Kingsley Amis: An Appreciation

Abstract

Kingsley Amis, after Graham Greene, is my favourite living novelist. I remember very well the great excitement and joy when I first read Lucky Jim in 1954. It seems to me that I hadn’t read anything as good as this, as sharp, funny and brilliantly written, since I came upon Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall in the House library at Wellington, age 16. And those who liked this one were not disappointed. That Uncertain Feeling, which followed in 1955, was as good, or almost as good, in the same kind of way that a second helping of raspberries (if you like raspberries) is as good or nearly as good as the first helping.