Perhaps it's inevitable that, as time passes, less and less of Martin Amis's work lives up to the promise of Money and London Fields, but debate about his talent or lack thereof rages on regardless. Reception of his latest offering, Lionel Asbo: State of England, is no different; to some he's still, as the dust jacket of this new novel declares, "one of the world's greatest writers", to others he's simply past his prime.
The novel's subtitle, State of England, invokes echoes of Amis's trademark satire, but given that the England he conjures up here appears dreadfully outdated, the end result smacks instead of self-congratulatory egotism. Unluckily for Amis, this novel is also destined to be haunted by the much-quoted, apparently mistranslated interview printed in France last year in which he was supposed to have described it as a "final insult" to the country he was leaving behind (he's recently relocated with his family to New York) – an attack on Britain's "moral decrepitude". What Amis actually said or didn't say is of little consequence, the damage has already been done. It's now impossible to read Lionel Asbo without these reported words ringing in one's ears. But even without them, the novel makes for disappointing reading – occasional flashes of brilliance and an endearingly drawn baby aren't enough to save it.
The novel’s eponymous hero is a 21-year-old “subsistence criminal” who has already spent “half his life in jail” and speaks with a “rueful fondness” of his adolescent rite of passage in a young offender institution. On the rare occasion he’s not being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Lionel lives in a flat on the 33rd floor of Avalon Tower in the London borough of Diston with his 15-year-old orphaned nephew, Des Pepperdine, doggedly loyal to his uncle but decidedly more intelligent and honest. Lionel in bedroom number one, “the size of a low-ceilinged squash court”; Des in bedroom number two, “the size of a generous four-poster”; and Lionel’s two pit bulls, Jeff and Joe, the “tools of his trade” who live off a diet of Tabasco-doused meat on the small balcony outside.
That Diston can be read as an amalgamation of London's Dalston and dystopia seems to neglect the fact that Dalston is currently home to some of the city's hippest property (a fact in itself that makes for the height of dystopia in many an eye, but not perhaps for the reasons Amis had in mind). Amis's Diston, by comparison, is a confusing mix of bourgeois privilege superimposed on a stereotypical working class. Forty is considered "past it" and men get arrested following "altercations" with their own mothers (and court arrest for doing far worse with their grandmothers); though these same women buy a distinctly middle-class newspaper, The Telegraph, for its cryptic crossword.
The “Asbo” moniker, we’re informed, is self-chosen, changed by deed poll on Lionel’s 18th birthday in honour of the fact that he was served his first restraining directive (what was eventually known as an Asbo – anti-social behaviour order) at the tender age of three years and two days old: “Had he come along half a generation later [it] would have been called a Basbo, or Baby Asbo.” As Des points out though, one would have to give “being stupid a lot of very intelligent thought” to change your surname to Asbo if you “spend about a third of your waking life in court”. Here, as in much of the book, the conceit is less than satisfactory, not to mention unsubtle.
Even Amis’s characterisation is lazy, and he makes no bones about this, describing Asbo as “brutally generic”, his “slab-like body, the full lump of the face, the tight-shaven crown with its tawny stubble” rendering him indistinguishable from “hundreds of thousands of young men” in London. And yes, you guessed it, if this description wasn’t detailed enough Amis rams home the obvious with an inevitable resemblance to the footballer Wayne Rooney – the go-to figure for an illustration of Britain’s once much-discussed “chav culture”.
It’s the predictability of the plot, however, that proves most grating. While serving time for inciting a brawl at a wedding reception in a hotel and causing hundreds of thousands of pounds in damage, Lionel receives the news that he’s won £140 million (Dh794m) on the lottery. The press fall back on well-worn clichés like “Lotto lout” and “jackpot jailbird” to report Asbo’s good fortune – a story that feels like it’s been directly lifted from the pages of Britain’s tabloid press; Michael Carroll, the self-styled King of the Chavs, who won £9.7m in 2002 automatically springs to mind. Here’s the rub: what would have been a lively and biting piece of satire 10 years ago, now reads as if it’s a long way past its sell-by date.
Cue a series of episodes that one can only assume are meant to be a clever dig at celebrity culture – Lionel pays off the hotel damages, thus securing his re-entry into society, then proceeds to scale the dizzy heights of social aspiration at a speedy pace. He spends £12,000 on socks almost immediately and, after a brief stint in London’s most expensive hotel (out of which he’s unceremoniously thrown in a matter of hours), installs himself among his “peers” at the infamous South Central, an establishment that prides itself on its “Zero Ejections”. The clientele is exclusively rich and famous, but of a certain bent: “None of them got that way by work of mind.”
He hires a publicist whose plan is to turn him into a “national treasure” and conducts a very public, tabloid-enticing relationship with Threnody – a glamour model turned poet who’s engaged in a bitter battle with her rival, Danube. Unfortunately, we’ve seen all this before, too, in the likes of Jordan (in the days before she reverted to the name Katie Price) and the barrel-scraping world of reality television shows.
Comedy is clearly the aim of the game but, sadly, bar an episode in a Knightsbridge fish restaurant where our hero engages in mortal combat with a lobster, there’s little wit to be found in the majority of the novel.
The funniest section by far has to be the pre-windfall wedding reception that ends with most of the guests incarcerated, but even here there’s something unsettling about the fact that the fallback option when it comes to writing about the working classes, and there’s clearly some kind of cultural imperative to do so, is to use humour.
At its best Lionel Asbo reads like a literary Shameless, which certainly isn't faint praise, but at its worst like a back issue of a tabloid newspaper.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
