Casting Is the Key
The always informative, always interesting Cup of Chicha reports that David Cronenberg will direct the adaptation of Martin Amis's novel London Fields.

Much will depend on who is cast as super-yob* Keith Talent and maneating, femme fatale Nicola Six. James Diedrick writes in his fair and comprehensive book Understanding Martin Amis:

Exhaustion is, in fact, the unifying theme of the novel's allegory. "Over the gardens and the mansion-block rooftops, over the windowboxes and TV aerials, over Nicola's skylight and Keith's dark tower (looming like a calipered leg dropping from heaven), the air gave an exhausted and chastened sigh" (229). The sun itself is no longer able to mount the sky ("quite uncanny, the sun's new trajectory, and getting lower all the time" (309) . Under its weakening light, moral energies are flagging. Sympathy, tenderness, belief, meaning, and, of course, love are all collapsing. This exhaustion extends right down to the low comedy of Keith's petty criminality. Consider this description of what he and his cohorts discover when they enter a house they intend to rob: "it was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled" (248). When Nicola, noting that she has been a male fantasy figure for fifteen years, says "it really takes it out of a girl," she is contributing her voice to this theme as well.

* yob - British slang for a loutish male (an inversion of the word "boy")