Lionel Asbo: State of England: Amazon.co.uk: Martin Amis
----- 4.0 out of 5 stars
The Li of the land.
BySue KichensideTOP 500 REVIEWERon 3 December 2012
Format: Hardcover
Well, well, well. Lionel Asbo has certainly caused something of a stir amongst the Amazon reviewing community. For what it's worth - and this review will be so far down as to never be seen - I found it to be Shamelessly enjoyable.
Film and tv viewers of such programmes as Shameless are certainly inured to seeing (hmm, how shall I put this?) the underclass (if that would be acceptable?) portrayed on the screen. But in a book, not so much. Martin Amis clearly had fun writing this and why should he not? We all have the right to write what we like these days so I really don't see why he should be decried for doing so. Why the fuss?
Bad luck for Amis, though, that the publication of this book more or less coincided with the government's announcement of a proposal to replace ASBOs with a "criminal behaviour order" (nicknamed "crimbo" in the media). Thus, the moment the book came out, it appeared to be immediately behind the zeitgeist. Timing is everything. But it doesn't really matter whether the book is relevant to our times or whether it tells us anything about the state of the nation. The question is: is it a good read? For my money, the book is a blast.
Others have covered the plot but it bears repeating that the main protagonist, violent, amoral Uncle Li, lacks a single redeeming quality; you have to be prepared for the fact that there are no concessions to likeability here. Then there's his mum who has a penchant for young boys and the Telegraph cryptic crossword. His long-suffering, academically brilliant nephew Des, the moral heart of the book. Plus sundry other unsavoury characters whose names are a hoot (as you'd expect from Amis). And then there are the dogs.
Jokes, when they come, are laugh out loud funny and the writing is glorious. Exuberant, even. The thing about Martin Amis never writing a cliché has, in itself, become a cliché. Oh, the irony.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Refreshingly irrational look at the lower echelons of the worst estate in England
ByAbe Ayeron 11 May 2013
Format: Kindle Edition
After reading Money I became an Amis fan but am still waiting to read London Fields. The blurb on the back of Lionel Asbo suggested as simple a concept as the original, Money. Entertaining scumbag wins the lottery about summarises it.
Indeed money is pivotal to this book and those satisfied by "Money", should be well served here. I found the book more accessible as, although set in London, it is "Diston", the worst sink estate in England that provides the environs. While easier for big city types, accessibility is promoted through simply imagining a rough council estate near you. Diston is full of strange, extreme, desperate people and Amis describes them succinctly enough for the busiest, most distracted, reader to really care.
Asbo is a monster. The central charm of the novel is how his young charge, Des Pepperdine, shapes his own path. The classic "nature vs nurture" debate with a modern consideration of class mobility. I won't spoil the story but I enjoyed seeing this done without fabulous amounts of money, despite what the abstract might first have you imagine.
Upon reading other reviews I thought it wise to address the labelling of Amis as a bigot etc, by the national press. Asbo is not representing the working class, though he has/had a career in crime this does not qualify him as working class. I don't want to qualify the reasons and distinctions with the underclass, but that is what Asbo is, senseless and insensible to danger, living only for the moment, as shallow as a TV villain. While his "friends" and relatives are not strangers to honest labour, we can form no such judgements about them, only that they have the misfortune to know such a character as Asbo.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Solzhenitsyn
BySylvia pon 16 June 2013
Format: Paperback
Having purchased this book yesterday morning, I read all day and into the night, and then I had nightmares. The story is horrible but it's written beautifully ( most of the time; there were parts that needed editing) and the writer has the ability to make the words dance. Its the juxtaposition of the plod plod of everyday living with the descriptions of acute beauty thats almost heartbreaking. But my enjoyment of the book was compromised early on as I could not stop thinking of the fate of the boy who disappeared, Rory, who haunted the book for me. Why didn't Des have more of a guilty conscience about him? Wasnt he complicit? Whenever I read a book by M Amis I'm aware that the impact of Times Arrow is influencing my reading in ways I don't fully understand: my first thought when I pick up an Amis book is, this is by the writer of Times Arrow, and then I read it in that context.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Amis at his very best. The ASBO as a badge of honour.
ByJustice Peaceon 12 April 2014
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
It would be sacrilege not to give Lionel ASBO 5 stars. Amis is a master of his craft. Lionel ASBO is an inspired creation. The story here is a metaphor for the victory of money (and celebrity) over everything: pecunia rex est. Lionel is a cliche, a stereotype, a criminal who is proud of his criminality. His class is criminal. Jail is nothing to Lionel. He enjoys it. He's a sociopath, a psychopath: selfish, violent, vindictive and he bears a grudge like his celebrity page 3 GF bares her fake boobs - with enthusiasm and pride.
Lionel accidentally wins the lottery and this simply gives him a license to misbehave on a grand scale. It deserves a movie adaptation and it's easy to see Ray Winston or Bob Hoskins (in their youth) in the role of Lionel. These days, Plan B would my first choice.
The anti-hero takes little pleasure from his 140 million + fortune. A jungle predator enjoys the hunt, the battle for survival and Lionel is soon back in his old manor up to his tricks, just for kicks.
There are moment of great humour. When his concubine Threnody (a page 3 porn star with more plastic surgery than Action Man or more appropriately Barbie) is rushed to hospital by air ambulance there is talk of her 'fake arse having exploded!' (Threnody has 'blown more on her arse than her tits' Lionel muses in an earlier chapter).
Nothing is perfect of course and my main criticism is that Amis makes Lionel too likeable. In my experience such people are monsters with little or no redeeming qualities; there is nothing likeable about these nasty misanthropes. Of course writing about violent, nasty psychopaths is very depressing so I guess the author needed to make us sympathise with El ASBO to keep our attention.
Lionel ASBO is like Amis' MONEY. It's a page turner. I read it in 48 hours.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
State of the art
Byjfp2006on 13 August 2013
Format: Paperback
People do go on (and on (and on)) about Martin Amis: he's politically incorrect, we're told... he has reactionary political opinions (not the same thing BTW), he's misogynistic, he's a condescending snob, he hates his own country... and on and on...
The fact remains that he's one of the most accomplished English writers of his generation. Money and London Fields are among the best English novels of the later years of the twentieth century; before them, The Rachel Papers was a remarkable debut novel, published while Amis was still in his early-to-mid twenties. The rot set in with Yellow Dog in 2003, cruelly lambasted as being "not-knowing-where-to-look bad" by Tibor Fischer in the Daily Telegraph. (If you've heard of, and maybe read, Martin Amis, but not heard of, and let alone read, Tibor Fischer, you can draw the appropriate conclusions...)
Lionel Asbo: State of England begins with fifteen-year-old Desmond Pepperdine confessing, in a letter to a tabloid agony aunt, that he's been having an inappropriate relationship with his grannie. (Who's all of thirty-nine.) This is the subtitular "state of England", established via this striking and extreme caricature of how the moral compasses have all gone decidedly wonky. (Grannie gave birth to Cilla, Desmond's mother, at the age of twelve, and Cilla produced Desmond at the same age, and later died in a freak accident.)
And yet Desmond, who thus lost his mother before he was a teenager (and of course never knew his father), will make his way in life, and become a (tabloid) journalist. And be set in contrast with his uncle, the Lionel Asbo of the title, a severely psychotic hooligan with whom he shares a flat on the thirty-third floor of a tower block, and whose communication with his nephew takes the form of rhetorical questions such as "Why aren't you out smashing windows?"
Lionel goes on to win £140,000,000 (all but 50p, to be fastidiously precise) on the lottery, and the novel then develops into a devastating satire on celebrity and various kinds of excess. And loutishness. And false tits. And the way that money, unsurprisingly, does not buy happiness. Or love.
Lionel. "Loyonoo"... And there's also "Mao" (i.e. Lionel's mate Mal.) As ever, Amis is spot-on in his dissection of the ways people speak, the ways in which they use and abuse language. (Another clear example: "Get you fat prat in that sauna!") The prose is often laugh-out-loud - as are the multiple mishaps. It's perhaps not quite in the league of its brilliant predecessor, The Pregnant Widow, but's it's still the best novel I've read this year. And Martin Amis is the most accomplished writer around today, whether you like it or not. And whether you like him or not.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Out of touch
ByD. Rodriguezon 25 June 2012
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
To write about the Underclass, a writer must surely have some knowledge or experience of it, even if all it amounts to is a week or two hanging out in some low-life pub. I'm not going to give a summary of the plot: there are some excellent ones here already. I'll just say that the plot is an engaging one, and Amis a consummate storyteller. Where he falls down, in my opinion, is that he doesn't make me believe in his characters. It's not clear whether he intends them to be outlandish caricatures of benefits scroungers, thugs and teenage mothers. (David Cameron and George Osborne may have picked up their ideas from the same sources.)"Lionel Asbo" is also full of anachronisms. For example, at what sink comprehensive were boys wearing shorts and purple blazers as recently as 2006? Surely a 15-year-old has a mobile phone, even if s/he has nothing else? (Most of the 8-year-olds I know have them.) The book sometimes reads like a poor, contrived pastiche of Dickens, funny surnames, street names and all. Where Amis excels is in his ability to convey a character's physical features in a small number of words, and his beautiful use of simile and metaphor: the sun, in one passage, is fixed in the sky like a gilt tack. "Lionel Asbo" is an enjoyable read, but that isn't enough. I failed to engage with his characters; they seemed rather pathetic, and in the end I didn't really care what happened to them.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
What is Amis playing at?
ByM. READon 27 March 2013
Format: Hardcover
This is a genuine question. My first reaction--clearly shared by many other reviewers--was that he has completely lost the plot. Unlike Amis, I live in central London, and until recently worked with adolescents. The portrayal of characters and social context bear no relationship to reality--or rather, a grossly distorted one. This horror of working class urban life seems to run through Amis's work--perhaps he ought to try living somewhere really tough!
and yet....I didn't throw the book aside in disgust, though I was tempted to after fifty pages or so. His plotting and writing are sufficiently engaging to keep the reader interested. It appears to me that he's attempting a Dickensian approach: social satire by exaggeration and caricature. There are three reasons why this doesn't work:
1) although a lively and inventive writer, he's no genius
2) Dickens did at least know the world he depicted at first hand
3) Although Dickens is marred by sentimentality, this at least suggests some generosity of spirit, which Amis (or his authorial persona) seems mostly lacking in.
That said, it's not a waste of time. Over the past few years, there's been a lot of Amis-baiting, but at least he writes lively and accessible novels that don't play safe.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Asbo, no change
ByRaymond C. Hodgkinsonon 30 August 2012
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
Lionel Asbo is an oik and although he wins the lottery he remains essentially the same in and out of prison. He wins a lot of money and the floodgates of wealth open, but the style and behaviour of the past rear the ugly heads. He is just able to indulge his vendettas on a grander scale using fear and prostitution to meet his own ends. Nobody seems able to escape his malign influence. Not even Desmond and Dawn with their university degrees, parental skills and careers.
Before reading it I had hoped for some kind of insight into the underclass, some sort of grid reference beyond the expected drunkenness, aimless violence and pornography. After all Martin Amis has deigned to write a novel about it and I thought he might throw up some redeeming half light, some forgotten truths perhaps. But he is able to evade that responsibility, that particular challenge, by letting Asbo win the lottery. From then on the task of the novellist is easier, the theme of mispent wealth overtakes and smothers the theme of coping and managing in a misbegotten and downtrodden place like Diston Town.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Decline and Fall
ByEnobarbuson 20 November 2013
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
The pretentious (just desperate?) sub-title of Martin Amis's latest novel is State of England; it might more fittingly have been State of Amis. Anyone expecting a Philip Roth of an analysis might consider taking out a private prosecution under the Trades Descriptions Act. What we're given in place of a State of the Nation novel is an unwitting self-accusation, an outing, a sordid strip tease performed by a paranoid narcissist oozing bile, misanthropy and exhaustion. The poverty of imagination and technique is surely terminal: the novel would never have been published had it not flourished the imprimatur of a once gifted writer. Reading this feeble stuff is a sad experience, like listening to the senile hiccupping of that oh so promising student who developed premature Alzheimer's.
Lionel Asbo is grotesque in the way the anti-Semitic fantasies of the Nazis were grotesque: a vicious kind of humour is attempted but not delivered partly because the writer's loathing of his subject matter so cripples his invention and disfigures his prose that we observe with horror not the improbable villainies and mindlessness of Lionel Asbo but the increasingly desperate antics of his worn-out creator. The book is like the transcript of a drunken dinner party where one unaccountably privileged senile grandee after another swaps ludicrous fantasies about the underclass whilst massaging the group's social and political prejudices. How funny is it to create a Wayne Rooney caricature and generate around him a society of thugs and perverts? It makes Swift look comparatively healthy.
In Diston- in Diston, everything hated everything else, and everything
else, in return hated everything back.
But in fact this manifesto turns out to be no more than a marginal bleat: we meet very few characters from Diston or anywhere else, and many of them are no more than names with interchangeable biographies, unrealised personalities and voices. Before long, the novel modulates into a modest romance, complete with a tepidly "happy" ending despite the laboured frighteners we've been saddled with for two hundred pages.
Oddly, the last part of the novel has the occasional paragraph of the searching prose we remember from the earlier, accomplished Amis. The sub-literate prose: it's Amis, not his character, who inserts those lame exclamation marks begging you to find something outrageous, side-splitting, worth a second glance. The writing is less distinguished than the tabloidese which it treats to token ridicule. But it's all very low-wattage, half-hearted stuff. In Money, the central character was funny because he found himself ridiculous. In this rant, the author is a figure of fun because he expects us to applaud his limitations.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting spin on country house fiction.
ByV. G. Harwoodon 11 December 2014
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
I read this book as I was doing a study at the time on English Country Houses as a metaphor for the state of the nation and a book about a man who buys a country pile after winning the lottery entitled "Lionel Asbo: State of the Nation" seemed pertinent. It was useful to the study and shows nicely how the country house as a setting in literature continues to be a convenient box to shove all kinds of themes into, It was also a bit disappointing. I liked Des (what's not to like) mainly because the author intended we like him. I hated Lionel (what is to like?) mainly because the author intends we hate him. I could also see that Lionel was a kind of emblem for a certain aspect of England in our time. However, there was equally something I didn't like about this book as a work of fiction - it read as a bit artificial to me - Lionel was too much, and it was all a bit overkill. I kept waiting and waiting for justice to find Lionel, but it never did. Even when justice did catch up with him and he went to prison, Lionel was glad to be there, because it was a good place to sort his head out ("Prison, said Lionel. Good place to get you head sorted out. You know where you are in prison. Well yeah, thought Des. You're in prison." p. 123. I also kept waiting for the storyline to develop around the character who Lionel organised to be "sold" (his name escapes me, sorry) but it never did. The ending was unsatisfactory (probably because it wasn't neat enough for me). I know some people will say that there's something wrong with expecting a neat ending in a world which is less than satisfactory - but I do like to have that happy ending in fiction - as, even today, I think most people do. This wasn't for me - it was too bleak, too grubby and too messy. Still, it was an interesting spin on country house fiction.
A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers. Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious Anti-Social Behaviour Order), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love (and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him). But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle—once again in a London prison—wins £140 million in the lottery and upon his release hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and “poet.” Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.
Review Despite a time frame that gallops forward into 2013 and a wealth of irresistibly hyperbolized pop cultural references, Lionel Asbo is at heart an old-fashioned novel, earnest in its agenda... a theme familiar to the audience of Amis's forebear, Dickens: the corrupting influence of money... Amis is, like Dickens, an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society. Kathryn Harris, The New York Times Book Review (front page) One of Amis's funniest novels a league with Money and London Fields. Amis, like his heroes Nabokov and Bellow, writes exuberant, ecstatic prose. His ear is precisely tuned, and his sentences in narration and dialogue are lethal. Our hero is a thug named Asbo (for Anti-Social Behaviour Order), a brilliant sociopath who delivers beatings for sport and feeds Tabasco to his pit bulls to make them extra-ornery in the morning. (Reader alert: Asbo delivers the most hilarious wedding speech in the history of English literature.) He sort of raises his nephew, an ambitious lad who happens to be sleeping with Grandmum. Mid-book, Asbo wins the lottery, a Dickensian turn of fortune that not only leads to some unforgettable comic opportunities but deepens matters as well. The jokes, the high-voltage sentences all that energy begin to drive an increasingly complicated machine. The New Yorker
----- 4.0 out of 5 stars
The Li of the land.
BySue KichensideTOP 500 REVIEWERon 3 December 2012
Format: Hardcover
Well, well, well. Lionel Asbo has certainly caused something of a stir amongst the Amazon reviewing community. For what it's worth - and this review will be so far down as to never be seen - I found it to be Shamelessly enjoyable.
Film and tv viewers of such programmes as Shameless are certainly inured to seeing (hmm, how shall I put this?) the underclass (if that would be acceptable?) portrayed on the screen. But in a book, not so much. Martin Amis clearly had fun writing this and why should he not? We all have the right to write what we like these days so I really don't see why he should be decried for doing so. Why the fuss?
Bad luck for Amis, though, that the publication of this book more or less coincided with the government's announcement of a proposal to replace ASBOs with a "criminal behaviour order" (nicknamed "crimbo" in the media). Thus, the moment the book came out, it appeared to be immediately behind the zeitgeist. Timing is everything. But it doesn't really matter whether the book is relevant to our times or whether it tells us anything about the state of the nation. The question is: is it a good read? For my money, the book is a blast.
Others have covered the plot but it bears repeating that the main protagonist, violent, amoral Uncle Li, lacks a single redeeming quality; you have to be prepared for the fact that there are no concessions to likeability here. Then there's his mum who has a penchant for young boys and the Telegraph cryptic crossword. His long-suffering, academically brilliant nephew Des, the moral heart of the book. Plus sundry other unsavoury characters whose names are a hoot (as you'd expect from Amis). And then there are the dogs.
Jokes, when they come, are laugh out loud funny and the writing is glorious. Exuberant, even. The thing about Martin Amis never writing a cliché has, in itself, become a cliché. Oh, the irony.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Refreshingly irrational look at the lower echelons of the worst estate in England
ByAbe Ayeron 11 May 2013
Format: Kindle Edition
After reading Money I became an Amis fan but am still waiting to read London Fields. The blurb on the back of Lionel Asbo suggested as simple a concept as the original, Money. Entertaining scumbag wins the lottery about summarises it.
Indeed money is pivotal to this book and those satisfied by "Money", should be well served here. I found the book more accessible as, although set in London, it is "Diston", the worst sink estate in England that provides the environs. While easier for big city types, accessibility is promoted through simply imagining a rough council estate near you. Diston is full of strange, extreme, desperate people and Amis describes them succinctly enough for the busiest, most distracted, reader to really care.
Asbo is a monster. The central charm of the novel is how his young charge, Des Pepperdine, shapes his own path. The classic "nature vs nurture" debate with a modern consideration of class mobility. I won't spoil the story but I enjoyed seeing this done without fabulous amounts of money, despite what the abstract might first have you imagine.
Upon reading other reviews I thought it wise to address the labelling of Amis as a bigot etc, by the national press. Asbo is not representing the working class, though he has/had a career in crime this does not qualify him as working class. I don't want to qualify the reasons and distinctions with the underclass, but that is what Asbo is, senseless and insensible to danger, living only for the moment, as shallow as a TV villain. While his "friends" and relatives are not strangers to honest labour, we can form no such judgements about them, only that they have the misfortune to know such a character as Asbo.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Solzhenitsyn
BySylvia pon 16 June 2013
Format: Paperback
Having purchased this book yesterday morning, I read all day and into the night, and then I had nightmares. The story is horrible but it's written beautifully ( most of the time; there were parts that needed editing) and the writer has the ability to make the words dance. Its the juxtaposition of the plod plod of everyday living with the descriptions of acute beauty thats almost heartbreaking. But my enjoyment of the book was compromised early on as I could not stop thinking of the fate of the boy who disappeared, Rory, who haunted the book for me. Why didn't Des have more of a guilty conscience about him? Wasnt he complicit? Whenever I read a book by M Amis I'm aware that the impact of Times Arrow is influencing my reading in ways I don't fully understand: my first thought when I pick up an Amis book is, this is by the writer of Times Arrow, and then I read it in that context.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Amis at his very best. The ASBO as a badge of honour.
ByJustice Peaceon 12 April 2014
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
It would be sacrilege not to give Lionel ASBO 5 stars. Amis is a master of his craft. Lionel ASBO is an inspired creation. The story here is a metaphor for the victory of money (and celebrity) over everything: pecunia rex est. Lionel is a cliche, a stereotype, a criminal who is proud of his criminality. His class is criminal. Jail is nothing to Lionel. He enjoys it. He's a sociopath, a psychopath: selfish, violent, vindictive and he bears a grudge like his celebrity page 3 GF bares her fake boobs - with enthusiasm and pride.
Lionel accidentally wins the lottery and this simply gives him a license to misbehave on a grand scale. It deserves a movie adaptation and it's easy to see Ray Winston or Bob Hoskins (in their youth) in the role of Lionel. These days, Plan B would my first choice.
The anti-hero takes little pleasure from his 140 million + fortune. A jungle predator enjoys the hunt, the battle for survival and Lionel is soon back in his old manor up to his tricks, just for kicks.
There are moment of great humour. When his concubine Threnody (a page 3 porn star with more plastic surgery than Action Man or more appropriately Barbie) is rushed to hospital by air ambulance there is talk of her 'fake arse having exploded!' (Threnody has 'blown more on her arse than her tits' Lionel muses in an earlier chapter).
Nothing is perfect of course and my main criticism is that Amis makes Lionel too likeable. In my experience such people are monsters with little or no redeeming qualities; there is nothing likeable about these nasty misanthropes. Of course writing about violent, nasty psychopaths is very depressing so I guess the author needed to make us sympathise with El ASBO to keep our attention.
Lionel ASBO is like Amis' MONEY. It's a page turner. I read it in 48 hours.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
State of the art
Byjfp2006on 13 August 2013
Format: Paperback
People do go on (and on (and on)) about Martin Amis: he's politically incorrect, we're told... he has reactionary political opinions (not the same thing BTW), he's misogynistic, he's a condescending snob, he hates his own country... and on and on...
The fact remains that he's one of the most accomplished English writers of his generation. Money and London Fields are among the best English novels of the later years of the twentieth century; before them, The Rachel Papers was a remarkable debut novel, published while Amis was still in his early-to-mid twenties. The rot set in with Yellow Dog in 2003, cruelly lambasted as being "not-knowing-where-to-look bad" by Tibor Fischer in the Daily Telegraph. (If you've heard of, and maybe read, Martin Amis, but not heard of, and let alone read, Tibor Fischer, you can draw the appropriate conclusions...)
Lionel Asbo: State of England begins with fifteen-year-old Desmond Pepperdine confessing, in a letter to a tabloid agony aunt, that he's been having an inappropriate relationship with his grannie. (Who's all of thirty-nine.) This is the subtitular "state of England", established via this striking and extreme caricature of how the moral compasses have all gone decidedly wonky. (Grannie gave birth to Cilla, Desmond's mother, at the age of twelve, and Cilla produced Desmond at the same age, and later died in a freak accident.)
And yet Desmond, who thus lost his mother before he was a teenager (and of course never knew his father), will make his way in life, and become a (tabloid) journalist. And be set in contrast with his uncle, the Lionel Asbo of the title, a severely psychotic hooligan with whom he shares a flat on the thirty-third floor of a tower block, and whose communication with his nephew takes the form of rhetorical questions such as "Why aren't you out smashing windows?"
Lionel goes on to win £140,000,000 (all but 50p, to be fastidiously precise) on the lottery, and the novel then develops into a devastating satire on celebrity and various kinds of excess. And loutishness. And false tits. And the way that money, unsurprisingly, does not buy happiness. Or love.
Lionel. "Loyonoo"... And there's also "Mao" (i.e. Lionel's mate Mal.) As ever, Amis is spot-on in his dissection of the ways people speak, the ways in which they use and abuse language. (Another clear example: "Get you fat prat in that sauna!") The prose is often laugh-out-loud - as are the multiple mishaps. It's perhaps not quite in the league of its brilliant predecessor, The Pregnant Widow, but's it's still the best novel I've read this year. And Martin Amis is the most accomplished writer around today, whether you like it or not. And whether you like him or not.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Out of touch
ByD. Rodriguezon 25 June 2012
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
To write about the Underclass, a writer must surely have some knowledge or experience of it, even if all it amounts to is a week or two hanging out in some low-life pub. I'm not going to give a summary of the plot: there are some excellent ones here already. I'll just say that the plot is an engaging one, and Amis a consummate storyteller. Where he falls down, in my opinion, is that he doesn't make me believe in his characters. It's not clear whether he intends them to be outlandish caricatures of benefits scroungers, thugs and teenage mothers. (David Cameron and George Osborne may have picked up their ideas from the same sources.)"Lionel Asbo" is also full of anachronisms. For example, at what sink comprehensive were boys wearing shorts and purple blazers as recently as 2006? Surely a 15-year-old has a mobile phone, even if s/he has nothing else? (Most of the 8-year-olds I know have them.) The book sometimes reads like a poor, contrived pastiche of Dickens, funny surnames, street names and all. Where Amis excels is in his ability to convey a character's physical features in a small number of words, and his beautiful use of simile and metaphor: the sun, in one passage, is fixed in the sky like a gilt tack. "Lionel Asbo" is an enjoyable read, but that isn't enough. I failed to engage with his characters; they seemed rather pathetic, and in the end I didn't really care what happened to them.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
What is Amis playing at?
ByM. READon 27 March 2013
Format: Hardcover
This is a genuine question. My first reaction--clearly shared by many other reviewers--was that he has completely lost the plot. Unlike Amis, I live in central London, and until recently worked with adolescents. The portrayal of characters and social context bear no relationship to reality--or rather, a grossly distorted one. This horror of working class urban life seems to run through Amis's work--perhaps he ought to try living somewhere really tough!
and yet....I didn't throw the book aside in disgust, though I was tempted to after fifty pages or so. His plotting and writing are sufficiently engaging to keep the reader interested. It appears to me that he's attempting a Dickensian approach: social satire by exaggeration and caricature. There are three reasons why this doesn't work:
1) although a lively and inventive writer, he's no genius
2) Dickens did at least know the world he depicted at first hand
3) Although Dickens is marred by sentimentality, this at least suggests some generosity of spirit, which Amis (or his authorial persona) seems mostly lacking in.
That said, it's not a waste of time. Over the past few years, there's been a lot of Amis-baiting, but at least he writes lively and accessible novels that don't play safe.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Asbo, no change
ByRaymond C. Hodgkinsonon 30 August 2012
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
Lionel Asbo is an oik and although he wins the lottery he remains essentially the same in and out of prison. He wins a lot of money and the floodgates of wealth open, but the style and behaviour of the past rear the ugly heads. He is just able to indulge his vendettas on a grander scale using fear and prostitution to meet his own ends. Nobody seems able to escape his malign influence. Not even Desmond and Dawn with their university degrees, parental skills and careers.
Before reading it I had hoped for some kind of insight into the underclass, some sort of grid reference beyond the expected drunkenness, aimless violence and pornography. After all Martin Amis has deigned to write a novel about it and I thought he might throw up some redeeming half light, some forgotten truths perhaps. But he is able to evade that responsibility, that particular challenge, by letting Asbo win the lottery. From then on the task of the novellist is easier, the theme of mispent wealth overtakes and smothers the theme of coping and managing in a misbegotten and downtrodden place like Diston Town.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Decline and Fall
ByEnobarbuson 20 November 2013
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The pretentious (just desperate?) sub-title of Martin Amis's latest novel is State of England; it might more fittingly have been State of Amis. Anyone expecting a Philip Roth of an analysis might consider taking out a private prosecution under the Trades Descriptions Act. What we're given in place of a State of the Nation novel is an unwitting self-accusation, an outing, a sordid strip tease performed by a paranoid narcissist oozing bile, misanthropy and exhaustion. The poverty of imagination and technique is surely terminal: the novel would never have been published had it not flourished the imprimatur of a once gifted writer. Reading this feeble stuff is a sad experience, like listening to the senile hiccupping of that oh so promising student who developed premature Alzheimer's.
Lionel Asbo is grotesque in the way the anti-Semitic fantasies of the Nazis were grotesque: a vicious kind of humour is attempted but not delivered partly because the writer's loathing of his subject matter so cripples his invention and disfigures his prose that we observe with horror not the improbable villainies and mindlessness of Lionel Asbo but the increasingly desperate antics of his worn-out creator. The book is like the transcript of a drunken dinner party where one unaccountably privileged senile grandee after another swaps ludicrous fantasies about the underclass whilst massaging the group's social and political prejudices. How funny is it to create a Wayne Rooney caricature and generate around him a society of thugs and perverts? It makes Swift look comparatively healthy.
In Diston- in Diston, everything hated everything else, and everything
else, in return hated everything back.
But in fact this manifesto turns out to be no more than a marginal bleat: we meet very few characters from Diston or anywhere else, and many of them are no more than names with interchangeable biographies, unrealised personalities and voices. Before long, the novel modulates into a modest romance, complete with a tepidly "happy" ending despite the laboured frighteners we've been saddled with for two hundred pages.
Oddly, the last part of the novel has the occasional paragraph of the searching prose we remember from the earlier, accomplished Amis. The sub-literate prose: it's Amis, not his character, who inserts those lame exclamation marks begging you to find something outrageous, side-splitting, worth a second glance. The writing is less distinguished than the tabloidese which it treats to token ridicule. But it's all very low-wattage, half-hearted stuff. In Money, the central character was funny because he found himself ridiculous. In this rant, the author is a figure of fun because he expects us to applaud his limitations.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting spin on country house fiction.
ByV. G. Harwoodon 11 December 2014
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
I read this book as I was doing a study at the time on English Country Houses as a metaphor for the state of the nation and a book about a man who buys a country pile after winning the lottery entitled "Lionel Asbo: State of the Nation" seemed pertinent. It was useful to the study and shows nicely how the country house as a setting in literature continues to be a convenient box to shove all kinds of themes into, It was also a bit disappointing. I liked Des (what's not to like) mainly because the author intended we like him. I hated Lionel (what is to like?) mainly because the author intends we hate him. I could also see that Lionel was a kind of emblem for a certain aspect of England in our time. However, there was equally something I didn't like about this book as a work of fiction - it read as a bit artificial to me - Lionel was too much, and it was all a bit overkill. I kept waiting and waiting for justice to find Lionel, but it never did. Even when justice did catch up with him and he went to prison, Lionel was glad to be there, because it was a good place to sort his head out ("Prison, said Lionel. Good place to get you head sorted out. You know where you are in prison. Well yeah, thought Des. You're in prison." p. 123. I also kept waiting for the storyline to develop around the character who Lionel organised to be "sold" (his name escapes me, sorry) but it never did. The ending was unsatisfactory (probably because it wasn't neat enough for me). I know some people will say that there's something wrong with expecting a neat ending in a world which is less than satisfactory - but I do like to have that happy ending in fiction - as, even today, I think most people do. This wasn't for me - it was too bleak, too grubby and too messy. Still, it was an interesting spin on country house fiction.
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