Stories by Miller, Jones, Schmitz and Godwin from Spectrum 5

Back in the middle of July I purchased a copy of Kinglsey Amis and Robert Conquest's Spectrum 5, a 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories; my copy of a 1968 edition has an irresistibly beautiful cover painting by Paul Lehr.

In their introduction, Amis and Conquest defend science fiction from the haters.  After making an appeal to authority (reminding us that C. S. Lewis, Angus Wilson, and William Golding are all SF fans) they get to some more serious literary analysis.  Novelist and James Bond fanatic Amis and poet and Sovietologist Conquest argue that while a good writing style would be nice (they suggest J. G. Ballard and Algis Budrys as examples of SF writers with a good style) it is not essential in SF, as what makes SF what it is is mythic themes (they present Jules Verne as an example here) or ideas (for this they offer the example of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There," an SF story with "a brilliantly engineered main problem" resolved by an "unexpected but logical solution.")  As for the development of character, another virtue supposedly absent in SF, Amis and Conquest follow the line of Edmund Crispin, who noted that science fiction is about the relationship of humanity to some novel "thing," an invention or alien or cataclysm or whatever.  The character in such a story need not, maybe even should not, be too unusual or complex, because he represents all of mankind, acts as a sort of everyman.  Amis and Conquest's examples here include, again, Verne, as well as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the narrator of which represents an ordinary Englishman.

I don't know to what extent I agree with everything Amis and Conquest have to say, but it is a thought-provoking little essay that makes me want to see the essays at the start of the other Spectrum volumes.

Let's read four stories from Spectrum 5 by writers we have already discussed at least a little here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond F. Jones, James H. Schmitz, and Tom Godwin.  All four of these stories appeared in Astounding, which was sort of the flagship for SF that was about science and ideas and didn't necessarily focus on heroic or horrific adventures or prioritize literary style.

"Crucifixius Etiam" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.  (1953)

I loved Miller's 1954 story "I Made You," and liked his 1955 "The Triflin' Man" so I have high hopes for this one!

It is the year 2134, and Peruvian Manue Nanti wants to travel the world and see the sights: Notre Dame, New York skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt, the radioactive craters of Russia.  But he needs money to do so.  Solution: signing a five-year contract for a lucrative job on Mars!

On Mars Nanti works as a laborer, swinging a pick!  To breathe the thin air of Mars, laborers like Nanti have artificial lung machines implanted into their bodies.  The risk of using such a machine is that your body will likely forget how to breathe naturally, and your natural lungs will atrophy, and you won't be able to live without the uncomfortable machine, even back on oxygen-rich Earth.  (The engineers have better machines and better working and living conditions and don't run this risk as severely.)

Life for Nanti on Mars is a nightmare--no women, no friends (everybody on Mars is a jerk), the work is exhausting (there is a vague and not really convincing explanation for why they use picks and shovels instead of bulldozers and backhoes on Mars) and the lung machine is like a torture device, the valves pulling painfully at the skin in which they are embedded every time you move or try to breathe naturally.

For most of its 21 pages "Crucifixius Etiam" reads like one of those stories in which the space program is a foolish waste of time and humans aren't fit to live off of Earth--beyond Earth, Earthmen lose their culture, religion, morality, etc.  This is Barry Malzberg territory, and demonstrates that 1) Malzberg is not quite as innovative as he is sometimes considered, 2) pre-New Wave SF and Astounding in particular are not quite so technophilic and optimistic as sometimes considered!  It is also one of those stories in which the government and bourgeoisie abuse the working classes (represented by non-whites like Nanti) and major government and industrial projects, like terraforming Mars, don't have a legitimate goal, but are a scam that serve, as one character in "Crucifixius Etiam" puts it, as "an outlet for surplus energies, manpower, money....if the Project folded, surplus would pile up--[causing a] big depression on Earth."

The ending of Miller's story could be considered a twist--a hopeful and life-affirming twist!  When it is explained to Nanti that he and the other people stuck on the Hell that is Mars are building the first of 300 derricks and associated processing machines that will draw up subterranean frozen "tritium" and convert it to helium and oxygen so that in 800 years Mars will have an Earth-like atmosphere, he accepts his fate and believes his sacrifice is worthwhile.  Nanti sudffers now so that people in eight centuries can live on a beautiful healthy world!  Miller doesn't come right out and say it, but I believe we are meant to see Nanti and his comrades as like Christ, sacrificing themselves for others, and like Moses, unable to enter the promised land to which they are leading humanity; Miller includes priests and rabbis as minor characters, nudging you, I believe, to make this interpretation.

Not bad--Miller's style is good and all the economic, religious, and technological stuff, whether or not any of it is really believable, is interesting and serves a human story.  Anthologists Judith Merrill and Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty would see merit in "Crucifixius Etiam" and reprint the story (in Human? and their The Best Science Fiction Stories series, respectively) in 1954, over a decade before Amis and Conquest did.

"Noise Level" by Raymond F. Jones (1952)

I really enjoyed Jones's novel about disembodied brains, artificial life, and the perils of socialism, 1962's The Cybernetic Brains, so I am also looking forward to this one!

It is the Cold War.  A bunch of physicists are gathered together by the U.S. government under conditions of strict security to watch a film.  The film depicts a twenty-something demonstrating to government officials his anti-gravity device, a thing like a backpack that lets you levitate and fly around!  But during the demonstration the device explodes, killing the young inventor!  The assembled eggheads are told the young inventor was a paranoid with no friends who left no notes or blueprints describing his amazing invention, and they have been summoned to work on the top secret project of studying the wreckage and this genius misfit's library and lab with the goal of rediscovering the secret of anti-grav!

"Noise Level" is a smooth and pleasant read, though some may say it is too long (like 45 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5) and doesn't amount to much: it consists mostly of conversations and throws around concepts like Einstein's postulate of equivalence and metaphors involving whirlpools and signal to noise ratios.  The point of the story is that people get too set in their ways to be able to think outside the box and that being more open-minded is the path to making major breakthroughs.

All the physicists, before seeing that film, thought that anti-grav was impossible.  Some of them maintain that anti-grav is impossible and that the film is a hoax.  But seeing the film convinces some of them that anti-grav is possible--they get to work on the problem and in a few weeks have a working prototype of an anti-grav vehicle that weighs one hundred tons.  The twist of the story is that the film and wreckage and lab are all a government trick, just special effects and props designed to get the country's best physicists to abandon their preconceptions and free their minds so they can develop a technology that will allow us to explore the universe and give us a leg up on the commies.  The sense of wonder ending is the revelation that all the things we think are impossible are in fact possible if we can first convince ourselves that they are possible, which will free our minds and give us a chance, through hard work of course, to make them a reality.

This story is alright, and it has many of the hallmarks of classic golden age SF: a bunch of scientists, a paradigm shift and a sensawunda ending, and the use of trickery and manipulation by an elite group on an inferior group for their own good.  I can't help but find the lionization of elite trickery of the masses, which we see so often in classic SF (Asimov's Foundation stories and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are my go-to examples) kind of sick and twisted, but at least this time the victims are a themselves a bunch of geniuses.

"Noise Level" was included in two anthologies published before Spectrum 5, one by William Sloane and one by Edmund Crispin, and was also selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss for a 1973 anthology of Astounding material.

"Grandpa" by James H. Schmitz (1955)

I enjoyed Schmitz's 1943 horror tale "Greenface" and his collection of stories about female psychic space cops who manipulate people (or just shoot them, you know, whatever works), Agent of Vega, so I've got no qualms about reading this one.

Cord is a fifteen-year-old boy, a member of the two-thousand strong team preparing planet Sutang for colonization.  Schmitz stories usually portray women in positions of authority, and as the story begins a seventeen-year-old girl is warning Cord that he had better start behaving or the Regent, the head woman in charge of the colony, will have him sent back to his home planet in disgrace.  Don't think that Cord has been smoking crack and playing dice while neglecting his duties, dear reader--Cord is a junior biologist and when he is supposed to be following orders he has been capturing native fauna and studying them in his unauthorized private zoo.  Cord is from planet Vanadia, a world settled relatively recently by humans, and he isn't as enamored of rules and regulations as the Terrans who make up the vast majority of the team's members.  (I thought maybe Schmitz here was trying to remind us of how British people sometimes see Americans and Australians as unruly uncouth cowboys.) 

One of Cord's jobs, apparently, is as a driver, so when the Regent comes by to make an inspection of the Colonial Team's work, Cord drives the vehicles she rides around the colony.  One of these "vehicles" is a native animal, a thing like a giant lily pad, 25 to 50 feet across, with all kinds of tendrils and paddles underwater; people can climb aboard this creature, which the humans call "a raft," and direct its movement.  (All you animal rights activists will be booking flights to Sutang when I tell you that the way one directs a raft is by shooting it with a heat ray pistol--don't get your granola in a bunch, treehuggers, the heat ray is--well, usually--set on low power!)

A dangerous situation arises related to the larger than average raft Cord and the Regent's party are riding (this raft has been christened "Grandpa") and it is Cord who saves the day using his knowledge of biology and his powers of observation and quick-thinking and quick-stabbing.

The real star of this story is the ecology of Sutang--Schmitz does a great job of coming up with and describing interesting alien life forms.  The character of Cord, the slightly subversive teen-aged boy, is fun (he hopes that a disaster will occur so he can be a hero and save his position on Sutang.)  A good story.

"Grandpa" has been anthologized many times, in books edited by Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Martin. H. Greenberg, Gardner Dozois, and still more. A well-regarded classic with something for everybody--alien monsters, the glorification of science and the colonization of the galaxy, people shooting off guns and stabbing enemies with knives, and women who tell you what to do for your own good whom the author doesn't portray as nags but as people we are supposed to admire.

"Mother of Invention" by Tom Godwin (1953)

So far, the stories I have read from Spectrum 5 have been stories that have been widely anthologized, stories that editors and/or readers have been crazy about.  But "Mother of Invention" has only been anthologized by Amis and Conquest, though it has also appeared in the Croat magazine Sirius in 1976 and a Baen collection of Godwin's work with a preface and an afterword by our hero Barry Malzberg.  Maybe this one is weak, or maybe Amis and Conquest have found an overlooked gem?  (It is also possible that this story's length, like 60 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5, has discouraged reprinting.)  Well, let's find out what is up with this one.

"Mother of Invention" starts with a sort of comedy scene, in which a concatenation of factors--including a nagging wife!--leads to a mistake by a technician engaged in inspecting a space ship's "nuclear converter."  This mistake, compounded with additional bad luck, leads to the five men who own the ship being marooned on a virgin planet they discover 30,000 light years away from civilization.

Aurora, the name they give this new world, has a very high percentage of carbon in its make up, and there are diamonds as big as your fist all over the ground and diamond dust in the air which plays havoc with the men's equipment as they search for the uranium and cadmium they need to repair their wrecked space ship. They are under a lot of time pressure, because in seven or eight months a star passing through this system (they erroneously thought this was a binary system--doh!) is going to annihilate Aurora.

Unable to find any uranium, and with their mining equipment ruined by the diamond dust anyway, the five adventurers decide to invent an anti-grav device.  Through dogged persistence, and by keeping their minds open, they accomplish in the wilderness what people in well-appointed labs back on Earth were never able to.  Then, like in an Edmond Hamilton story, they move Aurora itself away from the impending stellar collision and ride the planet back home.

Back in 2014 I read Godwin's novel The Survivors, AKA Space Prison.  As here in "Mother of Invention," in The Survivors a bunch of people find themselves on a barren planet but through hard work not only escape but trigger a paradigm shift and usher in a new period of human history.  "The Mother of Invention" is also like The Survivors in that it is quite bland.  The five explorers in "The Mother of Invention" lack personality, motivation and relationships--there is more human drama and characterization in the jocular little prologue than the main story.  (Maybe Amis and Conquest chose it specifically to prove their point about SF not needing characterization?)  After Schmitz's vivid and fascinating Sutang, Godwin's Aurora is woefully dull.  I gave The Survivors a marginal negative vote, but I'll say "Mother of Invention" is barely acceptable.  Like Jones's anti-grav story, it is very much a classic SF tale about male scientists who, in response to an external impetus, invent a technology that will revolutionize human life, but Jones injects more surprise, fun, and human feeling into his story.

**********

The first US edition of Spectrum 5 has a
wacky collage cover--I think Joachim Boaz
loves this kind of thing!

Godwin's piece is pretty marginal, but these four stories are all worthwhile reads, good examples of SF that glorifies science and technology and tells you that it totally makes sense to take terrible risks and make huge sacrifices to expand the power and reach of the human race.

Spectrum 5 includes eight stories; in our next episode I'll read the four stories in it by SF writers I don't think are quite as famous as Walter A Canticle for Liebowitz Miller, Raymond This Island Earth Jones, James Witches of Karres Schmitz and Tom "The Cold Equations" Godwin.

Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis

"A nice man would have tried to make a girl feel it had been worth while, however tired and pissed he was.  No that's not fair, a man who sees more in women than creatures to go to bed with, a man who doesn't only want one thing.  So you see I've rather come around to Brenda's way of thinking."   

This week I tackled another Kinglsey Amis novel, 1978's Jake's Thing.  Living in the suburbs and lacking access to a university, there was no hope of finding in any library within easy reach any books by Kinglsey Amis beyond Lucky Jim, so I read the scan of a Penguin paperback edition of Jake's Thing available at the internet archive.

Jaques Cecil Richardson is a fifty-nine-year-old college professor--an Oxford don, no less--living in London with his third wife, the quite fat Brenda.  When he was younger, Jake (as everybody calls him) was very sexually active--he claims to have "been in bed with well over one hundred women" and has cheated on Brenda quite often.  But the last year or so he has suffered what the doctors categorize as a decline in libido.  "I don't fancy anyone, not even girls I can see are very attractive," Jake explains to the shrink his GP sends him to.

Jake's Thing is in part about how the passage of time wreaks changes, changes which may well not be welcome.  Starting with the very first chapter there are many scenes of the Jake walking and riding around London and Oxford, and Amis presents all manner of details pointing out how England has changed, and continues to change, and how Jake resents and to some extent has resisted such changes.  Jake's house is an early example.  It is one of a long row of brick homes put up a century ago which are now in demand and more expensive than Jake could afford to pay today.  All of the houses on the street have had their front gardens or facades altered for cosmetic or practical reasons, but Jake has refused to change a thing about the front of his own domicile.

Much of the novel is taken up with the odd methods of diagnosis and treatment prescribed by Jake's shrink.  Our hero is to "study" pornographic magazines, to write his own pornography (like so many college professors, Jake turns out to be an atrocious, or maybe just extremely lazy, writer), to attach a device to his penis that measures his nocturnal erections, among other things.  There are group therapy sessions; the patients in attendance have all manner of psychological problems--one man is a kleptomaniac, one woman suffers crippling shyness, etc.

In one scene that I suspect was deliberately constructed to remind readers of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Jake sits in an operating theatre with a machine connected to his member and is shown different images of women; over a dozen people, doctors and medical students, watch the experiment, the object of which is to determine Jake's sexual tastes.  Between pictures, to make sure Jake has returned to a state of zero arousal, Jake is instructed to read aloud long paragraphs from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty; Amis reproduces these paragraphs, which cover such topics as the value of free speech and individual autonomy, and the dangers of increased government power.  Presumably this is a hint that scientists and medical people in 1970s Britain think that the freedom of the individual is hogwash or that the very idea is alien to them.  In conversation Jake finds his shrink to be woefully ignorant of history and culture--to these men of science the things held dear by Jake, a specialist on classical Mediterranean civilization who translates Martial for fun, are beneath notice.

Jake spends about 10% of the year (he calculates) living up at Oxford, and we see him at his college, Comyns.  Comyns is one of the few colleges at Oxford that does not yet admit women students, and Jake is physically harassed by feminist protesters on his way to his office; when he opens his mail he finds what you might call anti-male hate mail.  In the next few scenes after the mail opening scene Jake has a conference with a lazy and incompetent female student and then hangs around with other Oxford profs--they decry the ignorance of their women students and all the zany feminist ideas they profess.

About halfway through the novel Brenda starts attending some of Jake's meetings with his psychologist, and Jake is shaken when she says that "she had had no pleasure or other benefit out of her marriage for a not very small number of years and only acquiesced in its continuance out of habit, laziness and dislike of upsets, and, in particular, that she considered her husband to be at best indifferent to all women except as sexual pabulum."  Then the head of Comyns College, who is planning on having a sort of hearing on whether Comyns should start admitting women, asks Jake to assemble and present at the hearing the case for admitting women.

Winston Smith at the end of 1984 and Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange have changes of heart, and there is a scene in Lolita in which Humbert Humbert admits he stole Lo's childhood.  I began to wonder if Jake, prodded by his long-suffering wife and his task of examining the benefits of admitting women to the college, would in similar wise become a more affectionate husband and begin to see women as more than sex objects.

As the final third of the novel of 277 pages begins, it is the day of the hearing and Jake wakes up with a terrible hangover in the bed of a member of the university administrative staff, having gotten drunk and cheated on Brenda again.   His bedmate of the night before tells him that he wasn't at all sweet or considerate after their lovemaking--he really does treat women as mere sex objects!  Jake hurries off to his office to prepare his presentation of the case for admitting women to Comyns, which of course he has not even started work on.  The case he presents is simply that admission of women will soon be inevitable and there is no point in resisting, and when directly asked if he thinks women are equal to men, Jake unleashes an impassioned description of how women will ruin the college:

"...there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument.  They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end for the search for truth, which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about."     

Jake does not reform!  At least, he does not develop a greater appreciation for or sensitivity towards women.  He does change his attitude about psychology, going from deep skepticism accompanied  by a willingness to give it a shot at the start of the book to abject hostility and refusal to even consider it by the end--after one of the patients who regularly attends the group therapy sessions tries to commit suicide Jake gives the medical professionals a tongue lashing, telling them their methods not only fail to resolve people's problems but make them worse and that their whole industry is a scam.  Brenda, who has been taking the therapy seriously and who, in an effort to become more attractive to Jake, "had lost something like two and a half stone and could no longer be called fat" leaves Jake for one of the many minor characters who fill the novel and about whom I will not be talking.  (I looked it up and can report that 2.5 stone is 35 pounds.)

On the last page of Jake's Thing, months after abandoning psychotherapy and being abandoned by his no-longer-fat third wife, the protagonist's GP tells Jake that it is likely his lowered libido is not psychological at all, but the result of a hormonal imbalance that can be treated with drugs.  Would Jake like to try this simple remedy?  Jake considers how much trouble women are and says "No thanks."

Many of the compliments and criticisms I had for Lucky Jim, Amis's 1954 novel which I read just recently, are equally applicable to this 1978 novel.  Jake's Thing is good, but it is just an ordinary novel, unless you think the constant unsexy talk of sex or the rank hostility to psychotherapy and women is extraordinary, and perhaps it would be for some people, especially in 1978, before Dr. Ruth and Howard Stern and Dr. Drew hot the airwaves.  The jokes are not bad, but they are not uproariously funny, either.  The novel feels a little slow, and the group therapy session, which takes up two chapters, really drags.  The whole thing is understated and lacks excitement and passion--the best part of the novel is Jake's harangue, quoted from above, about how women can't discuss abstract intellectual ideas and take personally any disagreement and so fill up time by telling pointless quotidian stories; this speech gets a rise out of the reader by making a controversial case with some spirit.  The exciting parts of Jake's Thing, like the ferocious attacks on women and on psychotherapy, are like islands in the novel's broad sea of interesting but bland text.

Like Jim, Jake is selfish and not terribly sympathetic.  (The most sympathetic character in Jake's Thing is Brenda, who really tries to make her marriage work but whom Jake is not willing to meet halfway.)  Where Jake's Thing is superior to Lucky Jim is in how Amis doesn't try to pawn off on us an inexplicable and bogus happy ending--Jake and Brenda act in a way that makes sense and they get their just deserts.   

Also on the good side, I enjoyed the various references, some learned, like talk of T. S. Eliot and the Greek Anthology (I love my Penguin edition of selections from the Greek Anthology edited by Peter Jay) and Thunderball, the 1965 James Bond movie that features a surfeit of underwater action.

Another noteworthy facet of the novel is Amis's depiction of London as a multicultural, international city.  As the most prominent members of Monty Python and The Smiths have been eager to tell us, there are very few English people left in London, and Amis as far back as the Seventies stresses how London is full of foreigners, with "Americans, Germans, Spaniards," and "black, brown or yellow" people taking up all the taxis, a Muslim in traditional Middle Eastern attire in the doctor's office, a "witch doctor" on the street.  Jake's shrink is an Irishman, and, as his first own name suggests, Jake himself is descended from a Frenchman who came to England in 1848, the year of revolutions.  ("Jakes" of course, is also slang for lavatory, and we all know what the shortened form of Richardson must be.)

Like Lucky Jim, I can give this one a moderate recommendation.

In our next episode we'll check in with one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log, space opera pioneer, Weird Tales scribe, and husband of Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton. 

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Dixon began to feel definitely alarmed.  Had Welch's long-heralded derangement finally come to pass?  Or was this a bitterly sarcastic way of alluding to Dixon's own disinclination to approach any possible arena of academic work?

I have often thought I should read something by Kinglsey Amis, important British man-of-letters, fan of genre literature (he wrote a lot about James Bond, for example) and co-editor with Robert Conquest, the Anglo-American poet and historian, of SF anthologies.  So from a Howard County library I borrowed a 2012 New York Review of Books Classics edition of Amis's first published novel, Lucky Jim, which is like 265 pages long in this edition.

James Dixon, the Jim of the title, is a young academic who doesn't like to read very much (his "policy it was to read as little as possible of any given book") and for eight or nine months has held a junior position at a mediocre English college lecturing on medieval history even though he doesn't know what the word "scholasticism" means (Dixon doesn't let lack of comprehension of its meaning keep him from using the term every day, however) and mixes up Aquinas and Augustine.  Dixon is on what they call a "two-year probation" and is in a constant state of fear that he will be let go by the erratic head of the History Department, Professor Ned Welch, and much of the novel's volume consists of Dixon trying to stay on Welch's good side--for example, by getting his admittedly boring article on the economic effects of innovations in shipbuilding in the 15th century published--and seeing his efforts upended by his own vices and shortcomings as well as bad luck.  Dixon has also been casually dating a female lecturer, Margaret Peels; he is not very attracted to Margaret at all, but feels trapped in a relationship with her out of pity and inertia and social pressure.  As the novel begins the semester is about to end, and it has been some weeks since Dixon's paper was rejected by a respectable journal and since Margaret, after being dumped by another man she was dating, one she was apparently dating much more seriously than she was Dixon, tried to commit suicide.  And it is only a few hours before Dixon is scheduled to head out to Welch's country house where a bunch of provincial smarties, including Margaret, will be participating in an "arty week-end."

Dixon, who doesn't even really want to be a college professor and whose main interests are drinking and smoking, is something of an outsider, and a causeless rebel who acts out for peevish childish reasons instead of any ideological conviction, expressing privately his contempt for everybody in caustic inner monologues and the making of faces and outwardly via the indulgence in some pretty intrusive practical jokes.  A music professor, Johns, is a particular target of Dixon's pranks; Dixon lifts a music magazine from Johns's mailbox and draws a mustache and fangs on the photo of a composer on its cover, and later forges a threatening letter to Johns that accuses the man of taking sexual liberties with his secretary and vows revenge.  All through the novel Dixon is pulling scams and deceptions like this, often to cover up his blunders but also, apparently, just for the hell of it.

The plot follows two main threads--Dixon's strivings to impress, or at least not appall, Welch, and Dixon's relationships with women.  The former plot thread is full of obvious sorts of comedy: Dixon claims he can read music and so at the arty week-end gets shanghaied into singing songs he's never heard before at an amateur concert, but of course he can't read music and is a poor singer anyway; Dixon gets drunk and falls asleep while smoking, burning holes in the sheets and table and carpet in his room at Welch's country house; Welch enlists Dixon to deliver a lecture on one of Welch's favorite topics and Dixon gets drunk right before his career-critical performance.

The latter plot thread, Dixon's relationships with women, is a little more serious.  This novel has many characters and they all have tangled relationships with each other...I considered drawing myself a chart with arrows signifying everybody's blood, sexual, and adversarial connections, but didn't quite reach that point.  Welch's son Bertrand is a painter, and, as is to be expected of an artist, he has all kinds of sexual affairs, including with the wife, Carol, of one of Dixon's colleagues in the History Department, Cecil Goldsmith.  Bertrand's latest girlfriend is the beautiful Christine Callaghan, who works in a London bookstore, but she has been resistant to surrendering her virginity to Bertrand, so Bertrand has still been seeing Carol on the side, though carefully, so as not to drive away Christine because he wants to get in good with Christine's Uncle, an important patron of the arts.  This uncle is looking for a sort of personal assistant, and Bertrand wants that job.  Dixon meets the obnoxious painter and the fetching virgin at the arty week-end and is immediately attracted to Christine, and Carol, apparently trying to buttress her own position or just out of spite, encourages Dixon to go after Christine; Dixon achieves some preliminary success, which leads to bitter conflict with Bertrand Welch, who of course threatens to put Dixon's job in jeopardy by tattling to his father.

Things look bleak in the final fifth or so of the book.  Christine feels stuck with Bertrand, and Dixon feels stuck with Margaret, and she lives in London and he far off in the provinces anyway, so Christine and Dixon abandon their blossoming relationship.  Dixon, after a physical fight with Bertrand and his disastrous performance of the big lecture where he was supposed to put forward Welch's ideas, is told he will not be asked to stay for the next semester.

But then the novel ends happily, deus ex machina style.  Christine's uncle offers Dixon the London-based personal assistant job Bertrand wanted.  Margaret's former boyfriend appears and he and Dixon piece together the clues that indicate that Margaret is not a sensitive soul who tried to commit suicide but a manipulative neurotic jerk who faked the suicide attempt in order to gain control over Dixon and/or the other guy.  This revelation means Dixon has no obligation to maintain his relationship with Margaret and can pursue Christine.  And Christine is now available because Carol has told her about her ongoing affair with Bertrand, releasing Christine from any obligations to the promiscuous painter.  As the book ends we have every reason to believe that Dixon and Christine will live happily ever after, with Dixon even shedding his bitter cynicism and ceasing to play his practical jokes on people. 

Lucky Jim is alright, but I was rather disappointed in it; it has such a high reputation ("The comic novel of out time") that I was expecting something something fun and laugh-out-loud hilarious like a P. G. Wodehouse caper, or some tremendous life-changing masterpiece, like Proust or Lolita or something.  Instead, Lucky Jim is just a good ordinary mainstream novel.  It is cynical instead of light-hearted, and the jokes, while good, generally elicit smiles rather than guffaws and are sort of predictable--how many jokes that revolve around people being drunk have we encountered in our lives?

Nothing about Lucky Jim is difficult or challenging; you don't have to wrestle with anything or figure out any kind of puzzle.  The style is a bit verbose but easy to understand, and understated rather than passionate or exciting.  Amis only nibbles at the edges of political or social issues, he rarely tries to tell you something tendentious about life or to move you.  There is nothing deep and philosophical, nothing outrageous or shocking--Lucky Jim is not labyrinthine and tragic like something from Proust or Nabokov, it is not blunt and outrageous like Charles Bukowski's work or pretentious and outrageous like Henry Miller's.  And while it is not satisfying in the way a "hard" literary novel can be, Lucky Jim is also not really satisfying in the way a popular novel or genre novel can be--there is no catharsis when Dixon succeeds because he doesn't seem to deserve to succeed (it was not really clear to me why Christine and her uncle take to Dixon so readily, as he is always acting irresponsibly and Christine and the uncle seem like responsible people) and because he is not quite likable; similarly his foes are not so terribly monstrous that you really want to see them thrashed.  How much better a person is Dixon than the Welches and Margaret, and how much more interesting?--not very much.

Before returning Lucky Jim to the public library, I'll note some good things about it, and repeat that I don't think it is bad or a failure, just underwhelming.  Obviously, I like that the protagonist is an outsider who hates everything and that it portrays academia as a corrupt scam and academics as a bunch of lazy and self-important jerks who contribute nothing to society and believe--and promulgate--a lot of nonsense.  I was very interested to take in a minor character's analysis of academic grade inflation and the lowering of admissions standards due to political and financial pressures which have nothing to do with (and even undermine) the search for knowledge.  This sort of thing resonates with my own experiences over the course of my spotty career at 2nd and 3rd rate institutions of higher learning.

In one memorable scene Dixon engages in spirited ridicule of modern romanticizing of the medieval period*:

As he approached the Common Room he thought briefly about the Middle Ages.  Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages.  The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.  Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Age--Margaret's way of referring to the Middle Ages?

In this scene Amis lets himself go a little, courts a little controversy, and Dixon exhibits some strong feelings--the novel could have done with more of this.  Another example of Amis turning up the heat and of Dixon demonstrating some passion is the book's best and funniest scene, in which, in the final pages of the novel, Dixon chases down and then rides a bus, desperate to catch a train he (erroneously) thinks is about to leave, and vents his frustrations over the bus's slow progress in a long series of extravagant fancies.

I will probably give some of Amis's later work a try, but for the nonce I am eager to get back to the science fiction and fantasy stories which have been the meat and potatoes of this blog throughout its life.

*You may recall that I recently found Gene Wolfe's romanticizing of the medieval period charming and exciting.  My point, here and there, is not that I find these arguments particularly convincing, but that they are thought provoking and fun to read because they evidence some kind of deeply considered thought and exhibit some deep emotion.