees’ (43). The animals are dying (97), and rumour has it that there is to be massive flooding, cosmic rays, and the Second Coming (118). The natural world is on fastforward, rushing toward catastrophe with the political situation racing to keep up. There's danger of ‘A flare-up. A flashpoint somewhere’ (105). The international situation is mysteriously linked to the ill-health of Faith, the First Lady (207), and the ‘new buzz word’ is ‘Cathartic war’ (417). The sun is daily sinking lower as the earth tilts on its axis in anticipation of a full eclipse on November 5, at which point, so the rumours go, two nuclear bombs will explode, ‘one over the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, one over Marble Arch’ (394).

It's the end of the century and the planet is braced for impact (197) because while previous millenniums didn't really mean the end of the world (‘Nobody had the hardware’, 369), this time things are different. But when November 5 does come around, there isn't a bang but a whimper. The comet doesn't hit, the bombs don't explode, the sun returns to its normal position. A woman, however, is murdered and we are back with what we were promised on the novel's first page: ‘This is’ the story of a murder.’

London Fields is a murder story, popular fiction dressed up as high art, a text that functions as much as a textbook (designed for the undergraduate seminar requiring neat examples of the metafictional and postmodern) as a novel. Where in Lanark there are ‘two’ novels, one an experiment in realism, the other science fiction, London Fields is also multi-layered, the commentary of the narrator, Samson Young, sandwiching the fiction he is writing. The commentary, of course, tells us that this fiction is ‘real’ (‘This is a true story but I can't believe it's really happening,’ 1): a woman—Nicola Six, ‘the murderee’—dumps her diaries in a London rubbish bin (26) and an author finds a ready-made story. At the same time Nicola Six finds her murderer. Or, rather, potential murderer for while, in Lawrentian terms, a murderee is always a murderee, ‘The murderer was not yet a murderer’ (18). A murderer has to be made, and so Samson Young describes how Nicola goes to work on Keith Talent who, although ‘a very bad guy’, working class, petty crook, wife-beater, rapist, is not yet ‘the very worst ever’ (4). It is up to Nicola to turn him into that, and in order to transform Keith into what is required she plays him off against Guy Clinch—upper class, nice guy, handsome, rich (27).

Nicola Six (a blend of sex and an Apocalyptic 666) has from an early age always known ‘what was going to happen next’ (15), and in the case of her own murder is playing both prophet and author. Why she wants to die is another matter: ‘It's what she's always wanted’ (1). Nicola Six is a heart, and ball, breaker: ‘She pauperized gigilos, she spayed studs, she hospitalized heartbreakers’ (21). For Guy, Nicola plays the virgin, teasing him into a state whereby he loses dignity, sanity, family. For Keith she's the whore. Nicola is all things to all men: ‘I'm worried’, Samson Young tells her, ‘they're going to say you're a male fantasy figure.’ To which the reply is ‘I am a male fantasy figure. I've been one for fifteen years. It really takes it out of a girl’ (260).

If this is the writer (the real writer, Martin Amis) attempting to cover himself the attempt is less than a success. Geoff Dyer confides that ‘youngish male writers’ find themselves struggling against the influence of the Amis style (‘… the guy has got it. I mean, really’) and ‘accusing each other of imitating him’ (Dyer, 8). Some women critics, however, appear to find Amis less difficult to resist (Ellison, 21) and it is easy to see how the depiction of Nicola Six invites accusations of misogyny, even though Amis's apparent intention is for his female character to be read as a symbol of her age rather than a sign of her gender. Nicola is self-destructive, compelled not just to cancel love but to murder it (21), a perversion of emotion which, according to this text, is reflected in a predeliction for sodomy: ‘It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive’ (67). But while Nicola can't quite comprehend her own desires she is aware that ‘Literature did go on about sodomy, and increasingly’ (67). Joyce, Lawrence, Beckett, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Naipaul (68), compiling her list of (male) writers she is tempted to see sodomy as a ‘twentieth-century theme’, and Nicola ‘would be perfectly prepared to represent her century’ (67-8). Sodomy, for Nicola, is about negation—‘That's what I am, she used to whisper to herself after sex. A black hole. Nothing can escape from me.’ (67)—and that too is the motto of the suicidal last century of the second millennium.

The twentieth century has ‘come along and after several try-outs and test-drives it put together an astonishing new offer: death for everybody …’ (297). At the end, however, death calls only for Nicola, who barely whimpers. This doesn't mean that the big bang won't happen, but is more a recognition that it has happened already. We've already seen the big one, and are living in its aftermath. The big one was the Second World War and what it unleashed, the possibility of nuclear holocaust. Just as Nicola has known since childhood what was going to happen next she's been accompanied by an invisible companion: ‘… Enola Gay. Enola wasn't real. Enola came from inside the head of Nicola Six’ (16). As part of her effort to humiliate Guy, Nicola extracts large amounts of money from him on the pretext of trying to save Enola Gay and her little boy, stranded in south-east Asia as a result of the Cambodian war. But just as Enola Gay isn't really a refugee in Thailand or Burma, she isn't a fantasy either:

‘Enola Gay’ was the plane that flew the mission to Hiroshima. The pilot named the aircraft after his mother. He was once her little boy. But Little Boy was the name of the atom bomb. It killed 50,000 people in 120 seconds.

(445)

Nicola has been able to con Guy because, like the vast majority, he hasn't known one of the most important facts in his sad century's history. Similarly, Keith has to be told that the bikini Nicola dons is named after the Bikini Atoll:

‘What American men did there—one of the greatest crimes in human history. If you got the world's most talented shits and cruelty experts together, they couldn't come up with anything worse than Bikini. And how do we commemorate the crime, Keith?’ She indicated the two small pieces of her two-piece. ‘Certain women go about wearing this trash. It's very twentieth-century, don't you think?’

‘Yeah. Diabolical.’

(127)

So diabolical in fact that it's as if the Second World War never really ended: ‘… it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running the century. Hitler, the great bereaver’ (395). History ended mid-century and what we are caught in in London Fields is the hell of the perpetual present.

Nicola Six, the murderee, walks in the shadow of Enola Gay, and so too does her murderer. When Nicola appears in the Black Cross pub Samson Young leaps to the conclusion that she's recognized her murderer in Keith. But this is one of those whodunnits in which the unwitting narrator turns out to be the ‘who’. ‘She leaned forward. “You,” she said, with intense recognition. “Always you …”’ (465). Nicola had known him from the start (466). And Young should have known too because he and Nicola are linked by the fact that they're both as good as dead already (260). However where Nicola, representative of a self-destructive century, wills her own death, Young has had his willed on him as a legacy of the work his father did, in London Fields, on High Explosives Research (120, 161).

Samson Young is ‘pre-nuked and dead-already’ (323). So when Guy is about to kill Nicola, Young can make a deal with him and take his place because he has nothing to lose. ‘After the first blow she gave a moan of visceral assent’ (467) and the narrator is left to take a suicide pill. A murder and a suicide and everything goes back to normal. Which is the problem with London Fields because, ultimately, any political message there is about the destructive temperament of the century, the madness of things nuclear, is lost as the skies clear and the novel, like other of Amis's novels, concludes by valorizing class and gender (Doan, 79). The woman gets what she's asking for and her death is, ultimately, engineered by Guy who beats up the already-humiliated Keith and reasserts himself as the dominant, upper-class male. The post-war, postmodern, postmillennial world gets back to normal.

III

Hannah Arendt's explorations of the dynamics of holocaust have demonstrated the banality of evil, and this is the premise behind Shena Mackay's powerful, and alarming novel, Dunedin. Mackay's text begins as a realist novel set in 1909, effortlessly jumps forward into a dark comedy about middle-class, suburban life in south London, 1989, then skews sideways into a surreal, alternative world which serves as a nightmarish vision of the future.

In the early years of the new century the minister Jack Mackenzie and his family, fresh from Scotland, sail into Dunedin harbour, New Zealand, and find: ‘the New World glittering at the end of the beams which streamed from the fingers of God as a sign that all would be well’ (3). In this last century of the second millennium, however, God's influence is decidedly weak. Jack Mackenzie, hypocrite and sensualist, disregards the needs of his flock, tyrannises over his family, and is more interested in science than religion. Nothing is well at all.

Where cause and effect are tenuous in both Lanark and London Fields, the equation is carefully worked out in Dunedin. Thus Sandy, Jack Mackenzie's son, will become overtly what his father is covertly, a professional con-man. The minister brings bad luck on his son, and on his son's children, the Mackenzie family representing in miniature the repercussions of imperialism and colonialism on future generations. When they leave Dunedin they take bad luck with them back to the Old World in the form of a preserved head which Jack steals—as a scientific curiosity—from his Maori lover, Myrtille. But the head is ‘tapu … sacred or magic (27): in 1811 a sailor stole a similar one and six years later was killed, along with some of his shipmates, by the natives he'd robbed. In revenge the Maori city of Otago was set alight and destroyed (10-11). Jack Mackenzie knows the story, but doesn't heed its lesson.

Eighty years later the English, once with a mighty empire to exploit, can only exploit each other. South London in 1989 is, like the rest of Europe, a frightening and dangerous place where it is no longer safe to let children play in the park alone (60). A fact recognized only too well by William Mackenzie, Jack Mackenzie's grandson, whose career as a headmaster comes to an end when one of his students is murdered on a school trip. William blames himself:

almost every moment of the day and night, waking screaming in a sodden, strangling tangle of sheets. The horror of the child's going.

(61)

It is for their lost children that William and his sister, Olive, grieve. Olive finds a solution in the simple expedient of child-napping. The pretty black baby in his mother's arms on the tube is irresistible and when Olive gets him back home she announces that he is named Theodore: the next morning her brother leaves this ‘Gift of God’ (81) outside a local hospital.

Olive sees the baby as a desirable object; less desirable is the scruffy boy she meets in the Horniman Museum. Nineteen-year-old Jay Pascal, newly arrived from New Zealand, is beaten and robbed on his arrival in London (280), and is appalled by the ‘vastness, noise and dirt’ of the city (66). Should she ask him, Jay—who might not be a gift from God but is certainly one of God's holy fools—would be only too happy to go and live in Olive's house. But all Olive offers is a lift, and even when he asks to be dropped off at ‘Dunedin’, once the Mackenzie family home but now a derelict squat, she fails to ask why this young New Zealander has come to stay at this particular address. If she did ask she would discover that Jay, brought up in an orphanage in New Zealand, has made his way ‘home’: Jack Mackenzie not only stole the sacred head from Myrtille, but left her pregnant, and Jay is his great-grandson.

Jay soon joins the ranks of the ‘ruined people’ (70). This is the wasteland of the Eighties, the Thatcher years: the hospitals and asylums are in the process of being demolished and the patients have been left to make their own way in ‘what they had been taught to call the community’ (73). The disaffected, deranged, and dispossessed, sleep in doorways, beg at tube stations—and it is at this point that Mackay's vision of the future begins to shape itself along the lines of what is, after all, not a remote past. Because before long:

There were those who had decided that something must be done about them. Private enterprise was engaged to trawl the streets in the dead hours before dawn. … Rumours of disappearances circulated in crypts and park benches and in derelict houses but nobody walked into a police station to register a vagrant as a missing person.

(73-4)

The reality of late-Eighties England, the increase in begging and homelessness, the well-publicized moves to ‘clean up’ areas like the Strand and the cardboard city clustered around the South Bank, reverberates with the reality of late-Thirties Nazi Germany. The millennium is on the doorstep and its shape is that of the Holocaust, the ‘T4’ euthenasia programme and the removal of ‘asocials’ to concentration, and death, camps.

Late one night Jay is bundled into a windowless van ‘marked Department of the Environment’ (187) and finds himself at St Anne's, a vast Victorian house which has quietly been removed from the Ordnance Survey maps and isn't listed in the telephone book: ‘it was as if it did not exist’ (185). And the people who have been brought here, ‘herded into the reek of misery and rot’, might as well not exist any longer either:

They were being addressed by a man in a quasi-uniform of navy blue: ‘… and just in case there should be any barrack-room lawyers among you, with any fancy ideas about Human Rights, I should point out that you lot have renounced any claim you might once have had to humanity. You are no longer human beings. You are the scum of the earth. Your subsciptions to Amnesty International have been cancelled. If you have any friends, which I very much doubt, they won't find you here. Oh yes, one more thing, there is no way out, so don't even think about it.’

(188)

This is the discourse of power and brutality, legitimized as ‘the Vagrancy Act’ (318), and in the face of this Jay's appeal for justice on behalf of himself and his fellow prisoners is not only futile but dangerous: ‘Why am I being kept prisoner here? And it's not just me, all of us, we haven't committed any crimes and if we had we're entitled to a hearing, not just to be locked up and beaten …’ (318). A sign above a row of bins reads ‘Refuse To Be Incinerated’, which is how the institution's staff regard the inmates. Jay reads the same sign and determines to survive: ‘I will refuse … I am still myself. I won't let them destroy me. I will get out of here’ (236).

The reader is tantalized with the hope that Jay might escape the incinerators. Father Jeremy, a vicar who in these last days of the century cherishes a touching faith in God, also harbours the suspicion that something is dreadfully wrong at St Anne's: ‘I know that God wants me to find out what it is’ (193). He eventually hears the truth from the director's secretary:

As Cheryl spoke of vans disgorging broken people into the courtyard, of black-windowed private ambulances, the secret laboratories, locked rooms where naked men and women rocked silently in filth, the faint far-off cries of children, it was as though a troop of demons streamed from those rosebud lips.

(315)

Jeremy, blessed with a loving wife, a baby son, and the ability sometimes to read others' thoughts, seems to be just the person to blow Dr Barrables’ establishment sky-high. This is the conclusion that Barrables comes to himself, with the result that Olive later reads about: ‘a curate and his family, wife and child, who had been killed in a freak accident, when their Volkswagen Beetle had run off a seemingly empty country road in broad daylight and somersaulted down a chalky bank (326). ‘Hell on Earth’, Olive reads in her paper, ‘Greek Island of the Insane Exposed. Why it couldn't happen here …’ (325). But Hell is here already, experienced by ‘a monkey with … tubes and electrodes coming out of his scalped head’ (193), ‘galvanised animal concentration camps set in stinking yards’ (265). It is only a short step from here to the conclusion that if people like Jay are ‘no longer human beings’ (188) then genocide is, humane. Like with animals … the kindest thing …’ (241).

Olive, wrapped in her cloak of self-centred, middle-class angst, can read the newspaper article about the dead curate and his family without reading it: ‘“They'll be all right,” she thought dully, turning the page’ (326). Passing a boy huddled outside a pub she does briefly remember Jay and ‘if goodwill had any power against evil a spark flared for a second in the darkness’ (329). But in the gathering gloom that is the end of the second millennium, evil has won out and for Olive the only answer left is a return to the God that her grandfather turned his back on at the beginning of the century: ‘“Well,” she thought. “Seeing as no one else bloody well wants me, I'd better see if God will take me back”’ (330). In this black comedy this might either be a reference to suicide, or to the Evangelicals who have just passed by.

The suggestion of suicide links Olive to Thaw/Lanark, and Samson Young. However a stronger link among Dunedin, Lanark, and London Fields, is the fear we feel not so much for ourselves but for our children, and our anxiety that they should be kept safe. In Dunedin successive generations fail their children and in the last years of the century there is no assurance that anyone can keep a child safe. However the one sliver of hope that the novel does offer is the fact that Olive's brother, William, has found a lover and conceived a child.

As Nastler reminds Lanark, this is a century in which millions of children have been vilely murdered. Lanark, a child of the Second World War, is desperate to know what will happen to his son Alexander in the war which is to engulf Unthank. And Alexander, in turn, is quick to assure Lanark that his own daughter is ‘in a safer place than this, thank goodness’ (556). Meanwhile, in London Fields, Nicola Six is finally murdered for the sake of a child. Samson Young loves Keith's baby daughter, Kim. Kim, however, is being abused by her mother, Kath, who is abused by Keith. The deal Young strikes with Guy means that Kath and Kim will be looked after financially, and Kim will be safe in the future.

With the Second World War history entered hell's gates, and never came out again. Apocalypse but with no Second Coming, no heavenly jurisdiction. But while history might have ended some fifty years ago it is still possible to hope that it can move forward once again through future generations. Thus, as the sun sets on the battleground that was the twentieth century time becomes even more urgent, for it is now: ‘time to do this, time to look for our children and see how many we can find’ (London Fields, 469).

Works Cited

Amis, Martin, 1990 (1989). London Fields, Penguin.

Doan, Laura L., 1990. ‘“Sexy Greedy Is the Late Eighties”: Power Systems in Amis's Money and Churchill's Serious Money,’ Minnesota Review 34-5, Spring-Fall, 69-80.

Dyer, Geoff, 1993. ‘Mad about the boy,’ The Guardian, 2 Nov., 8.

Ellison, Jane, 1989. ‘Battlefields,’ The Guardian, 12 Oct., 21.

Gifford, Douglas, 1987. ‘Private Confession and Public Satire in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray,’ Chapman 10.i and ii, Summer, 101-16.

Gray, Alasdair, 1991 (1981). Lanark, Picador.

Imhoff, Rudiger, 1990. ‘Chinese Box: Flann O'Brien in the Metafiction of Alasdair Gray, John Fowles, and Robert Coover,’ Eire-Ireland 25.i, Spring, 64-79.

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Mackay, Shena, 1992. Dunedin, Penguin.

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