Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Published: 1954
My edition: Penguin Modern Classics
Pages: 276
I noticed this the other day in one of those Top Ten Funniest Books Ever list. And I also read an old review which said you shouldn't read it sitting on the bus because your howls of laughter would make people look at you funny.
Well.
This was Kingsley Amis's first novel, published in 1954 and set round about the beginning of that decade. It's a satire of academia and class, the tale of a rather reluctant medieval history lecturer, Jim Dixon, at a not!Oxford university in the midlands of England somewhere, where he struggles with what he (and Amis presumably) see as the intellectual pretensions of academics and their society. He has to keep in with the head of his department, the dozy Professor Welch, since he wants to pass his probationary year, and he is also approaching a deadline for the publication of his first piece of published scholarship. Add to that his on-off relationship with a needy colleague, Margaret, and his desire to live an altogether racier life than he does (with Christine, the girlfriend of Professor Welch's son) and you have all the ingredients for misadventure.
There are various quite memorable set pieces of a more or less farcical, wince-inducing nature, such as when Jim gets drunk at Professor Welch's and things go horribly wrong - think Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents - and the admittedly funny scene where he makes what we already suspect will be a doomed attempt to deliver a public lecture entitled "Merrie England":
"Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a boook-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet wirtten by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist."
You get the picture.
Jim's bad luck provides most of the humour, and as a character he's there to demonstrate that what happens to you in life is as much down to luck as it is to entitlement. Those characters representing entitlement and the establishment of course come off worst in the end. And indeed come in for quite a lot of authorial contempt. There have been various dramatisations of the book, and I can imagine the physical comedy would work really well on screen or stage. The two main problems for me were that I didn't warm to Jim Dixon himself - there's an arrogance about him despite his haplessness - and I really hated Amis's depiction of Margaret, a plain, and apparently therefore frigid woman who is characterised variously as manipulative and emotionally unhinged. There was something about Jim's wanting to have sex with her but actually being rather contemptuous of and repelled by her that just finally pissed me off.
Worth reading? Probably, for it's well written, there are some very good lines, and it's very much of its era, so instructive in that sense. I get the impression from others that if the style of humour catches your fancy it can be a really riotous read and I'm rather jealous I didn't have that. I found it much harder to get through than I was anticipating, mainly because of my reaction to Jim (who some find a wonderful hero). So in the end perhaps more ho hum than ha ha.
My edition: Penguin Modern Classics
Pages: 276
I noticed this the other day in one of those Top Ten Funniest Books Ever list. And I also read an old review which said you shouldn't read it sitting on the bus because your howls of laughter would make people look at you funny.
Well.
This was Kingsley Amis's first novel, published in 1954 and set round about the beginning of that decade. It's a satire of academia and class, the tale of a rather reluctant medieval history lecturer, Jim Dixon, at a not!Oxford university in the midlands of England somewhere, where he struggles with what he (and Amis presumably) see as the intellectual pretensions of academics and their society. He has to keep in with the head of his department, the dozy Professor Welch, since he wants to pass his probationary year, and he is also approaching a deadline for the publication of his first piece of published scholarship. Add to that his on-off relationship with a needy colleague, Margaret, and his desire to live an altogether racier life than he does (with Christine, the girlfriend of Professor Welch's son) and you have all the ingredients for misadventure.
There are various quite memorable set pieces of a more or less farcical, wince-inducing nature, such as when Jim gets drunk at Professor Welch's and things go horribly wrong - think Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents - and the admittedly funny scene where he makes what we already suspect will be a doomed attempt to deliver a public lecture entitled "Merrie England":
"Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a boook-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet wirtten by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist."
You get the picture.
Jim's bad luck provides most of the humour, and as a character he's there to demonstrate that what happens to you in life is as much down to luck as it is to entitlement. Those characters representing entitlement and the establishment of course come off worst in the end. And indeed come in for quite a lot of authorial contempt. There have been various dramatisations of the book, and I can imagine the physical comedy would work really well on screen or stage. The two main problems for me were that I didn't warm to Jim Dixon himself - there's an arrogance about him despite his haplessness - and I really hated Amis's depiction of Margaret, a plain, and apparently therefore frigid woman who is characterised variously as manipulative and emotionally unhinged. There was something about Jim's wanting to have sex with her but actually being rather contemptuous of and repelled by her that just finally pissed me off.
Worth reading? Probably, for it's well written, there are some very good lines, and it's very much of its era, so instructive in that sense. I get the impression from others that if the style of humour catches your fancy it can be a really riotous read and I'm rather jealous I didn't have that. I found it much harder to get through than I was anticipating, mainly because of my reaction to Jim (who some find a wonderful hero). So in the end perhaps more ho hum than ha ha.