Sir Amis has a prose style that I can only describe as buttoned-up, stilted, ungenerous, ungiving and vehemently tight-arsed (a side effect, possibly, of his setting: The English academic institution). Perhaps I am simply too uncultured to appreciate his brand of fiction. Perhaps my paltry, begrimed East African education has once again let me down. All I know, is that Lucky Jim tests the limits of endurance, insults the virtue of patience, and wears out the gifts of tolerance.

Consider the beginning of the novel,

'THEY made a silly mistake, though,' the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.

That line is carefully constructed to induce a soporific response in the casual reader. If you recall your own Professor of History, you likely remember a dowdy, bleary-eyed, uninteresting lecturer. All my public-university-education mental associations were immediately activated. The "gradually sank beneath..." is a stylistic declension that, if the reader weren't already falling asleep in a Pavlovian response to the invocation of the memory of his Professor of History, ensures that he is firmly in the grip of the psychosomatic symptoms of boredom.

From there Sir Amis does not disappoint. The "silly mistake" that has been made is that during a certain musical performance, a flute was mistaken for a recorder.

What a thunderclap.

In the very next chapter, a girl describes her attempted suicide. Once again we get the declension, sending us slouching towards a word-induced coma,

But quite soon I didn't in the least mind going; I felt too tired, somehow.

The prose plods along, and continuously, by its syntax and content, slows down your reading. A few pages later, we are at a musical event where,

A soporific droning filled the air round Dixon as the singers hummed their notes to one another.

By this time, Sir Amis' prose which is droll, drab and hostile to sustained reading has done what it was intended to do: The reader is bored but rigor has not yet set in even though the process leading to mortis is well begun.

But soft! A joke; humour; comic relief! A segment of the choir, conducted by Professor Welch (the notorious Professor of History), bursts into laughter. Dixon (our protagonist) wants in on the joke. We want in on the joke. The joke itself is worth reprinting in full:

In less than a minute Dixon did see, and clearly. Instead of the customary four parts, this [ballet] piece employed five. The third and fourth lines of music from the top had Tenor I and Tenor II written against them; moreover, there was some infantile fa-la-la-la stuff on the second page with numerous gaps in the individual parts. Even Welch's ear might be expected to record the complete absence of one of the parts in such circumstances.

At which point, I put down the book and gave up. This is a book that, if I were to read it standing, would send me tumbling and, because of the resulting heavy contact of my skull on the floor, would leave me concussed.

Caveat: I may become more educated and—we can only hope—even, cultured, at which point my opinion of Sir Amis' book may change completely.