Martin Amis and the underclass

New Martin Amis novels haven’t always received a fine reception of late. So much so that even tepid praise now reads generously. In the current magazine Philip Hensher reviews the latest, Lionel Asbo, and closes by declaring it, ‘not as bad as I feared.’ Having just finished it I think there is much more to recommend it than that.

Not least because it is such a good attempt at satirising our almost un-satirise-able modern Britain. There aren’t many novelists who can make you laugh at the strange thing this country has become. But Amis does, and often.

The London borough of ‘Diston’ where most of the action is set is as good a description as any of the state of the underclass in Britain (the people who used to be the working class until the working class were imported and those they replaced paid not to work). Diston Town is many things in Amis’s description, but what it adds up to is a place ‘where calamity made its rounds like a postman.’

Amis’s depiction of the strange moral damage that has been done to, and by, a whole class of people interestingly and repeatedly echoes many observations of the great Theodore Dalrymple. Not least in the devastating portrayal of people who understand themselves by curiously separating their selves from their actions (and the consequences of those actions). So the title character, a violent lout who wins the lottery, tells his nephew early in the novel, ‘I’m not going to stand there at the gates for a fucking fortnight, am I. Think of the effect that’d have on me temper.’ As though he and his temper are two different things and the temper, over which he can have no control, is something with absolute control over him.

The ‘culture’ of celebrity is also nicely diced.