Review: Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

I found a fairly pristine copy of Lucky Jim sitting unassumingly in the corner of an excellent little Italian restaurant in the place I am now fortunate enough to call home. The owner encouraged me to have a look at what I realised was a local book exchange; a multi-cultural mixture of Spanish, Catalan, German and English language books from all eras and for all tastes.

Like many others on here, what drew me to reading Kingsley Amis was the reputation that preceded him. The cover boasts his credentials as 'the finest comic writer of the twentieth century', and he gets plaudits from kinds of people you wish you could have met at a drinks reception in their prime, waxing eloquent, e.g. the acerbically witty Christopher Hitchens.

Is it all that good? Well, no. It doesn't quite hold up; age has not been kind to Amis's style of humour which mostly revolves around relentless misanthropy which, at times, barely conceals a whole host of other prejudices, not least a brash male chauvinism. There are moments in here to make a millennial snowflake like me wince and think 'Oh God, you can't say that!' Despite myself, there are sometimes moments when saying the unsayable, and writing the unwritable, are bold departures transgressing the cultural mores of the day to prove a satirical point. Alas, and alack they are few and far between in here. To tell you the truth, I found large portions of this short novel a bit of a slog and I was crawling at a snail's pace by the final chapters, eagerly determined to finish.

HOWEVER... When the comedy really lights up, Amis did have me laughing out loud. The very concept is something I could actually relate to: a young teacher (Jim Dixon) who's ended up in a university lecturing on something he isn't really that passionate about, and trying to suck up to his superiors to keep his job. So very British, and delighfully passive-aggressive from the get-go. The whole section when Dixon has been invited to sing in 'the madrigals' at his Head of Department's house is genuinely hysterical. Amis has a deliciously acute way of pinpointing and ridiculing the tedious pretension of these 'intellectual' characters he so clearly despises. They're snobby, smug, and rely on Britain's entrenched class system to maintain their sense of entitled superiority.

The humour is most definitely angry young man, but it's also silly and irreverent in just the right measure. At times, the writing reminded me of my grandpa's wry wit which could wither any airs and graces with mere tone of voice and slightly cocked eyebrow. It's a gift.

This is not the funniest book I've ever read, not even close. The story is a bit boring, and I had to struggle to stay engaged for the most part. However, Amis has still got it, in small measures, all these years later and his influence in the long canon of irreverent British humour is palpable. There was something a bit Mark Corrigan from Peep Show about Dixon, with all the cynical internal dialogue and flimsy social persona.

Credit where credit is due: a commitment to sarcasm this relentless is almost heroic in its own right.