Jim, Jake and the Years Between

Abstract

Kingsley Amis’s thirteenth novel, Jake’s Thing, appeared by a convenient symmetry almost exactly twenty-five years after the publication of Lucky Jim, the first novel that shot him to immediate fame and itself to cult status.¹ That fact, seemingly at first of no more than passing interest — the kind of interest possessed by the unsettling photograph of a jowled, late-middle-aged face staring from the dustjacket of Jake’s Thing — becomes on closer examination worth attention. Lucky Jim was unequivocally a young man’s book, its ultimately affirmative disrespect calculated, and still able, to fill an undergraduate audience with a surprisingly creative joy.² Jak’s Thing, by painful contrast, proclaims in every embittered chapter that a glory has passed away from the earth, or at least the English bit of it. It probably went for Amis some time between Suez and Vietnam, and we have long since grown accustomed to the inevitable but inaccurate view of him as the angry socialist young man who became the petulant Tory old one — ‘a difficult old sod’ as a recent interviewer, smarting from a harrowing lunch, proclaimed him.³ The tenor of Jake’s Thing, then, surprises no one. But the extent of its similarities to Lucky Jim, the strong feeling that in Jake Richardson goes, but for the grace of Gore-Urquhart and Christine, Jim Dixon, is. of considerably more than nugatory interest. In situation and rhetoric the two novels have many links; in mood and resolution they could not be more different.