A hilarious satire about college life and high-class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.
This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh.
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"Amis' characters shone brilliantly in this comic tale, although to describe it as comic could do the novel a large disservice as it does contain some emotionally well thought out moments. The characters definitely drive what is a fairly simple plot, even the bit part players such as Michie (Jim's frustratingly keen student) are brilliantly captured. Jim as the protagonist can make you want to tear your hair out as he bounds with hapless abandon into another display of buffoonery, but despite his idiocy you feel a sense of kinship for him as he finds himself at the mercy of the bureaucratic and intensely boring Mr Welch his egotistical son, and the hysterical presence of Margaret Definitely worth a read."
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Springheelednic (4 out of 5 stars)