Lionel Asbo

From June 2012

Martin Amis's latest novel Lionel Asbo: State of England was recently described in the Guardian as 'basically incoherent'. Incoherence of itself suggests that there is something to understand in the first place, a plot perhaps or maybe a some sort of social comment. Lionel Asbo lacks both of these possible elements and I would suggest - to misquote Jon Bon Jovi - that Martin Amis gives incoherence a bad name.

I'm not an author so I don't know how the artistic process works but I view as one of the world's greatest unresolved mysteries the fact that Martin Amis who has given us The Rachel Papers, Success and Money - three truly inventive novels - also wrote the incomprehensible Yellow Dog. The Pregnant Widow two years ago suggested a return to the form of those those earlier works but Lionel Asbo ... Lionel f**king Asbo, if you will ... well, where to start?

The eponymous (anti-)hero is a two dimensional chav little different from Keith Talent out of 1989's London Fields the book where, in my humble opinion, Amis started to lose his mojo. He - Asbo - lives a life of petty crime and violence. Whilst serving a stretch in jail he somehow contrives to win £140 million on the lottery although how he does this is never clearly explained. Nothing is clearly explained. And the sentences like that - and this - would have Amis's father Kingsley turn in is grave. Gaaaaaaa! (There's a lot of that too.) In between smashing up hotels and drinking champagne out of beer mugs, Asbo hooks up with a thinly disguised - although conceivably more interesting - version of Jordan called "Threnody". Meanwhile Asbo's nephew is having an affair with his grandmother. There's a murder. At least I think there's a murder. And loads of f**king swearing. Gaaaaaaa!

If this were a debut novel it would never have been published. As Amis himself writes (page 181, thankfully only 95 to go): 'What's happening? Where's Lionel Asbo? Gone. I'm gone, boy, I'm gone. Jesus, load of bollocks all this is.'