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A powerful and very affecting novel. Very funny. When the debauched Gregory Riding undertakes the profound sexual humiliation of his step-brother, Terence Service, he turns him from shy wallflower suffering low self-esteem to a wily aggressor seeking revenge. Martin Amis once said at a New York Public Library talk that this book was in part modeled on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and you can see echoes of Humbert Humbert's enormous vanity in Gregory. The narrative moves gradually and convincingly from light to dark comedy, and this too seems a lesson learned from VN's great masterpiece. Amis has always been open about his models (Saul Bellow's another) and he takes the master's lessons here and makes them his own. I won't go into into how everything skillfully doubles back on itself, how it goes all Rapturesque in the end. Vigorously recommended.