Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
A Comic Novel by One of the "Angry Young Men"
Defiantly in favour of jazz, beer and pulling faces, the hero of "Lucky Jim" struggles through 1950s Britain in a rage at the pretension around him.
Kingsley Amis’ novel Lucky Jim is a modern British classic. Written and set in the early fifties, the title character Jim Dixon is a history lecturer at one of the modern provincial universities, who is frustrated by the academic banality of his job, and trapped in a suffocating pseudo-relationship with a woman he is completely uninterested in.
Though that summary would suggest otherwise, Lucky Jim is a very funny book. Amis continually plays upon the contrast between Jim’s need to present a respectable and polite front, and the loathing and contempt he seems to feel for just about everyone around him. He relieves his feelings by pulling bizarre and grotesque faces when he hopes no-one is looking, and indulging in fantasies of revenge. The plot eventually rewards Dixon with a new job and a lovely girlfriend, but only after he has been through a purgatory of embarrassing situations, personal disappointments, and emotional blackmail.
Dixon, though highly educated, is completely impatient with the “arty” tendencies of other characters, such as the painter Bertrand, and defiantly prefers popular jazz to “filthy Mozart” and madrigals. This led to the novel, and its author, being classed amongst the “angry young men” of the 1950s, whose most famous member was John Osborne, the playwright who wrote Look Back in Anger. There are also obvious comparisons to be drawn between Dixon’s attitudes, and those expressed in the poetry of Philip Larkin. Larkin and Amis were friends at university, and their voluminous correspondence reveals their shared love for jazz and beer, and their instinctive suspicion for “high culture”, as well as flashes of the stylistic brilliance which would emerge more fully in their writing.
Less comfortable for some readers is the way the book deals with female characters. The “angry young men” were a specifically male coterie, and the women in Lucky Jim seem to be either neurotic, passive or threatening; David Lodge comments on this aspect of the novel in his introduction to the current Penguin edition. The casual sexism in Dixon’s “realisation” that pretty girls are more fun to be around than plain girls may cause readers to wonder how Jim would rate his own charms, or indeed to condemn him out of hand. However, it is surely not necessary to agree with all the protagonists’ sentiments in order to enjoy the ferocious stylistic comedy, or to be fascinated by the novel’s setting in post-war Britain, which at times seems as far from us as the world of Jane Austen.
