As lockdown continues, Guardian Opinion is reviving its A book that changed me series, an opportunity for writers to select the very best reading to help get us through these uncertain times, with a new instalment every Monday. I was around 16 or 17 when my dad handed over a copy of Martin Amis’s London Fields and told me I should read it, that it would probably make me laugh. He is a dogged and passionate advocate for the things he loves, my dad, so what he actually said was: “You must read it. You will find it funny. You’ll love it, I promise you. Wait until you get to Keith. Wait until you get to Clive.” I remember he laughed richly and for a long time at the mention of Clive’s name, at the very idea of the world’s No 1 fictional alsatian, lying like a doorstop on the floor of the Black Cross pub, getting showered in the ash from Keith Talent’s cigarettes, panting hotly on various blighted pavements, being called Clive. Ahaha ... My dad didn’t say what it was about, which was smart of him. As I have learned to my cost over the years, it is a very rare person who will be sold on London Fields by a description of the plot, which is confusing, a bit top-heavy and very much beside the point. Technically, yes, Amis’s 1989 novel is a murder mystery (or, as the jacket copy mortifyingly puts it, a “postmodern whodunnit”), centred around Nicola Six and her inscrutable efforts to get murdered in the way she has foreseen, by a man whose identity is known only to her. In theory, yes, the “mystery” for the reader lies in finding out whether the murderer is Keith Talent (the cheat) or Guy Clinch (the foil), and in watching to see how old Nicola chivvies the various participants along. It doesn’t sound good when you put it like that. It certainly doesn’t sound like something I would have been drawn to at 16 – if someone had started talking to me about “postmodern whodunnits” when I was that age, I would have made a loud screaming noise until they promised never to talk to me about books ever again. But my dad was right: I couldn’t believe how much good stuff there was, just page upon page of Keith Talent doing appalling things and then saying “yeah cheers” afterwards, various characters sloping off for “a quiet glass of porno”, Nicola Six scheming away, having refreshing ideas about underwear and kissing, Guy Clinch being stabbed in the eyes by his evil child, Samson Young moaning and groaning about time going about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. All that. The fact that large tracts of it whizzed directly over my teenage head only made it more appealing. It was good that I could not make head or tail of the ending, or all that business with “Mark Asprey”, and the stuff about the narrator constantly on the phone trying to get through to Missy Harter, being barred by her vicious secretary who for some reason is named Janit. What was Missy Harter’s role in all this? What was her job, even? I couldn’t say. If you’d put a gun to my head, I couldn’t have told you why Nicola Six did anything that Nicola Six did. Again, the book’s opacity was key to its appeal. It’s a sort of magic trick, that feeling, when it becomes not so much a matter of taste as of identity: by loving London Fields, you can become the sort of person who loves London Fields, who will hopefully one day understand what any of it actually means. I carried my copy around with me all over the place – it was the one with the neon writing and the blurry TV still of the naked woman on the front. I did this partly to will into reality a scenario I had envisioned where an older and smarter version of me would see me reading it and become my best friend, but mostly because I just could not get enough of it. There’s a bit quite early on where Keith Talent and Guy Clinch are walking to Keith’s “drinking club”, the Golgotha. A silence grows between them as they walk, and Guy seizes on football, “a subject which had often helped him out in the past”. He asks Keith about a match he’d missed the week before, and Keith launches into this unbelievable speech, producing a perfect stream of terrible sportswriter clichés: “During the first half the Hammers probed down the left flank. Revelling in the space, the speed of Sylvester Drayon was always going to cause problems for the home side’s number two.” Trying to make sense of this display later, the narrator says: “At first I thought he’d just memorised sections of the tabloid sports pages. Absolutely wrong … When Keith goes to a football match, that misery of stringer’s cliches is what he actually sees.” That’s me and London Fields. I loved it so much and thought about it so much that it changed the way I apprehended certain slices of reality. To this day I cannot look at an old alsatian without warmly thinking Clive. I do it with younger alsatians, too, except with them I think Future Clive. Soon to reach his true form as Clive. I cannot hear a story about a badly behaved toddler without thinking Marmaduke, and then forcing myself to stop thinking of the part where the narrator describes him “fucking a light socket (he’s the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees.)”. I cannot come up against anything to do with darts without quietly whispering the word “clinicism” to myself. “Gracing the oche.” “The sincerity of the dart.” I cannot read another Amis novel without at least briefly thinking “I wish Clive were here,” and I certainly cannot read an article or review where someone talks about their contentious relationship with Amis’s writing or starts going on about their problematic relationship with Amis’s best friend, “The Hitch”, without longing for three or four paragraphs acknowledging the superiority of London Fields as a work of art. There are lots of books I love equally as much or more, but there’s something unique about London Fields’ ability to get into my head and stay there. On the phone to my dad the other day, I told him I was writing about it, and the first thing he said was: “Don’t forget about Clive.” I was almost offended at the suggestion, as I imagine Keith Talent himself would be. You don’t just go around forgetting about Clive like that, and you don’t forget about London Fields, either. • Rosa Lyster is a writer who lives in Cape Town