Advertisement

This septic isle

Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0

Lionel Asbo
by Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape

About a third of the way through Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis' 13th novel, our titular hero discovers he has won GBP140 million in the National Lottery. Violent, skinheaded, and profoundly criminal, Lionel is in prison for his (central) part in destroying a London hotel.

Later, Lionel (the 'Lotto Lout') exits Wormwood Scrubs prison, pursued by a posse of paparazzi. As the cameras 'flashed and mewed', he bids farewell to the media in his own inimitable fashion. '[He] unleashed a surprisingly cosmopolitan flurry of obscene gestures: the V-sign, the middle finger, the pinkie and the index, the tensed five digits, the thumbnail flicked against the upper teeth; and then he smacked his left hand down on the biceps of his right arm - whose fist shot skywards. Finally, as he bent to enter the car, Lionel reached for his anal cleft and lingeringly freed his underpants.'

It is tempting to read Lionel Asbo as Amis' literary incarnation of Lionel's crude, angry but colourful series of adieux. Rumours are flying that Amis has had it with being English and is relocating to New York. Commentators have already decreed that Lionel Asbo (subtitled State of England) represents Amis waving his anal cleft in the direction of the country that inspired his finest work: The Rachel Papers, Success, Money and London Fields.

The setting is the fictional London borough of Diston, a loveless, dismal place with low life expectancy, and where 'Each thing hostile/To every other thing: at every point/Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless/Resisted weight.' The quotation is from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and describes Chaos. In Amis' recasting, this has been made flesh in the body of Lionel, a 24-year-old career criminal who spends more time in jail than in the cramped flat he shares with his young nephew, Des.

Lionel's brushes with the law have metamorphosed him too. He has changed his name from Pepperdine to Asbo. In England, an ASBO is an 'anti-social behavioural order', a piece of legislation intended to address the petty crimes (noise pollution, spitting, vandalism) that often go unnoticed by the criminal justice system.

Advertisement