In the cover photo on the back inside flap of Lionel Asbo: State of England, the book's haughty scribe ("Martin Amis is the author of two collections of stories, six works of non-fiction and 12 previous novels...") gazes out, in glowering profile, at an anonymous London street. The pavement appears moist from a sudden rainstorm. (Has Amis been drenched in the downpour on his way to the photo-shoot? Is that expensive grey suit peppered with damp? The trademark tousled mane weighted by droplets, only recently  and impatiently  combed aside before he sits at a cafe table and glances into the melee?)

Behind him (having survived the withering coruscation of his writerly stare) a black family (mum pulling a pushchair, dad in 50s-style hat and raincoat, toddler clutching his hand, struggling to keep up). Approaching him, a white man in a white T-shirt and jeans, shaven-headed  the generic English lad  lopes, hands shoved into his pockets, deliciously framed by the outline of an old red phone box. Facing this man, a headscarf-wearing woman, in full-length, enveloping black, bag slung over her arm.

And Amis? Slouched into his chair, relaxed mouth, eyes hooded but somehow expressing an ineffable sadness bleeding into disgust. Left hand obscured from view, right hand lifted and holding What is that he's holding? A small packet of Japanese incense? A party popper? A slim salt dispenser? A roll of Semtex? Are we witnessing Amis  frozen in time  mere moments before the hand tightens further, he straightens up in his chair, grimaces and steadies himself to hurl this mysterious object? But at whom? And why?

Perhaps he already knows that the early word on his new novel is that it's depressingly bad. A stinker. Perhaps he is thinking about his imminent move to New York. Perhaps he is looking at these streets, these wet London streets, and cursing them for not appreciating him  a great author, a great English author  nearly as much as he feels they should do. Perhaps he is thinking about his father. Perhaps he is thinking about becoming his father or not becoming his father. Perhaps he is remembering his old friend, Christopher Hitchens, to whom his latest novel is dedicated.

The look in his eyes is one of wistful disappointment. Of hurt.

So what about this seductive and garishly entitled Lionel Asbo, then (with its curious and provocative State of England adjunct)?

Is it  as nay-sayers believe  a savage, uncontrolled and splenetic attack on modern British life, culture, mores and tropes? Is it a casual bit of GBH against the working classes? Is it a parting shot (a carefree moon from the back window of a retreating National Express coach?); a final, well-aimed kick in the teeth to the doubters and the gloaters, the prize-givers and the father-haters?

Because  like it or not  he is the father; the current father of English letters. Amis is the daddy  something his own daddy never really was (much as Martin persists in believing otherwise). Amis is the don. And anyone who has read Sophocles or Freud knows that while we all love our dads, we all still harbour a deep, secret urge to kill them. And then to have sex with our nans.

In the opening chapter of Lionel Asbo, the young hero, Desmond Pepperdine, mixed-race 15-year-old resident of Diston Town or "Town" ("Diston  a world of italics and exclamation marks", part of "the great world city") writes a letter to an agony aunt about his incestuous relationship with his nan, Grace. Des's mother, Cilla, is dead. Des lives in a tower block with his Uncle Lionel, a psychotically violent local hoodlum, "a kind of anti-dad, the counterfather", a man with a genius for "disseminating tension", a man who has made stupidity into an art form ("Why did he work at being stupid?").

Des, by contrast, has a gentle and persistent intelligence. The plot is disarmingly uncomplicated. If Lionel finds out that Des has slept with his mother, he will kill him. But of course he probably won't find out (at least we sincerely hope he won't find out), not for 270-odd pages, and in the meantime he will win millions on the lotto and become ever more powerful, more wonderful, more hilarious, more disgusting, more visceral and more magnified. He will spew out his extraordinary vitality and violence and (better still) charm and ugly, irrepressible genius into every urgent, thuggish chapter.

And it will be filthy and endlessly inventive, and the language and the imagery will fizz and glow in a way that only Amis  at his very best, his most carefully careless  fizzes and glows. This is both a paean to and an attack on London:

"To evoke the London borough of Diston, we turn to the poetry of Chaos:
Each thing hostile
To every other thing: at every point
Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless
Resisted weight."

It is a masterclass in the strange variability of modern language and diction. Amis can do the accents. In fact he can do them so well, so effortlessly, that he undoes some of them. He performs guerilla surgery on them  nips and tucks  then sews them back together again. And he never pauses for breath. The novel comes at you and comes at you and keeps on coming. It never flags.

Is this an offensive book? Hell, yes. Deeply. But then maybe modern England needs offending. Is this a readable book? It's a Big Mac made from filet mignon. Is it a clever book? Clever and ignorant and topical and sad and cruel and ridiculous and breathtaking.

It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake. And the biggest joy is that Amis seems to find himself (and finds us, by extension) loving the thing he loathes. It is a great big confidence trick of a novel  an attack that turns into an embrace  a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve. So let's give thanks that Martin Amis was bad enough and brave enough to write it.

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 since the 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 new novel Lionel Asbo  about a yob who wins the lottery  suggests a serious relapse:

Who let the dogs in?
This, we fear, 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, repetitive insistence. 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's departure 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 the face, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble". A debt collector, he lives in a tower in the London Borough of Diston (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 no reason, and he can't talk proper (as Amis endlessly reminds us, spelling out his mispronunciations: his own name comes out as "Loyonoo"). He's so proud of his behaviour that he has changed his surname to Asbo by deed poll. Then, like Michael 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, and courting a Jordan-style glamour model.  

So it's a familiar line of attack  against unearned wealth and celebrity, 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 remote from the world he describes. The details are persistently wrong in jarring ways: the lottery is played by post; ageing single mums are addicted to the Telegraph cryptic crossword. Lionel's girlfriend is called "Threnody", meaning a poem of mourning (for some reason the inverted commas are crucial). When she's not having plastic surgery or appearing in Hello!, 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 heightened style, 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 as Calpol.

But then the novel is not realistic, even by satirical standards. Amis seems to be writing a romance, in the late Shakespearean sense. Lionel has a nephew, a half-Trinidadian orphan named Desmond Pepperdine. Though brought up by his uncle, he's the opposite of him: kind, gentle and intelligent, probably Amis's most virtuous character. We know that he has full authorial approval, not least because  not unlike Amis  he is an etymology pedant and a usage bore, 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 reminded him of the most courageous sound he had ever heard: the (amplified) beating of his unborn daughter's heart."

Every detail about Desmond suggests that we should approve of him, except one: in the first paragraph we learn that he's having a passionate affair with his granny. As in many recent Amis books, there's a hum of unresolved sexual weirdness about the whole project.

The stranger Lionel Asbo gets, the less it seems like a convincing indictment of England today  and the more it seems that Amis should have a nice lie down in a darkened room. But there are plenty of consolations: the poetic fragments (the "white-van sky of London"); the passing scraps of the saner novels Amis might have written. And not just these. In general, Amis only gets really interested in one character per novel (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 opposed to grassing up felons that he beats up Desmond for watching Crimewatch; he feeds his devil dogs on Tabasco and Special Brew. He speaks like no one on earth: "you never give them they Tabasco", he often complains. Yet you come to believe him, to be slightly scared of him, even to sympathise with his predicament. Lionel Asbo isn't a book that you'd press into someone's hands, like Money or The Rachel Papers. It is basically incoherent. Yet there's something powerful and authentic about "its wrongness, its deafened bad dream feel".

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 since the 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 new novel Lionel Asbo  about a yob who wins the lottery  suggests a serious relapse:

Who let the dogs in?
This, we fear, 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, repetitive insistence. 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's departure 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 the face, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble". A debt collector, he lives in a tower in the London Borough of Diston (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 no reason, and he can't talk proper (as Amis endlessly reminds us, spelling out his mispronunciations: his own name comes out as "Loyonoo"). He's so proud of his behaviour that he has changed his surname to Asbo by deed poll. Then, like Michael 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, and courting a Jordan-style glamour model.  

So it's a familiar line of attack  against unearned wealth and celebrity, 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 remote from the world he describes. The details are persistently wrong in jarring ways: the lottery is played by post; ageing single mums are addicted to the Telegraph cryptic crossword. Lionel's girlfriend is called "Threnody", meaning a poem of mourning (for some reason the inverted commas are crucial). When she's not having plastic surgery or appearing in Hello!, 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 heightened style, 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 as Calpol.

But then the novel is not realistic, even by satirical standards. Amis seems to be writing a romance, in the late Shakespearean sense. Lionel has a nephew, a half-Trinidadian orphan named Desmond Pepperdine. Though brought up by his uncle, he's the opposite of him: kind, gentle and intelligent, probably Amis's most virtuous character. We know that he has full authorial approval, not least because  not unlike Amis  he is an etymology pedant and a usage bore, 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 reminded him of the most courageous sound he had ever heard: the (amplified) beating of his unborn daughter's heart."

Every detail about Desmond suggests that we should approve of him, except one: in the first paragraph we learn that he's having a passionate affair with his granny. As in many recent Amis books, there's a hum of unresolved sexual weirdness about the whole project.

The stranger Lionel Asbo gets, the less it seems like a convincing indictment of England today  and the more it seems that Amis should have a nice lie down in a darkened room. But there are plenty of consolations: the poetic fragments (the "white-van sky of London"); the passing scraps of the saner novels Amis might have written. And not just these. In general, Amis only gets really interested in one character per novel (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 opposed to grassing up felons that he beats up Desmond for watching Crimewatch; he feeds his devil dogs on Tabasco and Special Brew. He speaks like no one on earth: "you never give them they Tabasco", he often complains. Yet you come to believe him, to be slightly scared of him, even to sympathise with his predicament. Lionel Asbo isn't a book that you'd press into someone's hands, like Money or The Rachel Papers. It is basically incoherent. Yet there's something powerful and authentic about "its wrongness, its deafened bad dream feel".