Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis (1954)

Lucky Jim tracks the professional and romantic struggles of Jim Dixon, an academic, as he navigates the stuffy English social scene in the mid-1900s.

Jim is stuck in a world of subtle social queues and of a social anxiety that afflicts everyone just below the surface. All this of course is present even before Jim’s real problems arise. Jim soon finds himself grovelling for a job he doesn’t want, managing a relationship he doesn’t want and forced to socialise with people he doesn’t like. Per the local social rules though, this is what he must do, all with a stiff upper lip.

It’s this fake politeness that Lucky Jim attacks. As an aside his struggle to keep his job tackles the deterioration of the university system but the heart of the story is Jim learning to let go of his own insecurities as his falls into the arms of a new love. Despite his visceral initial feelings about Christine the two develop a relationship which gets Jim into trouble with his Boss, the higher class and even the wider community. As Jim falls deeper and deeper for Christine he is helpless to manage his behaviours the English way and increasingly spouts off how he really feels about those around him.

The book builds to Jim’s public lecture about Merrie England – where he spectacularly embarrasses himself and announces against the expectations of the crowd that the place never existed, in a way confronting the middle class academic crowd with the reality that their own social structures and politeness are nothing more than a shallow façade. However following the lecture despite being jobless and lacking any social cache, Jim is forced to go on – without any of the things he once thought important.

Of course to present all this tediousness much of the book read tediously. Although this is part of the commentary, it made Lucky Jim impossible to pick up for 10 pages at a time. However that would be to miss the point. Many of the characters focus in on small things, but Lucky Jim presents a bigger picture by allowing Jim’s own story to wrap up neatly. It showed that following society’s rules doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and breaking them doesn’t necessarily lead to destruction.