Kingsley Amis- Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim

Penguin Modern Classics

Kingsley Amis

1954

“How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.”

  

Though Kingsley Amis is enough of a literary establishment in Britain that I'd been aware of his reputation as an author for some time, it took the knowledge of endorsements from my current favourite writer W. Somerset Maugham for me to pick up a copy of his most famous book. Lucky Jim has been lauded by the establishment as a classic piece of twentieth-century English fiction, portraying the turmoils of the life of a young teacher attempting to survive the political minefield of a chaotic new University campus. I was in the mood to enjoy a dry, sardonic comedy as a break from the typically direct doom and gloom I seem to always read, so I really wanted to enjoy my first experience reading Amis (random side-note- I did once read a Martin Amis novel once, it was horrible), but ultimately finished with mixed feelings.

Kingsley Amis

The eponymous Jim Dixon lectures in medieval history, but struggles to keep on the right side of academic politics amongst the faculty and so constantly worries for his job. His snide, pretentious colleagues patronise and irritate him, and his personal life is no better. Trapped in a volatile relationship with an emotionally insane woman he doesn't even actually like, his response is to get dangerously drunk at a party hosted by his senior professor, black out upstairs with a cigarette, and set fire to the bedsheets. When trying to conceal the crime in the morning, he meets Christine Callaghan, the beautiful girlfriend of the aforementioned professor's son. At this point the novel's true direction becomes abruptly clear, as the educational back-drop simply becomes the stage for a pained romantic conquest.

To a certain extent, this was actually something of a relief to me, since up to then I'd grown little-to-no attachment to the plot, setting or themes. I had no prior bias for or against them, but I couldn't get invested in Amis' portrayal of his comic surroundings. Amis' prose is technically excellent; flowing and consistent, but certain antiquated aspects of his style bored me; a real problem, since Amis emphasizes his main point of satire- that being the egotistical pretentiousness of those with power in academia- through his style, specifically character dialogue and Dixon's own critical trains of thought. As a result, I found the entire book to be overwritten, in the sense that each theme and subject of satire is over-laboured with a tone that itself became annoying eventually.

I won't deny that I did get a little invested in Jim and Christine's impossible relationship, and I also felt that Amis' eventual extrapolation of Margerat's (Jim's on-off girlfriend) psyche was by far his strongest writing; resembling Somerset Maugham's own fixation on the oft-disturbing motives of human obsession. Unfortunately the University setting fell almost completely flat for me, and there was so much more of it in comparison to the little I found engaging that the book became a chore. Perhaps my tastes in comedy have been irreversibly twisted by more contemporary things, but whatever the case was I just couldn't find any deeper meaning in the novel. It felt like a high-brow romantic comedy, harsh as that sounds.