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While serving time at Her Majesty's pleasure, Lionel manages to win the lottery which he promptly spends on alcohol, women and a huge house, but you can take the yob out of Diston but you cannot take Diston out of the yob. Despite unfailing loyalty to his uncle, Lionel doesn't share any of this wealth with Des, or indeed any of his family. Des remains in fear that one day Lionel will discover his past with his grandmother, knowing that Lionel's violence will know no bounds. Meanwhile Lionel hooks up with 'Threnody' (the inverted commas are part of her name), a sort of Katie Price-type character. She is an excellent creation, but as so often with Amis, the author isn't particularly strong on females and she remains frustratingly on the periphery of things.
One gets the impression that Amis has had great fun writing this book. It's a fairly light and breezy read, but even for Amis, the story is unusually viscous and nasty. Quite where Des gets his relatively good qualities from is a bit of mystery in the world he lives. The book is grandly sub-titled ''State of England'' although it is so unremittingly nasty that even the most pessimistic would question to what extent this can be claimed. Yes, it violently has a stab at those who are famous for being famous, but while Amis usually focusses on upper class rogues, here there is never any great sense that this reflects real life to any extent. In fact the portrayal of the main characters seems to be drawn more from the Daily Mail's coverage of the stories like Dale Farm. The result is that there is an unfortunate tendency to come over as rather sneering, which in turn reduces the impact of the story somewhat.
Yet for all that, there are moments of pure Amis class in the writing. He has a fine ear for conversation and some of his descriptions of atmospheres are superb. I found myself smiling more at these than at the comic moments in the story though. This is largely my problem with the book: it's well constructed and often told with great skill, but the story itself is not particularly edifying or enlightening. Ultimately, Lionel Asbo is too much of a caricature and not enough of a character, while Des is more of a rounded character, but I just didn't believe in him in the context of his environment. I had the feeling that the best medium for Lionel would have been the pages of ''Viz'' rather than a Martin Amis novel. It also suffers from a slightly fizzled ending but endings have never been an Amis forte in my view.