Kingsley and the Women

Abstract

The publication of Jake’s Thing (1978) was seen by most, indeed nearly all, reviewers as Amis’s sad but inevitable arrival at a terminus long foreseen in his work — an arrival, moreover, that showed he had gone off the rails. Briefly, this thesis maintains that from about the point where Amis ‘sold out’ by writing a James Bond novel, which is also about the point where he sold out politically by speaking in favour of American involvement in Vietnam, the right-wing quality of his social and political views has been matched by a tendency in the novels that is reactionary in substance and (and partly therefore) unpleasant in tone: Girl, 20 attacks pop music, trendiness and the cult of youth; The Alteration describes, not totally with disapproval, a right-wing totalitarian state, and Russian Hide-and-Seek describes bleakly a totalitarian state on the Soviet model. And the non-fictional output shows a continuing and deepening preference politically for right over left, and critically for lisible over scriptible (with a liking for the sound of neither term); a market-economy attitude to the funding of the arts; a book on (good God!) Kipling, and an interest in language recently characterised by a professor of English Studies as ‘Kingsley Amis banging on about “hopefully”’.

Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them.¹