14 Jun 2012 19:27:06
In the cover photo on the back inside flap of Lionel Asbo: State of England, the book's haughty scribe ("Martin Amis is the author of two collections of stories, six works of non-fiction and 12 previous novels...") gazes out, in glowering profile, at an anonymous London street. The pavement appears moist from a sudden rainstorm. (Has Amis been drenched in the downpour on his way to the photo-shoot? Is that expensive grey suit peppered with damp? The trademark tousled mane weighted by droplets, only recently – and impatiently – combed aside before he sits at a cafe table and glances into the melee?)Behind him (having survived the withering coruscation of his writerly stare) a black family (mum pulling a pushchair, dad in 50s-style hat and raincoat, toddler clutching his hand, struggling to keep up). Approaching him, a white man in a white T-shirt and jeans, shaven-headed – the generic English lad – lopes, hands shoved into his pockets, deliciously framed by the outline of an old red phone box. Facing this man, a headscarf-wearing woman, in full-length, enveloping black, bag slung over her arm.
And Amis? Slouched into his chair, relaxed mouth, eyes hooded but somehow expressing an ineffable sadness bleeding into disgust. Left hand obscured from view, right hand lifted and holding… What is that he's holding? A small packet of Japanese incense? A party popper? A slim salt dispenser? A roll of Semtex? Are we witnessing Amis – frozen in time – mere moments before the hand tightens further, he straightens up in his chair, grimaces and steadies himself to hurl this mysterious object? But at whom? And why?
Perhaps he already knows that the early word on his new novel is that it's depressingly bad. A stinker. Perhaps he is thinking about his imminent move to New York. Perhaps he is looking at these streets, these wet London streets, and cursing them for not appreciating him – a great author, a great English author – nearly as much as he feels they should do. Perhaps he is thinking about his father. Perhaps he is thinking about becoming his father or not becoming his father. Perhaps he is remembering his old friend, Christopher Hitchens, to whom his latest novel is dedicated.
The look in his eyes is one of wistful disappointment. Of hurt.
So what about this seductive and garishly entitled Lionel Asbo, then (with its curious and provocative State of England adjunct)?
Is it – as nay-sayers believe – a savage, uncontrolled and splenetic attack on modern British life, culture, mores and tropes? Is it a casual bit of GBH against the working classes? Is it a parting shot (a carefree moon from the back window of a retreating National Express coach?); a final, well-aimed kick in the teeth to the doubters and the gloaters, the prize-givers and the father-haters?
Because – like it or not – he is the father; the current father of English letters. Amis is the daddy – something his own daddy never really was (much as Martin persists in believing otherwise). Amis is the don. And anyone who has read Sophocles or Freud knows that while we all love our dads, we all still harbour a deep, secret urge to kill them. And then to have sex with our nans.
In the opening chapter of Lionel Asbo, the young hero, Desmond Pepperdine, mixed-race 15-year-old resident of Diston Town or "Town" ("Diston – a world of italics and exclamation marks", part of "the great world city") writes a letter to an agony aunt about his incestuous relationship with his nan, Grace. Des's mother, Cilla, is dead. Des lives in a tower block with his Uncle Lionel, a psychotically violent local hoodlum, "a kind of anti-dad, the counterfather", a man with a genius for "disseminating tension", a man who has made stupidity into an art form ("Why did he work at being stupid?").
Des, by contrast, has a gentle and persistent intelligence. The plot is disarmingly uncomplicated. If Lionel finds out that Des has slept with his mother, he will kill him. But of course he probably won't find out (at least we sincerely hope he won't find out), not for 270-odd pages, and in the meantime he will win millions on the lotto and become ever more powerful, more wonderful, more hilarious, more disgusting, more visceral and more magnified. He will spew out his extraordinary vitality and violence and (better still) charm and ugly, irrepressible genius into every urgent, thuggish chapter.
And it will be filthy and endlessly inventive, and the language and the imagery will fizz and glow in a way that only Amis – at his very best, his most carefully careless – fizzes and glows. This is both a paean to and an attack on London:
"To evoke the London borough of Diston, we turn to the poetry of Chaos:
Each thing hostile
To every other thing: at every point
Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless
Resisted weight."
It is a masterclass in the strange variability of modern language and diction. Amis can do the accents. In fact he can do them so well, so effortlessly, that he undoes some of them. He performs guerilla surgery on them – nips and tucks – then sews them back together again. And he never pauses for breath. The novel comes at you and comes at you and keeps on coming. It never flags.
Is this an offensive book? Hell, yes. Deeply. But then maybe modern England needs offending. Is this a readable book? It's a Big Mac made from filet mignon. Is it a clever book? Clever and ignorant and topical and sad and cruel and ridiculous and breathtaking.
It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake. And the biggest joy is that Amis seems to find himself (and finds us, by extension) loving the thing he loathes. It is a great big confidence trick of a novel – an attack that turns into an embrace – a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve. So let's give thanks that Martin Amis was bad enough and brave enough to write it.
