CultureShock:The public is terminally uninterested in the novels of Kingsley Amis - but he would probably be pleased about that
Dominic Sandbrook, an annoyingly young British historian, recently published a terrific two-part history of Great Britain in the 1960s. In both Never Had It So Good and White Heat, Sandbrook turns repeatedly to the novels of one particular author for comic observations on the social changes that swept the nation in those years. A book entitled Girl, 20 provides him with a withering evisceration of Carnaby Street. "Uncouth minstrelry enveloped me again when I crossed the threshold of what I supposed was the boutique," the novel's narrator begins. Elsewhere, Sandbrook turns to Take a Girl Like You and I Like it Here for similar expressions of distaste at the England of pink vinyl raincoats and unisex hairdressers.
Do not look for these volumes in your local bookshop. The literary reputation of Kingsley Amis has, since his death in 1995, suffered a quite startling decline. His first novel, the peerless Lucky Jim (1954), remains in print and will do so until laughter goes out of fashion. But only a handful of the books Amis wrote in the following four decades can be found on the shelves of Waterstones.
Zachary Leader, author of a recent, gargantuan biography of Amis, described his subject as "the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the 20th century". Yet the reading public seems terminally uninterested in Sir Kingsley's novels. What sort of a universe allows, say, the turgid prose of W Somerset Maugham to remain between crisp soft covers while so many of Amis's incalculably livelier comedies are sold only in second-hand stores and car-boot sales?
Nowhere in the fine early novels of Martin Amis, Kingsley's more experimental son, do we find anything to match the famous description of a hangover in Lucky Jim: "A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police." That section contains recognisable jokes - phrases that remain funny even when removed from their context - but Amis's great gift was his talent for extracting humour from the most mundane activities by describing them in archly detailed prose. Later novels may not have displayed quite the same pizzazz as Lucky Jim, but Amis continued to find ways of making the lighting of cigarettes and the brushing of teeth inexplicably funny.
So why has his reputation drifted? Some answers can be found in his fantastically nasty 1963 novel One Fat Englishman (currently out of print, of course). Roger Micheldene, the book's obese, drunken protagonist, now seems like one of the most fascinating characters in modern fiction.
When Amis, a lower-middle-class scholarship boy from an unfashionable London suburb, conceived the book, he was still loosely tethered to the political left. Micheldene, an English publisher boozing his way around an American university, exhibits levels of sexism, racism and reactionary belligerence that would appal even the members of a suburban golf club. At time of publication, the character was viewed as a fantastic grotesque modelled on the sort of hopeless buffer Amis and his generation had just elbowed aside. In retrospect, we see Kingsley constructing a cartoon version of the man he would very soon become (or, at least, the man he would pretend to be).
Nothing reads more like later Amis than Micheldene's musings on an experimental novel by an American named Macher. "It was not that the thing was a good novel. Macher's nationality, and existence in the present century, guaranteed that," Roger observes. He then goes on to remark that, unlike similarly modish novels, the book does not feature "paraplegic necrophiles, hippoerotic jockeys, exhibitionistic castrates, coprophagic pig farmers, armless flagellationists and the rest of the bunch."
Evelyn Waugh, just as conservative, but considerably less charming in person, balanced his cool reactionary tendencies with a romantic passion for the more glutinous extremes of English Catholicism. Kingsley Amis, an atheist, fearful of death, set his novels in old people's homes, rundown hotels and wretched saloon bars.
Liberal readers in search of guilty pleasures have always enjoyed living vicariously through the elegantly complacent - but doomed - heroes of Brideshead Revisited. The notion of climbing inside Roger Micheldene's balding head is, perhaps, less appealing to leftish youths.
Yet Kingsley Amis, an addict of his era's popular culture, who adored science fiction and James Bond, remains one of the greatest deflators of pomposity in English literature. He is, in that respect, a novelist young readers should seek out. Not that he would thank them for the effort. There was, perhaps, never a writer more likely to savour being cast into unfashionability.
Mind you, having now become - remember the hapless Macher - a novelist of the last century, Sir Kinsgley might allow us to seek out just a few of his hilarious books on eBay.
