Science fiction is a pessimistic medium… Most of it is about things going wrong. (Kingsley Amis in the preface) Amis Kingsley Amis was a grumpy old bugger. This judgement is based not only on reading his articles and reviews in the 70s and 80s when he was still alive (he died in 1995), but having […]
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The Biographer’s Moustache by Kingsley Amis (1995)
‘She told me she saw something in one of the papers about somebody called something Scott-Thompson writing something about JRP Fane…’ (p.96) Not particularly successful, forty-something literary journalist, Gordon Scott-Thompson, pitches the idea of writing a ‘critical biography’ of 68-year-old, very posh and very out-of-date novelist Jimmie Fane, to his reluctant publisher. There follows a series […]
Posted by Simon on August 26, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/the-biographers-moustache-kingsley-amis/
The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis (1992)
Richard had reached a kind of steady state of indecision. Everything that had happened seemed to make it harder to know what to do about anything. (p.179) Richard Vaisey’s circle Another novel set among the professional middle classes in London, this time focusing on Dr Richard Vaisey, lecturer in Russian Literature at the (fictional) London […]
Posted by Simon on December 23, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/23/the-russian-girl-kingsley-amis/
How to build a Kingsley Amis sentence
I find it mind boggling that the blurbs on the Penguin paperbacks routinely describe Amis as the premier serious novelist in Britain (in the late 1980s, early 1990s). Surely not for the originality of his subject matter (middle-aged white people having dinner parties in north London). Nor for his attitude (a perceptive but consistently grumpy […]
Posted by Simon on December 22, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/22/how-to-build-a-kingsley-amis-sentence/
We Are All Guilty by Kingsley Amis (1991)
This is a very short novella, barely 80 pages long, written in a simple style and marketed as Puffin Teenage Fiction. I doubt it would appeal to many teenagers in 2015 and wonder how many read it in 1991. Despite its naturalistic setting, I think this is more a ‘novel of ideas’, a fictionalised pamphlet, […]
Posted by Simon on December 21, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/we-are-all-guilty-kingsley-amis/
The Folks That Live on the Hill by Kingsley Amis (1990)
For more than just a moment Harry had the horrible feeling that he had finally lost all ability to understand why other people behaved as they did, and even to know what his own emotions or wishes were beyond a longing to be by himself indefinitely, unreachable by others, not necessarily in this room, just […]
Posted by Simon on December 20, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/the-folks-that-live-on-the-hill-kingsley-amis/
Difficulties With Girls by Kingsley Amis (1988)
‘You selfish pig.’ (p.210) Difficulties With Girls is Kingsley Amis’s 19th novel and a sequel to his fourth, Take A Girl Like You, published nearly 30 years earlier, in 1960. In that book we met twenty-year-old Jenny Bunn, a northern lass come down south to be an infant school teacher, who is pursued by every man she meets […]
Posted by Simon on November 19, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/difficulties-with-girls-kingsley-amis/
The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis (1986)
The area had once been called Monmouthshire but because of a decision taken in London was now called Gwent, after an ancient Welsh kingdom or whatever it was that might have formerly existed there or thereabouts. Anyway, it was Wales all right. (p.60) Overview A long novel by Amis’s standards, at 384 pages, The Old […]
Posted by Simon on October 20, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/the-old-devils-kingsley-amis/
Stanley and the Women by Kingsley Amis (1984)
The reference to Jewboys on page 43 (‘Soon afterwards I went out and picked up a taxi on its way back from dropping somebody at one of the Jewboys’ houses in Bishop’s Avenue’) was so wantonly offensive that it brought me up short and made me realise the character of Stanley Duke, who’s telling this […]
Posted by Simon on October 8, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/stanley-and-the-women-kingsley-amis/
Books & Boots 