Here is a book about a man’s heroic refusal to be reconciled to his own life. I found it sort of revelatory. I guess we must live in a culture that really does heavily emphasize the power of positive thinking, because I realize it has been a really long time since I last heard someone unapologetically despising their own life. Somehow it was quite a relief.
This novel is about a junior university professor, Dixon, desperate to be retained at his university despite his total contempt for it. He chose medieval history as his subject thinking it would be a soft touch and now faces a lifetime giving lectures on ‘Merrie England.
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Here he is seeing a pretty girl with his boss’ son Bertrand:
The notion that women like this were never on view except as the property of men like Bertrand was so familiar to him that it had long since ceased to appear as an injustice
And here he is listening to that boss breathe too loudly:
Fury flared up in his mind like forgotten toast under a grill.
And here he is looking at some house plants:
. . . potted and tubbed palms of an almost macabre luxuriance.
His is a life just waiting to implode. What kicks it off is this Bertrand’s girlfriend, who he manages to get talking to at a dance. (Quick side point: watched enviously by another man, he reflects that “the possession of the signs of sexual privilege is the important thing, not the quality nor the enjoyment of them.” I found this hilarious. It’s what most people feel, I’m sure, but it’s few who will admit it).
He upsets his boss with this flirtation, then makes bad choices in terms of getting a bit too Merrie with the whiskey during one of his lectures. Eventually it all works out for him, better than he deserves, and it ends with the traditional mad dash to meet this girl at the train station and declare his love. This book being what it is, even this is infuriating. He has to take the bus, which goes very slowly, and no person who has frequently to take public transport can fail to sympathize with his mounting rage:
Dixon thought he really would have to run downstairs and knife the drivers of both vehicles; what next? what next? What actually would be next: a masked holdup, a smash, floods, a burst tyre, an electric storm with falling trees and meteorites, a diversion, a low-level attack by Communist aircraft, sheep, the driver stung by a hornet? He’d choose the last of these, if consulted. Hawking its gears, the bus crept on, while every few yards troupes of old men waited to make their quivering way aboard.
I had avoided Kingsley Amis for years, having once read and really disliked a book by his son Martin Amis. I’m sorry I put him off for so long, because I found this book both hilarious and strangely liberating
