Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis

Previously published in the Herald Magazine.

Martin Amis’ new novel Lionel Asbo: State of England is exceedingly uncomfortable for such an easy read. It carries in it a heavy foreboding, a constant feeling of threat, of impending doom of the most violent, loutish kind all in the shape of its eponymous protagonist, the 20-something part-time crook, full-time aggressor Lionel Asbo, ‘always one size bigger than expected’. Amis does well with modern day grotesqueries, he always has - and yet in his creation of Lionel, the London thug who suddenly comes into large sums of money, there is a strange element of caricature that does not always sit right. 

During one of his many prison sentences, Lionel happens to win an absurdly large lottery, becoming an overnight billionaire and paparazzi favourite. This allows Amis to set up Lionel against the lifestyles of the very rich where he faces situations he has  never experienced before. Instead of a clever foil for economic disparity, the ‘Lotto Lout’ ends up becoming a cliche, reading trashy papers featuring aged page 3 girls in fancy restaurants, making awkward propositions to luxury hotel spa’s masseuses - none of this is particularly imaginative, it’s exactly what you would expect to happen even in a half-baked rags to riches sitcom. Lionel even finds himself glamour model companion who orchestrates large sections of his life for the media, in exactly the way his nephew and ward Desmond tried to but couldn’t. This is more than just Lionel’s story, however, although the entire narrative is mostly driven by him and others’ reactions to him. But this is also the story of Desmond, who is as far removed from Lionel’s predilection for violence and illegal activities as possible without making him a caricature as well.

Desmond is saintly as compared to Lionel - even his great sin of sleeping with his maternal grandmother (she’s not yet 40, he’s 15 and ‘the sex is fantastic and I think I’m in love. But ther’es one very serious complication and i’ts this; shes’ my Gran!’ [sic] ) cannot compare to the things Lionel does easily and without a shred of conscience. Through the course of the story, Desmond proceeds from bad to better and then onwards to the best he can be; Lionel heads in a fairly obvious downwards trajectory, opposite entirely to Desmond’s coming of age as an educated, intelligent and loving man, husband and father. Their treatment of Lionel’s pitbulls is enough to entirely define the two men - Lionel calls them ‘tools of me trade’, feeds them Tabasco and alcohol and trains them to tear apart ‘ethnic’ effigies while Desmond introduces them to his girlfriend and slowly converts them into cuddly pets. 

The dogs are important to Amis’ story. Each section of the book begins with the repeated epigraph ‘Who let the dogs in? Who? Who?’, although its just not clear why Amis felt the need to repeat this. It’s generally hard to tell what Amis is doing with Lionel Asbo - or not doing, as some may say. The easiest and possibly more enjoyable way to deal with this book is to simply read it at a surface level and to enjoy Amis’ control over the language, without thinking too much about whether it is a diatribe against the British working class or not, and if it is, then what, exactly, is Amis’ point? 

About half way into Lionel Asbo, a taut, incredibly well controlled scene that shows just how far Lionel has fallen turns out to also be a perfect description for the entire narrative. Amis writes, ‘the air itself was thick. Thick and weak, as if the room was about to faint. …this atmosphere - its wrongness, its deafened, bad-dream feel.’