After carefully constructing pockets of genius across the literary stratosphere in his heyday, it now seems Amis-junior is pretty content on churning them out. With little thought given to who he is writing about and, critically, why, we are given the peculiar tale of Lionel Asbo; a rough and ready, lottery-winning thug. It is humourous yes, but that does not allow complete forgiveness.

The problem is, where Amis has attempted to create another satirical state-of-the-nation classics, he has instead exceeded the boundaries of the absurd, creating something wholly ridiculous that is beyond a comment of today’s society.

What is worse, even if the satire is what made us, as readers, originally fall in love with Amis, here he has failed in the attempt to portray ‘contemporary’ society. ASBO’s were a big deal back in 2003, and in fact Theresa May announced plans to abolish them altogether a few years back.

So what if we do find a familiar voice in the self-confessed ‘Renaissance man’ Des? He is so far removed from the comfortable, bourgeois setting we would expect to find him in, that it is a fairly shoddy collage of two quite separate narratives. Amis’s description of the desolation and disparity of Britain is both charming and amusing, but it is uneasy to read this from someone who can hardly say they know it well. Whereas in his previous work, we have encountered extraordinary lower-class figures, they have never been explored from such a brutally close and involved perspective. Here we are invited into the world of working-class Britain, and it is unlike any we have met before (even the brutish Lionel-esque character Norm in The Rachel Papers).

Inescapable too, is its awkwardness. Who is Amis writing this for? Was Lionel Asbo written for those wanting a voyeuristic look into how the other half live? Or was this written about the people, for the people? I can’t believe Amis was expecting the everyday Briton to pick up a copy along with their four-pack of Stella and a pack of Mayfair Superkings.

Although Lionel’s ascent from council-block hero to tabloid-daring does nod at today’s ridiculous portrayal of individuals in the media (picture The Daily Mail on heat), Amis is doing nothing to help this fact. The depiction of Lionel is so far beyond what we as readers can comprehend, that you can hardly swim past the humourous farce to reach a moral incentive. This is not Amis looking at the gritty underbelly of society; it’s like diving under water and finding you can’t swim back up.

 

Lionel Asbo is available now from Jonathan Cape

words: Lily Dessau