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Summary
Summary
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 Behavior Order), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls, 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.
Author Notes
Martin Amis, son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, was born August 25, 1949. His childhood was spent traveling with his famous father. From 1969 to 1971 he attended Exeter College at Oxford University. After graduating, he worked for the Times Literary Supplement and later as special writer for the Observer.
Amis published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973, which received the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. Other titles include Dead Babies (1976), Other People: A Mystery Story (1981); London Fields (1989), The Information (1995), and Night Train (1997).
Martin Amis has been called the voice of his generation. His novels are controversial, often satiric and dark, concentrating on urban low life. His style has been compared to that of Graham Greene, Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow, among others. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
If there's a more depraved human being than the title character of Martin Amis's savagely funny new novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, you do not want to meet him. Like earlier Amis creations Keith Talent (London Fields) and John Self (Money), Asbo's very name (ASBO is the U.K. acronym for Anti-Social Behavior Order) is a tipoff of the author's intent. And like those earlier Amis novels, Lionel Asbo: State of England crackles with brilliant prose and scathing satire. Lionel first runs afoul of the law at the age of three years, two days ("a national record") for throwing bricks through car windows. By 21, he's a vicious criminal who raises pitbulls on a diet of Tabasco Sauce and malt liquor and terrorizes his seedy London neighborhood. So far so Amis. So who could predict that, from this delightfully nasty setup, an author the New York Times once called "fiction's angriest writer" would craft a novel so... Dickensian, a novel with such... I hate to even say it... heart. That's because Lionel Asbo: State of England also features a hopeful, lovable orphan in need of a benefactor, Lionel's nephew Desmond Pepperdine. And when Lionel wins 140 million in the national lottery, what follows is hilarious and strangely compelling-a gleefully twisted Great Expectations. Lionel's family tree is a tangle of early breeding: his mum, Grace, had seven children by the age of 19: a girl, Cilla, then five boys named after Beatles (the last is named Stuart Sutcliffe) and, finally, Lionel. Only Cilla and Lionel have the same father, so, despite the age difference, the bookended siblings are known as "the twins." Des is Cilla's boy and when she dies young, Lionel is left to raise his smart, sensitive nephew, who is only six years younger than him. Lionel takes to his new role, encouraging Des to put down his schoolbooks and go break windows with his mates. Then Lionel gets rich and becomes a tabloid sensation, the Lottery Lout. He lives large, hires a publicist, and starts a phony relationship with one of those beautiful, boring women famous for being famous (think: a British Kardashian.) Wealthy Lionel is even worse than poor Lionel; boorish, brutal, wistful for his old life. "Not happy. Not sad. Just numb," as he describes himself. "The only time I know I'm breathing is when I'm doing some skirt." Amis adopts a big, playful storytelling voice in this book. He riffs like a jazz master, in and out of vernacular, with brief gusts of description, all driven by a tight bass line of suspense. You see, Des is hiding a secret and if Lionel finds out... well, let's just say it would be better if Lionel does not find out. A double-edged question holds this terrific, lithe novel: will it be the fabulously wealthy Lionel who takes care of Des, or the sociopath? Reviewed by Jess Walter, who is the author of six novels, most recently Beautiful Ruins (Harper 2012). He won the 2005 Edgar Award for his novel Citizen Vince. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Amis' phenomenal vim and versatility, anchoring roots in English literature, and gift for satire power this hilariously Dickensian, nerve-racking, crafty, bull's-eye tale of a monster and a mensch. Lionel, a volatile and brutal thug much feared in his destitute Liverpool neighborhood, proudly changed his last name to Asbo, the English acronym for anti-social behavior order. Loyal to blood, Lionel has taken in his orphaned teenage nephew, Desmond. Gentle, smart, bookish, and half-black, Des nimbly if fearfully navigates Lionel's wrath and psychopathic pit bulls while anxiously harboring a potentially fatal family secret. While Lionel is in and out of prison, Des goes to college, becomes a journalist, and marries. Then Lionel wins the lottery and becomes the tabloids' favorite target as he struggles to transform himself and burns through a huge sum of money with mad desperation. In a wicked twist on the rags-to-riches motif, Amis exults in mocking the cheap dreams of the lottery and the rapacious British press while affirming the toxic conflicts of class, race, and gender. Even more caustically diabolical is the way Amis toys with our trust in love. This deliciously shivery, sly, and taunting page-turner provokes a fresh assessment of the poverty of place, mind, and spirit and the wondrous blossoming of against-all-odds goodness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With praise still in the air for Amis' last novel, The Pregnant Widow (2010), readers will flock to this rapidly devoured, fiendishly comedic, and telling fable.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Pity poor Lionel Asbo, a thug burdened by a vestigial conscience, his every ignoble thought and gesture determined by his maker, Martin Amis, a man not given to mercy. The antihero of Amis's new novel, "Lionel Asbo: State of England," Lionel takes the kind of drubbing only satire can sustain. The youngest of the seven mostly criminal and largely dysfunctional children his mother bore by the age of 19, Lionel works at "the very hairiest end of debt collection." Like his literary progenitor, the jet-setting John Self of Amis's 1984 novel, "Money: A Suicide Note," Lionel is in hot - desperate, tormented and doomed - pursuit of whatever gratifications might be wrung from the free fall and decline of contemporary society. Distinguished by the surname he assumed to celebrate his having received, at age 3, the Anti-Social Behavior Order (introduced in 1998 by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Crime and Disorder Act), Lionel divides his time among Extortion With Menaces, Receiving Stolen Property and their inevitable result: prison. Along with pornography, Lionel considers prison one of the two reliable pillars of civilization. As he tries to teach Desmond, or Des, the orphaned nephew he shelters, when you're incarcerated at least "you know where you are." Des is, alas, a most unpromising apprentice, unaccountably preferring books to criminality. But the scholar's is a lonely life in Diston (read Dystopia), where Des shares a fiat with his uncle, along with Lionel's two Tabasco- and alcohol-fueled pit bulls. In Diston, "with its gravid primary schoolers and toothless hoodies, its wheezing 20-year-olds, arthritic 30-year-olds, crippled 40-year-olds, demented 50-year-olds, and nonexistent 60-year-olds," life has sunk to the quintessential Hobbesian low: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Lionel's mother, Grace, 39, is therefore making haste to find pleasure wherever she can, even if it comes in the form of her grandson, Lionel's nephew. Des, whose predicament Amis summarizes as a fall "from grace to Grace," knows that while in Diston incest is "not considered that bad," Lionel isn't likely to forgive Des's shagging his mother. The suspense generated by the possibility of his volatile uncle learning the awful truth sustains the trajectory of "Lionel Asbo" from one close call to the next. When reckless Grace descends into what may be depression rather than what Lionel calls "that German lurgy that rots you brain," he takes it as an excuse to shunt her off to an old folks' home in the ominously named "Cape Wrath," from which she speaks like an oracle, in hints and riddles. Luckily for Des, Lionel is distracted from his suspicions about his "slag" of a mother when his criminal career is derailed by his winning the lottery. With high-ticket lawyers to keep him out of prison, Lionel disappears, as Des says, "into the front page." Once "Lotto Lout" becomes a tabloid darling he's easy prey for gold-digging celebutantes. Almost instantly, the wealth he imagined he wanted parts him from his life's two mainstays: prison and porn. Or, as he confides in Des, now the only time he knows he's breathing is when he's "doing some skirt" and discovering just how discombobulating real sex can be. 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. The "yttrium credit card," a few avatars beyond that platinum Amex in your wallet, "reality telethons" and even pit bulls that blaspheme in lieu of barking can't distract us from a theme familiar to the audience of Amis's forebear, Dickens: the corrupting influence of money. Like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and other of the great novelist-qua-social-critic's orphaned and destitute child heroes, Des provides a foil for the low company he keeps. As demonstrated by his earlier novels, Amis is, like Dickens, an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society. "Lionel Asbo" may not have the expansive cast or tangled plot of "David Copperfield" or "Oliver Twist," but as the author hints through the occasional allusion, his refrains are Dickensian. As Des is to David is to Oliver, so Lionel Asbo is to Wilkins Micawber to Fagin, all three benighted "mentors" lacking the moral compass of their younger, wiser acolytes. The owner of an "impenetrable mass of stolen property," Lionel is baffled by legitimate wealth. "His sole and devouring preoccupation since infancy," money, has been rendered "meaningless." The spendthrift Mr. Micawber cannot uphold the now famous principle his poor example demonstrates for David: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." The villainous miser, Fagin, sacrifices his pickpocket protégés to greed while hiding away the spoils of their labor, a treasure by which no one profits. "Me challenge," Lionel concludes, is "to go from the floating world ... to the heavy." In the "State of England" "nothing weighed, nothing counted and everything was allowed." An evanescent realm of hedonism where nothing has enough substance to be grounded by the laws of nature, the "floating world" - or ufeiyo, in the original Japanese - is hardly a new target for Amis. But whereas the grotesqueries of "Money" accrue the weight of tragedy, "Lionel Asbo" does not. Under its sordid costume, it's a simpler and far less troubling book, probably because John Self is a fully realized character while Lionel remains a caricature. Fast forward from Edo period Japan to Diston Town, England; from geishas to sexy grannies who advertise their withered charms in the singles adverts; from naughty woodblock prints to "Self-Esteem," the lingerie line hawked by "Threnody," the would-be superstar whose avarice kindles her feigned affection for Lionel. So much for the human condition. There is no gravity; the center will not hold; the vantage of "Lionel Asbo" moves ever outward into the ever-expanding cosmos, from the "sun pinned into place, as firm as a gilt tack," to Mars and Mercury and on, to "surge through the asteroid belt to the gas giants, to Jupiter, to Saturn." Earthbound Lionel tears from one mishap to the next in his Bentley Aurora through a land of "brown dwarfs," "blue giants" and "spasmodic 'flare stars,'" where fame is measured in light-years. What's a hoodlum to do when his honorific is hijacked by a 2-year-old girl who beats his record as the youngest to gamer an ASBO, in her case by swilling vodka, vandalizing property, stealing cash and biting social workers? No wonder a man needs bars to keep him in place. "When you in prison, you have you peace of mind," Lionel says. Des's redemption issues from different institutions: university and matrimony. As it was for David Copperfield, education appears to Des as the "harmony of the cosmos," and his dedication to self-improvement grants him passage to a coherent world where his ability to love wins him a woman of good character. Dickens couldn't resist a name that carries meaning, and neither can Amis. In the end, David finds his way through Agnes, or "purity," to salvation. Des, emerging from darkness, arrives at Dawn. A wealth of pop references can't hide Amiss Dickensian theme: the corrupting influence of money. Kathryn Harrison is writing a biography of Joan of Arc. Her most recent book is "Enchantments," a novel.
Guardian Review
It must be hard for Martin Amis, never quite knowing if he's a national treasure or a national embarrassment. His output in the first few years of this century, particularly the career lows of Yellow Dog (2003) and his books on Stalin and terrorism, saw him firmly established as the embarrassing uncle of English letters well past his prime, creepy, grandiose, given to unhinged outbursts about "the age of horrorism" and "the worldflash of a coming future". But in recent years, things have unmistakably looked up: his last novel The Pregnant Widow (2010) was his best sincethe glory years of the 1980s; Amis the journalist seems to have wisely given up trying to pass himself off as a clash-of-civilisations man, in favour of writing excellent criticism again. Unfortunately, the epigraph of his newnovel Lionel Asbo about a yob who wins the lottery suggests a serious relapse: Who let the dogs in? This, wefear, is going to be the question. Who let the dogs in? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who? For our more high-minded readers: this is a riff on the soca anthem "Who Let the Dogs Out?", a carnival favourite regularly voted one of the most annoying songs of all time. The effect is comparable to the old Peter Sellers joke of reciting Beatles lyrics in a Laurence Olivier voice, except that the comedy is not intentional. It suggests that Lionel Asbo is going to be a clueless foray into popular culture and working-class life, conducted with Amis's trademark gaudy, repetitiveinsistence. And so it turns out. The novel effortlessly exerts the car-crash fascination that long-term Amis-watchers know too well: surely he's not going to do that? My god, he's gone and done it. But this isn't the same as saying that it's irredeemably awful. It is, in many ways, an eccentrically impressive performance. It was surprising that, in the acknowledgments to The Pregnant Widow, Amis thanked Jane Austen for the "penetrating sanity" she had imparted to the English novel. And not just because people usually thank their spouse and agent, rather than major canonical figures (he also thanked Shakespeare and Ted Hughes). It was surprising because sanity has not been the prevailing mood of his big novels since, say, London Fields (1989). Where Ian McEwan, the yin to his yang, has gone from foetid psychosexuality and high-temperature visions to stately realism and breezy comedy, Amis has gone in the opposite direction. The case against the novels that followed London Fields is now well established. Amis, it is often said, has mistaken the nature of his talent. He was a brilliant comic novelist, but he felt compelled to take on ever more high-flown subjects: the Holocaust, the gulag, the cosmos, the deepest recesses of the human psyche. As with Woody Allen, people tend to prefer his early, funny ones. (Julie Burchill: "If Martin Amis had stuck to writing about smoking, shagging and snooker he might have been the next Nick Hornby.") No one doubts his linguistic gifts, but they have often led up him up blind alleys: the heavily brilliant narrating voice can stifle everything else in the novels. It sometimes seems that the genre does not exist for what Amis wants to write. He could have been a terrific novelist, poet, journalist and critic. Instead, he jams everything into the novels: editorialising, lyric poetry, even lectures on literary history. In his last one, as the narrator awaits a life-changing sexual initiation at the hands of a perfunctorily characterised Scottish lady with an extraordinary arse, he wonders what genre he's in social realism? comedy of manners? romance? before plumping in the end for "pornotheological farce". That's not a bad description of his later novels. Typically, a thin comedy plot collides with dark, fevered visions, along with some deeply emotional, transparently autobiographical material. The resulting mess is then held together with a basic suspense hook. We are kept waiting for hundreds of pages for a heavily flagged murder or sexual betrayal or in the case of the new book to find out who let the dogs in. Lionel Asbo is another pornotheological farce. At one level, it's a reasonably straightforward satire. Subtitled "State of England", and published soon after Amis'sdeparture for America, decrying the country's "moral decrepitude", it is a full-on indictment of a debased culture.Lionel Asbo is a "brutally generic" yob. He looks a bit like Wayne Rooney: "the slab-like body, the full lump of theface, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble". A debt collector, he lives in a tower in the London Borough ofDiston (a cross between Dalston and dystopia?), an urban hell-hole with the fertility rate of Malawi and the life expectancy of Djibouti. He wears a mesh vest, he has a pair of psychopathic pit-bulls, he beats people up for noreason, and he can't talk proper (as Amis endlessly reminds us, spelling out his mispronunciations: his own name comesout as "Loyonoo"). He's so proud of his behaviour that he has changed his surname to Asbo by deed poll. Then, likeMichael Carroll, the so-called King of the Chavs who won the lottery in 2002, he wins untold millions, and behaves in a tremendously vulgar fashion, drinking champagne out of pint glasses, buying a ridiculous house in the country, andcourting a Jordan-style glamour model. So it's a familiar line of attack against unearned wealth andcelebrity, vulgarity, fake tits, feckless chavs, slipping educational and moral standards (and, by implication, footballers). But, this being a Martin Amis novel, everything has to be much weirder than that. He seems very remotefrom the world he describes. The details are persistently wrong in jarring ways: the lottery is played by post; ageingsingle mums are addicted to the Telegraph cryptic crossword. Lionel's girlfriend is called "Threnody", meaning a poemof mourning (for some reason the inverted commas are crucial). When she's not having plastic surgery or appearing inHello!, she's a poet whose fondest ambition is to win the TS Eliot prize. "Glamour and myself are virtually synonymous"is the sort of thing she says, just as the Sun uses terms such as "doxy" and "delightfully assured". The heightenedstyle, as ever, brings its own oddities. London is called "the great world city" throughout, and there's a reference to"the infant's opiate the syrupy suspension of the purple paracetamol", known to inhabitants of planet earth asCalpol. But then the novel is not realistic, even by satirical standards. Amis seems to be writing a romance, inthe late Shakespearean sense. Lionel has a nephew, a half-Trinidadian orphan named Desmond Pepperdine. Though broughtup by his uncle, he's the opposite of him: kind, gentle and intelligent, probably Amis's most virtuous character. Weknow that he has full authorial approval, not least because not unlike Amis he is an etymology pedant and a usagebore, with a near-religious reverence for the Concise Oxford Dictionary. He will father a child later in the book, and,as usual when writing about parenthood, Amis goes into sentimentally incontinent mode: "That throbbing glow remindedhim of the most courageous sound he had ever heard: the (amplified) beating of his unborn daughter'sheart." Every detail about Desmond suggests that we should approve of him, except one: in the first paragraph welearn that he's having a passionate affair with his granny. As in many recent Amis books, there's a hum of unresolvedsexual weirdness about the whole project. The stranger Lionel Asbo gets, the less it seems like a convincingindictment of England today and the more it seems that Amis should have a nice lie down in a darkened room. But thereare plenty of consolations: the poetic fragments (the "white-van sky of London"); the passing scraps of the sanernovels Amis might have written. And not just these. In general, Amis only gets really interested in one character pernovel (usually the Amis surrogate). This time, it's Lionel. Like Keith Talent from London Fields, he creates his own comic reality, semi-detached from the one the rest of us live in. He wears a cashmere West Ham scarf; he's so opposedto grassing up felons that he beats up Desmond for watching Crimewatch; he feeds his devil dogs on Tabasco and SpecialBrew. He speaks like no one on earth: "you never give them they Tabasco", he often complains. Yet you come to believehim, to be slightly scared of him, even to sympathise with his predicament. Lionel Asbo isn't a book that you'd pressinto someone's hands, like Money or The Rachel Papers. It is basically incoherent. Yet there's something powerful andauthentic about "its wrongness, its deafened bad dream feel".
Kirkus Review
A social satire with a wickedly funny setup fails to sustain momentum and provide much of a payoff. The latest from Amis (The Pregnant Widow, 2010, etc.) returns to familiar themes of British caste and culture, though rarely has his writing been so over-the-top or so steeped in the vernacular. This is the story of the ultimate dysfunctional family (through which the "State of England" subtitle invites the reader to extend the symbolism), where the title character is a hardened, perpetual criminal, a sociopath who prefers prison to the outside world and the pleasures of porn to the complications of relationships. He has taken his last name from the acronym for Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, and he has become "the anti-dad, the counterfather" to his nephew, Des, a teenage orphan only six years younger than Lionel. As the novel opens, the racially mixed Des is secretly involved in sexual relations with his grandmother (Lionel's mother), though this isn't quite as age-inappropriate as it is incestuously taboo, for both Des' mother and grandmother began procreating when they were 12. The boy's other uncles include John, Paul, George, Ringo and (for Beatle obsessives) Stu. Nothing subtle here, but much that's outrageously funny. Des writes a letter to a newspaper advice columnist about his predicament, as Lionel rails about the "GILF" phenomenon that is dragging down "a once-proud nation. Look. Beefy Bedmate Sought by Bonking Biddy. That's England." Lionel becomes rich beyond all expectation by winning the lottery, Des disappoints him by maturing into a conventional and respectable family man, grandma suffers from some sort of early-onset dementia. The climax to which the novel builds is whether she'll ever regain her wits and reveal the secret she shares with Des. All of this in a town where "everything hated everything else, and everything else, in return, hated everything back." An initially sharp satire turns tedious by midpoint.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Amis's latest novel is really two stories, a satirical take on the rise and fall of Lionel Abso, small-time criminal, and the coming-of-age story of Desmond "Des" Pepperdine. Back when he was still a Pepperdine, at the tender age of two, Lionel started living the thug life by bullying his older brothers. By the age of three, he had been cited by the cops for smashing car windows. Des is Lionel's nephew. He is gifted, the book-smart kid in a school famous for low standards, college-bound among the prison-bound. When Lionel's not in jail the two live in a high-rise housing estate in the London borough of Diston. In jail for starting a brawl at a wedding, Lionel wins the lottery, becomes a multimillionaire and starts living the celebrity life. Cue the hijinks. VERDICT Despite the distractions of the Lionel's shenanigans (ridiculous, over the top, and, yes, funny) readers will be drawn to Des. He may be the straight man in the piece but he adds depth to the novel. It's a fun read all around, but fans of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle will want to look for this. [See Prepub Alert, 1/13/12.]-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland, St. Mary's City (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition 2006 Desmond Pepperdine, Renaissance Boy 1. Dear Jennaveieve, I'm having an affair with an older woman. Shes' a lady of some sophistication, and makes a refreshing change from the teen agers I know (like Alektra for example, or Chanel.) The sex is fantastic and I think I'm in love. But ther'es one very serious complication and i'ts this; shes' my Gran! Desmond Pepperdine (Desmond, Des, Desi), the author of this document, was fifteen and a half. And his handwriting, nowadays, was self-consciously elegant; the letters used to slope backward, but he patiently trained them to slope forward; and when everything was smoothly conjoined he started adding little flourishes (his e was positively ornate--like a w turned on its side). Using the computer he now shared with his uncle, Des had given himself a course on calligraphy, among several other courses. On the plus-side, the age-difference is surprisingly He crossed that bit out, and resumed. It started a fort-night ago when she rang up and said its the plumbing again love. And I said nan? I'll be right over. She lives in a granny flat under a house about a mile away and theres allways some thing wrong with it's plumbing. Now I'm no plumber but I learnd a bit from my Uncle George whose in the trade. I sorted it out for her and she said why not stay for a few drink's? Calligraphy (and sociology, and anthropology, and psychology), but not yet punctuation. He was a good little speller, Des, but he knew how weak his punctuation was because he had just begun a course on it. And punctuation, he (quite rightly) intuited, was something of an art. So we had a few Dubonnet's which I'm not used to, and she was giving me these funny look's. She's all ways got the Beatles' on and she was playing all the slow one's like Golden Slumber's, Yester-day, and Sh'es Leaving Home. Then gran says its so hot I'll just slip in to my night-dress. And she came back in a babydoll! He was trying to give himself an education--not at Squeers Free, recently singled out, he read in the Diston Gazette, as the worst school in England. But his understanding of the planet and the universe had inconceivable voids in it. He was repeatedly amazed by the tonnage of what he didn't know. So we had a few more drink's, and I was noticing how well preserved she is. She's taken good care of herself and shes really fit considering the life shes' led. So after a few more drink's she says are'nt you frying alive in that blazer? Come over here handsome, and give us a cuddle! Well what could I do. She put her hand on my thigh and slid it up my short's. Well I'm only human aren't I? The stereo was playing I Should Of Known Better--but one thing lead to another, and it was mind blowing! For instance, the only national newspaper Des had ever read was the Morning Lark. And Jennaveieve, his addressee, was its agony aunt--or better say its ecstasy aunt. The page she presided over consisted of detailed accounts of perhaps wholly imaginary liaisons, and her replies consisted of a lewd pun followed by an exclamation mark. Desmond's tale was not imaginary. Now you must believe me that this is all very "out of character." It was never mean't to be! Okay we live in Diston, where that sort of thing isnt much frownd up on. And, okay my Gran had a mischivous youth. But she's a respectable woman. The thing is shes got a big birthday coming up and I reckon its turnd her head. As for myself, my background is strict christian at least on my fathers side (Pentecostalist.) And you see Jennaveieve, I've been very unhappy since my Mum, Cilla passed away three year's ago. I can't find the word's. I needed gentleness. And when gran touched me like that. Well. Des had no intention of actually mailing his letter to Jennaveieve (whose partly naked body also adorned the page headed, not Ecstasy Aunt, but Agony Angel). He was writing it simply to ease his own mind. He imagined Jennaveieve's dependably non-judgemental reply. Something like: At least you're having a Gran old time! Des wrote on. Apart from the legal question which is worrying me sick, theres another huge problem. Her son, Lionel is my uncle, and hes' like a father to me when he's not in prison. See hes an extremely violent criminal and if he find's out I'm giving his Mum one, hell fucking kill me. Litrally! It might be argued that this was a grave underestimation of Lionel's views on trespass and reprisal . . . The immediate goal, for Des, was to master the apostrophe. After that, the arcana of the colon and the semicolon, the hyphen, the dash, the slash. On the plus-side, the age-gap is not that big. See Granny Grace was an early starter, and fell pregnant when she was 12, just like my M He heard the thick clunks of the locks, he looked with horror at his watch, he tried to stand upright on deadened legs--and suddenly Lionel was there. 2 Lionel was there, a great white shape, leaning on the open door with his brow pressed to his raised wrist, panting huskily, and giving off a faint grey steam in his purple singlet (the lift was misbehaving, and the flat was on the thirty-third floor--but then again Lionel could give off steam while dozing in bed on a quiet afternoon). Under his other arm he was carrying a consignment of lager. Two dozen, covered in polythene. Brand: Cobra. "You're back early, Uncle Li." He held up a callused palm. They waited. In his outward appearance Lionel was brutally generic--the slablike body, the full lump of the face, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble. Out in the great world city, there were hundreds of thousands of young men who looked pretty much like Lionel Asbo. In certain lights and settings he resembled, some said, the England and Manchester United prodigy, striker Wayne Rooney: not exceptionally tall, and not fat, but exceptionally broad and exceptionally deep (Des saw his uncle every day--and Lionel was always one size bigger than expected). He even had Rooney's gap-toothed smile. Well, the upper incisors were widely spaced, yet Lionel very seldom smiled. You only saw them when he sneered. " . . . What you doing there with that pen? What's that you writing? Guiss it." Des thought fast. "Uh, it's about poetry, Uncle Li." "Poetry?" said Lionel and started back. "Yeah. Poem called The Faerie Queene." "The what? . . . I despair of you sometimes, Des. Why aren't you out smashing windows? It's not healthy. Oh yeah, listen to this. You know that bloke I bashed up in the pub the other Friday? Mr. 'Ross Knowles,' if you please? He's only pressing charges. Grassed me. Would you credit it." Desmond knew how Lionel was likely to feel about such a move. One night last year Lionel came home to find Des on the black leatherette sofa, innocently slumped in front of Crimewatch. The result was one of the longest and noisiest slappings he had ever received at his uncle's hands. They asking members of the public, said Lionel, standing in front of the giant screen with his arms akimbo, to fink on they own neighbours. Crimewatch, it's like a . . . like a programme for paedophiles, that is. It disgusts me. Now Des said, "He went to the law? Aw, that's . . . That's . . . the lowest of the low, that is. What you going to do, Uncle Li?" "Well I've been asking around and it turns out he's a loner. Lives in a bedsit. So there's no one I can go and terrify. Except him." "But he's still in hospital." "So? I'll take him a bunch of grapes. You feed the dogs?" "Yeah. Only we're out of Tabasco." The dogs, Joe and Jeff, were Lionel's psychopathic pitbulls. Their domain was the narrow balcony off the kitchen, where, all day, the two of them snarled, paced, and swivelled--and prosecuted their barking war with the pack of Rottweilers that lived on the roof of the next high-rise along. "Don't lie to me, Desmond," said Lionel quietly. "Don't ever lie to me." "I'm not!" "You told me you fed them. And you never give them they Tabasco!" "Uncle Li, I didn't have the cash! They've only got the big bottles and they're five ninety-five!" "That's no excuse. You should've nicked one. You spent thirty quid, thirty quid, on a fucking dictionary, and you can't spare a couple of bob for the dogs." "I never spent thirty quid! . . . Gran give it me. She won it on the crossword. The prize crossword." "Joe and Jeff--they not pets, Desmond Pepperdine. They tools of me trade." Lionel's trade was still something of a mystery to Des. He knew that part of it had to do with the very hairiest end of debt collection; and he knew that part of it involved "selling on" (Lionel's word for selling on was reset). Des knew this by simple logic, because Extortion With Menaces and Receiving Stolen Property were what Lionel most often went to prison for . . . He stood there, Lionel, doing something he was very good at: disseminating tension. Des loved him deeply and more or less unquestioningly (I wouldn't be here today without Uncle Li, he often said to himself). But he always felt slightly ill in his presence. Not ill at ease. Ill. ". . . You're back early, Uncle Li," he repeated as airily as he could. "Where you been?" "Cynthia. I don't know why I bestir meself. Gaa, the state of that Cynthia." The spectral blonde called Cynthia, or Cymfia, as he pronounced it, was the nearest thing Lionel had to a childhood sweetheart, in that he started sleeping with her when she was ten (and Lionel was nine). She was also the nearest thing he had to a regular girlfriend, in that he saw her regularly--once every four or five months. Of women in general, Lionel sometimes had this to say: More trouble than they worth, if you ask me. Women? I'm not bothered. I'm not bothered about women. Des thought that this was probably just as well: women, in general, should be very pleased that Lionel wasn't bothered about them. One woman bothered him--yes, but she bothered everyone. She was a promiscuous beauty named Gina Drago . . . "Des. That Cynthia," said Lionel with a surfeited leer. "Christ. Even uh, during the uh, you know, during the other, I was thinking, Lionel, you wasting you youth. Lionel, go home. Go home, boy. Go home and watch some decent porn." Des picked up the Mac and got smartly to his feet. "Here. I'm off out anyway." "Yeah? Where? Seeing that Alektra?" "Nah. Meet up with me mates." "Well do something useful. Steal a car. Eh, guess what. You Uncle Ringo won the Lottery." "He never. How much?" "Twelve pounds fifty. It's a mug's game, the Lottery, if you ask me. Oy. I've been meaning to ask you something. When you creep off at night . . ." Des was standing there holding the Mac in both hands, like a waiter with a tray. Lionel was standing there with the Cobras in both hands, like a drayman with a load. "When you creep off at night, you carry a blade?" "Uncle Li! You know me." "Well you should. For you own security. And you peace of mind. You going to get youself striped. Or worse. There's no fistfights any more, not in Diston. There's only knife fights. To the death. Or guns. Well," he relented, "I suppose they can't see you in the fucking dark." And Des just smiled with his clean white teeth. "Take a knife from the drawer on you way out. One of them black ones." Des didn't meet up with his mates. (He didn't have any mates. And he didn't want any mates.) He crept off to his gran's. As we know, Desmond Pepperdine was fifteen. Grace Pepperdine, who had led a very demanding life and borne many, many children, was a reasonably presentable thirty-nine. Lionel Asbo was a heavily weathered twenty-one. . . . In dusty Diston (also known as Diston Town or, more simply, Town), nothing--and no one--was over sixty years old. On an international chart for life expectancy, Diston would appear between Benin and Djibouti (fifty-four for men and fifty-seven for women). And that wasn't all. On an international chart for fertility rates, Diston would appear between Malawi and Yemen (six children per couple--or per single mother). Thus the age structure in Diston was strangely shaped. But still: Town would not be thinning out. Des was fifteen. Lionel was twenty-one. Grace was thirty-nine . . . He bent to unlatch the gate, he skipped down the seven stone steps, he knocked the knocker. He listened. Here came the shuffle of her fluffy slippers, and in the background (as ever) the melodic purity of a Beatles song. Her all-time favourite: "When I'm Sixty-Four." 3 Dawn simmered over the incredible edifice--the stacked immensity of Avalon Tower. On the curtained balcony (the size of a tight parking space), Joe lay dreaming of other dogs, enemy dogs, jewel-eyed hellhounds. He barked in his sleep. Jeff rolled over with a blissful sigh. In bedroom number one (the size of a low-ceilinged squash court, with considerable distances between things, between the door and the bed, between the bed and the wardrobe, between the wardrobe and the free-standing swing mirror), Lionel lay dreaming of prison and his five brothers. They were all in the commissary, queuing for Mars Bars. And in bedroom number two (the size of a generous four-poster), Des lay dreaming of a ladder that rose up to heaven. Day came. Lionel left early with Joe and Jeff (business). Des dreamed on. For six or seven months now he had been sensing it: the pangs and quickenings of intelligence within his being. Cilla, Des's mother, died when he was twelve, and for three years he entered a kind of trance, a leaden sleep; all was numb and Mumless . . . Then he woke up. He started keeping a diary--and a notebook. There was a voice in his head, and he listened to it and he talked to it. No, he communed with it, he communed with the whispers of his intelligence. Did everybody have one, an inner voice? An inner voice that was cleverer than they were? He thought probably not. Then where did it come from? Des looked to his family tree--to his personal Tree of Knowledge. Well, Grace Pepperdine, Granny Grace, had not attended all that closely to her education, for obvious reasons: she was the mother of seven children by the age of nineteen. Cilla came first. All the rest were boys: John (now a plasterer), Paul (a foreman), George (a plumber), Ringo (unemployed), and Stuart (a seedy registrar). Having run out of Beatles (including the "forgotten" Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe), Grace exasperatedly christened her seventh child Lionel (after a much lesser hero, the choreographer Lionel Blair). Lionel Asbo, as he would later become, was the youngest of a very large family superintended by a single parent who was barely old enough to vote. Excerpted from Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
