A Proletarian Comedy of Menace: Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo

85 SUSANNE PETERS A Proletarian Comedy of Menace: Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo 1. The Principle of Terrestrial Mediocrity One of the familiar and often controversially discussed topics of Amis criticism is to point out how, in his novels, everything is going to the dogs.1 Lionel Asbo: State of England,2 published shortly before Amis's relocation to New York in 2012, takes this bone of contention to new heights in both a literal and a metaphorical sense: dogs play a major role in the novel's configurations of anxiety, but our metaphor of course, and more importantly, also reflects Amis's idiosyncratic diagnosis of a decrepit, violently ignorant English society, as his novel's subtitle aptly flags out: Its eponymous protagonist, a violent and ignorant criminal, assisted by his pair of pitbulls fed on Tabasco sauce and Cobra beer, is an allegory of the state of England. In this essay, I shall dis- cuss whether it is a humorous one. Martin Amis has found an intriguing phrase for what he thinks is happening in our Western societies today. It is "the principle of terrestrial mediocrity," (129) as the protagonist and writer Richard Tull (whom we can take as the ventriloquist Amis's dummy) assumes in Amis's 1995 novel The Information and it is further elaborated as guiding the development of human communities and the history of all art, especially literature: It inevitably leads to moral decay, and finds 20th-century culture in a state of exhaustion. Such downward spiralling history of humankind is aligned with the history of astronomical discoveries, in which man likewise seems to dwindle into insignificance – both processes of persistent humiliation.3 Perhaps the most character- istic (and often quoted) passage yet in this context can indeed be found in The Infor- mation, where Richard Tull is questioned by his editor about a new book project: 'What's this? The History of Increasing Humiliation. Non-fiction, right?' [...] 'It would be a book accounting for the decline in the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demi-gods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers, the burghers 1 In this context, Theo Tait begins his review of Lionel Asbo in The Guardian (8 June 2012) with the following rather pertinent remark: "It must be hard for Martin Amis, never quite knowing if he's a national treasure or a national embarrassment." The controversy around Amis and his works often rests on the conflicting opinions whether the comic mode is adequate to express serious subjects (e.g. the Holocaust in Time's Arrow and in his 2014 novel The Zone of Interest). Other accusations are those of sexism, arrogance, and a compassion for America (see Finney 2008, 95-96). 2 Martin Amis's novel Lionel Asbo (2012) will henceforth be abbreviated as LA. There is an earlier Amis short story entitled "The State of England," published in the collection Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), which also deals in low life. For an analysis of that story with respect to its comic mode see Verrier (2003): "Faithful to the definition of sentimental comedy, the polytonality of Amis's texts, which juxtaposes two rivalling moods, keeps the reader off balance because he/she knows that, at any time, laughter may erupt from social comedy or else horror and desperation may be produced by a ran- dom instance of wanton violence" (103). 3 Amis himself has abundantly commented on his views on art in his fiction, in interviews and critical writings, see e.g. "I Am in Blood Stepp'd in So Far," in the collection The War Against Cliché, 11-17, esp. 15: "[...] literature [...] has been following exactly the same graph line for two thousand years [...]. If art has an arrow, then that is the way it points: straight downwards, from demigod to demirep." See also Amis's 1984 novel Money: "[...] we 're pretty much agreed that the twentieth century is an ironic age – downward looking. Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the twentieth century" (248). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 27.1 (March 2016): 85-97. Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 86 SUSANNE PETERS and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then iro- ny: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin.' [...] 'And what would account for it?' He sighed. 'The history of astronomy. The history of astronomy is the history of increasing humiliation. First the geocentric universe, then the heliocentric universe. Then the eccentric universe – the one we're living in. Every century we get smaller. Kant figured it all out, sitting in his armchair. What's the phrase? The principle of terrestrial mediocrity.' .' . Big book.' 'Big book.' And he added, 'Small world. Big universe.' (Amis 1995, 129) With Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis adds a criminal multimillionaire or, a little more to the point, a multimillionaire criminal to this illustrious collection of literary protagonists referred to in the above quotation. The novel's hero (or rather anti-hero) is a 21- year-old violent and blatant debt collector who changes his surname from a rather innocuous "Pepperdine" to the acronym of Anti-Social-Behaviour-Order, to which he has been frequently exposed from the age of three onwards. While serving yet another term in prison, he wins 134 million Pounds in a lottery, without this undeserved for- tune ever affecting his outlook on life, other than making him feel slightly less real.4 Lionel Asbo has a nephew whom he brings up alone after the death of his sister, and this boy, (at the beginning of the novel) fifteen-year-old soft-footed and gentle Des- mond, is to Lionel what Oliver Twist is to Bill Sykes: incorruptible, naȉve, submissive to the point of his own detriment, yet desperately striving for education, scholarly Winter Journals knowledge, and love. Conversely, Lionel is premature (he has his first sexual encoun- ter at the tender age of nine), vulgar and addicted to the consumption of pornography, to name but a few of their differences which will be further explored below. While the narrative unfolds its comedy largely upon the utter discrepancy between this odd couple,5 it depicts the world they live in as humiliating and humbling indeed. In the fictive London borough of Diston, "nothing – and no one – was over sixty years old" for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution (LA 9), life expectancy and fertility rates seem to compete with each other for the higher figure, and a cultural ambience pervades that Amis amply captures in Ovid's poetry: Each thing hostile Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) To every other thing: at every point Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless Resisted weight. (19) 6 Notwithstanding Ovid's tale envisioning a world before the introduction of some kind of order, Amis takes this poetic vision of the state of the world as an adequate description of the contemporary state of England, thus reframing the original by fitting it to his conception of an ending, not – as Ovid does – as a beginning. The hostility and inconsistencies of humankind depicted here can be added onto the deeper, more lasting and universal humiliations as Richard Tull indicated in The 4 His sense of irreality is described as a feeling of numbness: "See, that's what happens when you win a hundred-odd million quid. You go numb. Not happy. Not sad. Numb..." (LA, 109). 5 Finney devotes a section to doubling as a major thematic concern of Amis's (2008, 100-105). 6 The lines are taken from Ted Hughes's 1997 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (the first section is titled "Creation; Four Ages, Lycaon; Flood," n.p.). Interestingly, and perhaps quite revealingly, Amis only quotes the four lines given above. The lines that follow refer to the creation of harmony, a posi- tion Amis would clearly reject. They read: "God, or some such artist as resourceful, / Began to sort it out. / Land here, sky there, / And sea there. Up there, the heavenly stratosphere. / Down here, the cloudy, the windy. / He gave to each its place, / Independent, gazing about freshly. / Also resonating – / Each one a harmonic of the others, / Just like the strings / That would resound, one day in the dome of the tortoise." Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) A PROLETARIAN COMEDY OF MENACE: MARTIN AMIS'S LIONEL ASBO 87 Information. Amis then seems to indulge in these manifold degradations;7 and with Lionel Asbo it now seems that when the writer has finished writing up his dark profile of humankind's – or at least Britain's – moral decrepitude, his saga of an exhausted culture, his analysis of anxiety and fury about its alleged geo-historical decline, he exits.8 On a more cheerful note, and given the novel's concern with sex and crime, power and money, Amis seems to respond to some 'absolute' reader interests. Writing in the first decade of the 21st century, he is not alone in picking the theme of an ordinary man coming to sudden and unearned riches and watching him spend it. Nicholas Shakespeare's Inheritance (2010), Allan Hollinghurst's Booker winner The Line of Beauty (2004), or Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2006) come to mind, which likewise deal with the topic of unforeseen monetary fortunes. In Shakespeare's novel, the protagonist undeservedly inherits 17 million Pounds, Hollinghurst's gains an equally substantial sum and complementary power after his friend puts him in his will and dies, and McCarthy's receives a huge compensation from an insurance company for something falling out of the sky onto his head.

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