Low-life lives the high life after lottery win in Amis’s state-of-England tirade
Martin Amis’s portrayal of England is damning. His style is Dickensian, with its vast cast of caricatured and cartoonishly-named characters, its comic place names and its epic range. Having rejected his motherland (he moved to New York), Amis spitefully sets his novel in London.
In the dystopian London borough of Diston, the territory of two extended families, an age-old love/hate relationship is extant between the Pepperdines (poor white trash) and the Dragos (immigrant Maltese trash). Treachery and loyalty conflict, erupting into violence at the least hint of disrespect. All the sordid details of low life, so loved by Dickens, are included.
But, strangely, it reminded me more of F Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel The Great Gatsby. Amis repeatedly mentions “a ladder that rose up to heaven”, similar to Fitzgerald’s famous line, “Gatsby saw that the blocks of sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees — he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.” Can Lionel Asbo climb this ladder? !
Larger-than-life Asbo’s exploits are witnessed and articulated by his intelligent nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. Like Gatsby, Asbo is a creation of his own fantasy, a man who has no balanced vision of the world. He remains brutal; interested only in his petty desires. But as in The Great Gatsby, we can imagine Desmond telling Asbo, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together.”
Amis’s title seems laughable; but the titular name is an amalgamation of a mother’s choice of Lionel, after Lionel Blair (choreographer), and Lionel’s decision to change his second name by deed poll from Pepperdine to Asbo (the acronym for anti-social behaviour order, the civil restriction introduced in the UK under Tony Blair’s government in 1998).
Incarcerated, as he often is, Asbo wins a lottery fortune of £140m. Amis allows us inside Asbo’s head as he pays off a civil suit, gets released from jail and negotiates his way through posh hotels and Savile Row tailors.
The reader fights through a miasma of uncertainties and unexplained plans in an attempt to understand what makes Asbo tick. His relationships with the media are hilarious. He challenges the press, who enrage him by, in his words, trying to “impugn his intelligence”. Asbo is not stupid but takes “pride in being stupid on purpose”.
Asbo has a Machiavellian and malicious intelligence, which seems to be ruled by a need to take revenge on family members, hangers-on, old acquaintances and random victims. He bears grudges and seeks to punish.
Sometimes, he employs the services of alliteratively named pairs of fighting dogs, fed on takeaway mutton, Vindaloo, Tabasco sauce and six cans each of malt lager. If John and Joel become too soppy under the care of Desmond, they are summarily replaced with Jak and Jek.
Amis uses this series of dogs as a structural device, titling the four parts of the novel with paraphrases of the Baha Men’s 2000 one-hit wonder “Who let the dogs out?”. But, here, the words are ominously changed to “Who let the dogs in?” and words like “fear” are introduced to foreshadow what seems likely to be a tragic end.
At first, Asbo is a malign presence rather than the central character; we generally see events through the eyes of Desmond, who, to his Uncle Lionel’s distress, is mixed race, “a spearchucker”. Desmond, initially struggling with life at Squeers Free (a nod in the direction of Nicholas Nickleby here), educates himself in punctuation and syntax at the local public library.
Amis has a clear agenda for England; he is against the closing of libraries and in favour of correct syntax and punctuation. The reader is given lessons in the use of the apostrophe and the need to say “You and me” rather than the incorrect “You and I”.
Amis is determined that we learn what is right, and that we resist the sloppy incursions, not only of incorrect syntax, “You don’t say whatever. You just say what,” but also of glottal stops and slurred pronunciation, which allow words to lose syllables, such as the name Cynthia becoming Simfea.
The novel is a study in language and Amis uses the full range of English idiom, from the most impoverished racist insult, “Here comes the soap dodger” to the poetic, “Yet the clouds were regretfully rearranging themselves and now held queries of grey”. Young Desmond travels forward through the entire linguistic range and Amis shows how language not only provides a tool for communication but also develops thought processes. So, Amis seems to suggest, the more sophisticated your language, the more rational your thinking. Refined language can take a person on a journey to selflessness and empathy. Asbo also learns new words, like “impugn”, but these never seem to carry him into a world of mercy and forgiveness.
Asbo confides to Desmond that he has had therapy for his sexuality. The diagnosis is that there is “ready-made rage waiting for him when he is having intercourse”. Asbo’s rage is a constant in his life and that’s why there is always fear in the air. Desmond loved him “deeply and more or less unquestionably, but he always felt slightly ill in his presence”.
When we learn that Asbo’s view is that “there’s certain things a man can’t do until his mum pops off”, the reader is filled with dread. We have witnessed Asbo doing unspeakable acts while his mother is still living. Perhaps Amis is suggesting that Asbo is England and the awful things that we will do cannot be done while the beloved monarch rules.
Certainly, Asbo, with his aggressive brand of anti-social behaviour, is a character who will not easily be dismissed from the mind; he hovers threateningly over the “sceptred isle ... this England”.
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