♣ Lucky Jim
Monday 23 April 2007
What first attracted me to Lucky Jim was not only it's reputation as one of the first Campus Novels, but also because of it's legendary humour. From the back of my edition (Penguin Classics) I can see that Helen Dunmore of The Times liked it enough to call it, 'a flawless comic novel.'
Well, flawless it isn't, but nonetheless, it was an exceptional read, albeit a slightly dated one. The story follows the eponymous Jim Dixon, a temporary Medieval History lecturer at an unnamed provincial university (though there are hints that it may be Leiscester.) After a number of undisclosed 'incidents' within the department, Jim recognises his likely dismissal at the end of the year. As such, much of his time is spent pursuing a publisher for his paper, 'The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 - 1485,' and trying to please his eccentric old-guard mentor, Professor Welsch. Increasingly however, Jim finds it hard to cope with the pretention he sees in the cliques of the University, suffering untold misery at a university ball, and sheer horror at the frankly wierd social he finds himself thrust into at a weekend away at Mr. Welsch's house. Here, trying to cope with the high society of rural England, he copes with choral recitals and the Welsch family. Perhaps symbolic of the people Jim finds himself cast against is Bertrand Welsch, the bohemian-styled, yet conservatively-minded painter; son of Professor Welsch. In trying to avoid blending into the pompous social circles of the decaying intellegentsia, Jim troops onwards and symbolically manages to nab Bertrand's girlfriend from him.
Within this framework is a quite powerful focus on relationships, both friendship and more sensual in tone. Dealing very much with the power plays of colleagues, friends and lovers, the book develops charachters (notably the neurotic Margaret) that can seem all too familiar.
Despite the archaisms in the courting, the book for me stands up best in it's observation, and in it's accuracy. On a precursory page to the main text an old song is written, 'Oh lucky Jim, how I envy him.' This is quite apt, because Lucky Jim represents the common man. He's rarely referred to by anything other than his last name, disassociating him from any corporeal indentity and emphasising his everyman quality, but most importantly, it's his attitude to the dire lifestyle he must endure, quite outside his comfort zone that will raises so many chuckles of recognition from readers.
What then of the humour? That is, afterall, what this book is supposedly famous for. Jim is in the habit of making absurd faces throughout the book whenever something demands his paticular displeasure, my personal favourite the, 'Sex Life in Ancient Roman face.' It's also in Jim's designs to violently attack those who annoy him, and hyperbolically relate the smallest frustrations into the most epic of problems. At one point Jim wakes up at the Welsch's house after their weekend get-together to find that whilst drunk (he has a habit of turning to alcohol for escapsim) he burn the sheets of his bed with a cigarette. In a fit of hysteria, brought on by fear and desperation, he decides the best course of action would be to cut the holes out. Then realising his fatal error, that the holes no longer look natural, but part of some pre-ordained attack on bedlinens, he further rips them apart with a pair of scissors. It really is funny stuff, and something I continually enjoy is how many of the comedic situations are referred to repeatedly in the book. It allows for the physical comedy to be restored, but also savoured in a very different way. We find ourselves moving from the pure belly laugh of slapstick to a guilty, dramatic-irony laden chuckle we get everytime Mrs. Welsch starts to ask pressing questions about her bed sheets.
To give you a flavour, here is a snippet from one of my favourite passages where Jim is desperate to reach the train station in order to meet his object of desire. With time ticking slowly away, frustration leads Jim into insane ramblings:
Just then the bus rounded a corner and slowed abrubtly, then stopped. Making a lot of noise, a farm tractor was laboriously pulling, at right angles across the road, something that looked like the springs of a giant's bed...Dixon thought he really would have torun downstairs and knife the drivers of both vehicles; what next? what next? What actually would be next: a masked hold-up, a smash, floods, a burst tyre, an electric storm with falling trees and meteorites, a diversion, a low-level attack by Communist aircraft...?
As the traffic thickened slightly towards the town, the driver added to his hypertrophied caution a psychopathic devotion to the interests of other road-users; the sight of anything between a removal val and a junior bicycle halved his speed to four miles an hour and sent his hand, Dixon guessed, flapping in a slow-motion St Vitus' dance of beckonings and wavings-on.
He never airs these feelings however, until his lecture on Merrie England' and I for one certainly can relate to the kind of high drama and comic basis Jim lend his everyday life.
A quick mention should also be given to the pace of the book. In short, it's done extremely well. Torturous scenes and dialogue really do bring that same feeling to the reader with their slow, innane structure, and scenes of a faster nature, paticualrly those scenes where Jim takes the charge with people can move at a staggering rate. The scenes of Jim's drunkeness are the best-wrought however; they impart that slow-moving feeling we all know, coupled with the horrific realisation that there is nothing you can do but wait to see how your own actions will pan out. The device of cigarettes is also used to measure out periods of time, always bringing us back into the monotony of Jim's life, refusing to let us go with Jim on flights of fancy. Jim claims that he cannot afford more than a strict ration of cigarettes a day, and so any whims he might care to pursue are brought back down by the pragmatism of Jim's habit. (Oddly, it seems everyone in the novel smokes.)
As noted, there are a number of archaisms in the text, but these are easily looked over. Those looking for a novel dealing with the nuances of courtship might well be pleased however, there is more than enough depth to charachters dynamics to confront readers. I do wish however that, as honest as the text is, the ending had not been quite so flagrantly optimistic. With respect to spoilers I shan't go into anything, but I did think the conclusion a tad arbitrary, and not really in keeping with the tone of the rest of the book.
Overall however, this is a great read. The subtlety and the strength of the observational humour inside astounds, and yet, being of a very frank, and in some places, dark tone, does not overwhelm. Charachters are well-realised and easily-recognised, and the book as a whole deserves all the praise it gets.
Tintin Verdict? Four Tintin's of Fury
Labels: books
posted by danny @ 02:32,
