Review: Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

a review by Rich Horton

I'm trying to get some things I wrote for my previous blog back up, and I ran across this bit I wrote after my most recent rereading of Lucky Jim. It's not Amis' birthday or anything -- that's next month (and I have a lesser known Amis novel to write about then!)

Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite writers, and Lucky Jim (1954) of course is probably his most famous novel. It's also his first novel, which makes him one of those writers who spent their entire career trying to live up to early success. That annoys many writers -- most people like to think they are getting better as they go on. Amis showed signs of annoyance at the continued preeminence of Lucky Jim in the public eye, but not too badly. He kept writing to the end of his life, producing a novel every two or three years right up to his death. Indeed, while his first successors to Lucky Jim are widely regarded as much lesser works, especially his third novel, I Like It Here, beginning with his fourth novel (Take a Girl Like You (1960)) he produced several that at least rival Lucky Jim in quality. I'd mention as my personal favorites The Anti-Death League (1966), The Green Man (1969), Ending Up (1974), The Alteration (1976), and The Old Devils (1986). (Of these The Alteration is alternate history, The Anti-Death League a near-future story with mild SFnal content, Ending Up is set slightly in the future, and The Green Man is a ghost story.)

I was introduced to Amis in High School, oddly enough. My junior year English teacher really liked his work, and she assigned Lucky Jim in our English Literature class. At about the same time I noticed New Maps of Hell, his critical study of SF, and later that year The Alteration came out. Both those books convinced me he was well-disposed to SF, which sat well with my defensive teenaged self, so I decided to be well-disposed to him. I quite liked Lucky Jim when I read it for class, but in all honesty the only other Amis book I read for years was New Maps of Hell. A decade or more ago I picked up a copy of The Old Devils, his Booker winner, and I really loved it, so I started reading him with more discipline, and by now I've read most of his prose, though not quite all of it.

I think this is my third reading of Lucky Jim. It remains a very enjoyable book. It's the story of Jim Dixon, a history lecturer at a provincial English university shortly after the second world war. Jim is involved in an unsatisfactory relationship with a drippy fellow lecturer called Margaret Peel, who uses emotional blackmail such as implicit suicide attempts (she took sleeping pills after breaking with her previous boyfriend) to keep him on the string. He hates his job, and he hates his boss (Professor Welch) if anything even more, while worrying that he won't be retained for the next school year. He hates phoniness in general, particularly that represented by Professor Welch, who is into recreations of old English music (recorders and all).

The plot revolves mainly around Dixon's growing attraction to Christine Callaghan, a beautiful girl who is nominally Professor Welch's son Bertrand's girlfriend -- but Bertrand is also fooling around with a married woman, and he's a crummy artist to boot. Also, Dixon is working on a lecture about Merrie Olde Englande, which he hopes will impress Professor Welch enough that he can keep his job, but every sentence of which he hates. The resolution is predictable, if rather convenient for Dixon (involving a rich uncle of Christine's), but it satisfies. The book itself is really very funny.

But -- one thing I noticed particularly on this reading. Which is -- yes, the people around Jim Dixon are mostly evil little shits, just as he thinks, but he's a little shit himself. Some of the things he does are intolerably mean, petty, or harmful. Burning holes in the Welch's sheets while drunkenly smoking a cigarette is one thing; but such stunts as stealing a colleague's insurance policies and burning them just seem, well, felonious. And of course Margaret Peel really is someone he's better off breaking up with, but the way Christine is presented as naturally good because she is beautiful and has big breasts does seem rather sexist (to say the least.)