Lucky Jim

by Kingsley Amis

A history lecturer at a not-too-prestigious British university, Jim Dixon, is compelled to please his superior, the amiable but tedious Professor Welch. He is invited to medieval musical revivals, meets Welch’s fatuous, bearded painter son Bertrand, and falls in love with the latter’s delightful girlfriend despite being bound by ties of guilt to a needy female Professor who recently attempted suicide.

It's a brilliantly comic novel, bursting with anger at the unfairness of Britain's Old School Tie system and peppered with some of the most viciously funny attacks on dreary academe ever written. Dixon’s ruminations on his thesis alone — "its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems" — encapsulates perfectly all my own feelings and experiences at attempting a life in the ivory towers. Dixon seethes with contempt for Welch's self-absorbed senility; Bertrand's beard, clothing and tone of voice; his own weakness at knuckling to those he needs; and Margaret, who keeps him in a sexless limbo of dependency. Brilliantly paced, graced with characters that range from the absurd to the pathetic, erudite without being pretentious, masterfully funny, and blessed with the happy ending that Ending Up (the only other Amis novel I've read) lacked. One of the greats. 

 five stars