Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

Toby Frost

Lucky Jim is bloody funny. It also happens to be a great work of art.

It's about James Dixon, a not-very-good lecturer in a second rate uni, in 1950s England. Jim wants to make a living, drink beer and date attractive girls. His "betters" want to bore him rigid, shove culture down his neck and tell him how lucky he is, and that's where the comedy begins, as Jim struggles to win the favour of his boss, avoid the half-mad woman who thinks she's his girlfriend, and somehow hang on to his job.

But let us leave aside the more lowbrow moments of the book for now - the scene where Jim nearly sets his boss's bed on fire; the laughably inept punch-up between Jim and his nemesis, pretentious, right-wing artiste Bernard; even Jim's whisky-fuelled lecture that turns into a ranting attack on his own employers, who are seated directly in front of him - and turn to the artistic merit and iconic status of the book.

Lucky Jim is a bellow of protest against the cultural elite: against pseuds and self-proclaimed experts everywhere. People like Jim came out of the war hoping for opportunity, and finding that the New Jerusalem they'd been promised was more prefab than fabulous, and felt cheated. Lucky Jim is an expression of that sense of being robbed, of a generation that wanted to get on being held back by people who demanded respect without giving reasons. How right they were is a matter for the reader to decide.

Fans of children's art, Merrie England (whatever that is) and close-harmony folk singing will find this book challenging. It's certainly not a hymn to elitist art. Somerset Maugham called people like Jim "malicious and envious...scum". Is the novel the work of a philistine? Is it misogynistic, as has been claimed? Does it get cheap laughs from the mentally unstable? Is Jim a tactless, drunken fool?

But it's not just a period piece, and there's more to Jim than another Angry Young Man. Everyone has met someone like Welsh, or Bernard, and felt the urge to pull faces behind their back, or thrust them feet-first down the toilet, just like Jim. Everyone remembers a boss who managed to combine tyranny with incompetence, and in that respect it's a relevant now as it was fifty years ago.

But enough historical relevance and psychological insight. Can anyone resist the idea of studying a novel that includes the following description of a hangover?

"The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again... His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

I can't. Vote Lucky Jim.