Amis has clearly had experience in this academic world and every character is sketched with a scabrous hilarity as their artifice and pretentions are unsparingly skewered.

He has found himself doing a job I which he has no real interest and forced into the social orbit of the Welches, who he loathes. Much of the humour of Lucky Jim comes from Jim’s haphazard attempts to do what he needs to do to hang on to things he doesn’t really like. He spends too much time at the pub, when he should be working on his lectures, he gets off on the wrong foot with Welsh’s son Bertrand and he is extricated in a romantic relationship with Margaret, a fragile and needy woman who is adept at emotional blackmail and just happens to be convalescing with the Welsh’s following a suicide attempt. In all of these endeavours, Jim is failing miserably. To this end, he is trying to get an article published in a new history journal, is cajoling students to sign up to the new course he has yet to devise and is attempting to keep Welsh and his family sweet on a personal level. When the novel opens, Jim’s primary concern is convincing his head of department Professor Welsh, not to end his contract at the end of term. Jim is an amiable and flippant protagonist and Amis guides the reader through a rogue’s gallery of lecturers, fraudulent arty types and academic bores as Jim ties to hold on to his university position and straighten out his love-life, preferably with as little effort as possible.ĭoing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.

Lucky jim novelist