Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis photo: bengal*foam
The background
Lionel Asbo: The State of England, the new novel from Martin Amis, has garnered mixed reviews. While some critics were unconvinced by the portrayal of a violent thug who wins the lottery, others have praised the novel’s power.
Inevitably, the reviews of Amis’s latest work are dominated by the obligatory comparisons with the writer’s headline-grabbing back catalog. So is Lionel Asbo a Yellow Dog-like disaster or a London Fields triumph?
Return to form?
“Lionel Asbo may not be up everyone’s street but it is my favorite Amis book since The Information,” wrote Carole Midgley in The Times (£). According to Midgley, publishing insiders have hailed the novel as a return to form for Amis after the critically-savaged Yellow Dog. “It certainly has much of the dazzling prose that made his earlier works so stand-out,” Midgley said. “But there’s something else, a tenderness and humanity that may stem from age and his status not just as a father but now a grandfather.”
Unconvincing characters disappoint
“Once again, the delight of re-encountering Amis’s mordant prose falls away after an initial dazzling burst of promise,” said Amanda Craig in The Independent. Lionel Asbo is “a cartoon of a chav”, and this damages the novel’s satirical intent. And Amis has chosen to easy a target: “The trouble with Lionel Asbo is that this underworld, with its tawdry dreams and supposed absence of morals, is so easy to send up that reading it feels like Amis is shooting fish in a barrel.”
Not Amis’s best but still powerful
“Lionel Asbo isn’t a book that you’d press into someone’s hands, like Money or The Rachel Papers,” wrote Theo Tait in The Guardian. “It is basically incoherent.” However, Tait felt the novel was still “powerful”, not least because of central character Lionel: “You come to believe him, to be slightly scared of him, even to sympathise with his predicament.”
