An enduring classic

A couple of years back, John Carey reviewed a new biography of Kingsley Amis and began with the question that people had been asking for years: why was he so horrible? Amis is regarded as one of a generation of fat philistines, drink-sodden and misanthropic, who made careers of bating Britain’s ‘Trots and leftist shags’. But he was not always so. John Metcalf, reviewing Lucky Jim for the Spectator in 1954, described it as ‘that rarest of rare good things: a very funny book’. ‘Dixon’, he wrote, ‘is completely believable, his predicaments and gaucheries are a part of him, and Mr Amis watches with wide-eyed objectivity’. Lucky Jim, Metcalf concluded, is ‘a very funny, very human novel’.
 
In Lucky Jim, Amis’ first novel, we can certainly see the nascent alcoholism as well as the misanthropy – not one of its characters comes out unscathed at the end. But it’s also a novel with a social and historical significance that should not be overlooked.