His idea of hell is being trapped at his professor’s for a weekend of arty conversation and classical singing, which is exactly what happens in the first major event of the plot.

Fakery and philistinismĭixon is a robust, beer-loving, woman-fancying philistine. The novel follows a few weeks in his harassed life, as he struggles to manage relations with just about every other human being in sight – the colleagues who politely despise him, his unbearably vague and high-minded boss, Professor Welch, and Welch’s wife and equally insufferable son, bearded self-satisfied artist Bertrand, not to mention the neurotic mousey young woman, Margaret, he’s somehow found himself lumbered with.Īs soon as smug Bertrand enters the room accompanied by a trim, big-bosomed young woman named Christine, I suspected the ‘plot’ would be Jim and her falling in love and sure enough that’s what happens – but not without many ‘madcap’ incidents intervening along the way. He is a fraud, having chosen the Medieval module in his history degree at Leicester University simply because it was the easiest course, then finding himself nervously emphasising it in the interview for the current job, then quietly horrified to find himself appointed the Medieval History specialist, all the while knowing nothing and caring even less about the subject. James Dixon is a short, round-faced young history lecturer struggling with his first job in an unnamed redbrick college. It led Amis to be included in the crop of writers labelled with the catch-all journalistic phrase, ‘Angry Young Men’, coined a few years later in light of the fuss around John Osborne’s famous play. This is Kingsley Amis’s first novel, published in 1954 when he was 32 (b.1922 south London), the comedy classic which made his name, giving voice to a post-war generation dissatisfied with the pompous provincialism of English life and rebelling against its smug narrowness. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Why couldn’t every single one of them without exception whatsoever just go right away from where he was and leave him alone? (p.92)

Lucky jim novel