The One with the ASBO: A Review

Welcome to the London borough of Diston, where everything hates
everything else, and everything else, in return, hates everything
back. It has a life expectancy on par with Djibouti, and a fertility
rate somewhere between those of Malawi and the Yemen.

Lionel Asbo is Diston’s most notorious inhabitant, and the eponymous
character of Martin Amis’s latest novel. Lionel (who changed his name
by deed poll when he became the youngest person in the UK to receive
an ASBO, aged three), is never without a can of Cobra in his hand or a
Marlboro Hundred between his lips, and he makes a living as a
self-styled debt collector, which naturally means spending time in and
out of prison on charges of “Extortion With Menaces and Receiving
Stolen Property”.

He is the youngest of seven (born to his mother when she was just
nineteen), and guardian to his intelligent, orphaned, mixed-race
nephew, Desmond, who, at fifteen, is having a casual sexual
relationship with his grandmother (aka Lionel’s mother).
Such warped family structures and behaviour are apparently common in
Diston, which is nothing more than a generic cardboard cut-out model
of any under-privileged suburban city borough. Lionel, too, is a
one-dimensional flat-pack caricature: crude, uneducated and violent,
it is tempting to see him as an unflattering stereotype of the young
working-class man.

Then, in an absurd twist of fate, another element of the creaking and
none-too-clear plot moves into place: Lionel learns that he has won
140 million pounds on the National Lottery.

As a “lotto lout”, he begins courting a topless-model-come-poetess,
“Threnody” (pronounced “Frenody” by Lionel), a character rumour to be
inspired by Katie Price, several volumes of whose autobiography Amis
has admitted to reading. The novel has the merit of affording some
insight into the absurdity of this almost fairytale world of unearned
wealth and arbitrary rewards: Lionel reflects at one point, “I’ll buy
a f*cking train and steam around in that. But then you think, where
to? What’s the point?”

One issue the novel raises (but does not tackle) is that of class in
English society. In particular, the book appears at times to be a
scathing critique of the working class. Throughout, Martin Amis seems
to be peering down his bespectacled nose at this marginalised and
somehow alien tier of society, as if through the side of a hot perspex
enclosure in a zoo. One cannot but suspect him of intellectual
snobbery and social elitism; the subtitle of the book (“State of
England”) only reinforces this impression.

The author claims, however, that Lionel is not a member of the working
class, but of the “under class”—a class whose social complexity it is
presumably acceptable to over-simplify and one that he has claimed
(with questionable tact and even honesty) to know, having “friends in
low places”.

Moreover, he has said that the novel is borne out of a sense of
affection, not disaffection, for England and its current
decline—indeed, upon reading it, one can only conclude that Amis is of
the opinion, so touted by politicians, that we live in a “broken”
Britain.

Such a muddied tableau of messages ensures that it is, a lot of the
time, very difficult to determine quite what the author is trying to
say at all. It is difficult to imagine an Amis criticism of the
working class done in such a heavy-handed and tactless manner, which
is perhaps redemption in part. In any case, the overall result is that
the author appears detached; his reflections outdated, even
incoherent—in stark contrast to those of his undisputed 1984
masterpiece, Money, which truly does have interesting things to say
about wealth and contemporary society. As Julie Burchill (aptly) put
it: “[if only] Martin Amis had stuck to writing about smoking,
shagging and snooker.”

Of course, Amis redeems himself where expected. The prose (when he is
not tirelessly and tiresomely driving home Lionel’s barbarisms) is
dazzling; original and effortlessly poetic. Amis is less than ever
afraid of a pair of (elegantly-used) brackets, and the somewhat
fractured narrative is interspersed with passages of simply brilliant
literary sophistication, especially when describing his beloved
England and London in particular: “It was the kind of morning that the
citizens of this island kingdom very rarely saw: an established and
adamant clarity, with the sun pinned into place, as firm as a gilt
tack; and the sky, seemingly embarrassed by such exalted pressure,
kept blushing an even deeper blue…”

So, it is a mixed bag. The plot won’t grip you; but Amis’s words are,
as ever, guaranteed to fascinate.