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"Kingsley Amis strikes again. Not only is he funny--and he is very funny, as anyone who has read LUCKY JIM knows--his very absurdities are profound." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Amis out of form,
By
This review is from: I Like It Here (Mass Market Paperback)
Classically Amis (but without the requisite humour), I Like it Here is a satire of British homeland nostalgia. Garnet Bowen, a Welshman, fears everything foreign, especially the thought of making a trip to a foreign country. Amis was the master of satirical books on the archetypical British/Welsh village dwellers. There's something very easy in making fun of Brits that plumply sit in their lounge room claiming they'd never be caught anywhere else, absorbed in the minutia of living in their communities, most likely sitting amongst a house stuffed full of furnishings and gadgetry and food from faraway lands. Bowen embodies the stereotype. Bowen on Italy: "All those rotten old churches and museums and art galleries." On Spain: "all the Spaniards are supposed to be proud all the time." You get the picture. Although probably not intentional, Bowen well characterises Amis' best friend Philip Larkin, about who Christopher Hitchens said in Hitch-22 "Larkin's pungent loathing for the Left, for immigrants, for striking workers, for foreigners and indeed "abroad," and for London showed that you couldn't have everything." The obvious discrepancy between the character and the muse in I Like it Here is that Bowen can't bring himself to leave London, whereas Larkin hated it, preferring the village life.Despite his fear of abroad, Bowen is enticed to take his family to Portugal by the offer of a job to find out if the author of a yet to be published book is, as he claims to be, a famous writer called Wolfstan Strether. To do this, Bowen must overcome his dislike for `foreign'. While in Portugal, the family stays with Oates, a friend of one of his wife's friends. Oates, in discussing the benefits of the dictatorial rule of António de Oliveira Salazar with Bowen, says "this chap Salazar has got hospitals and clinics and convalescent homes going, and schools and orphanages - there's one just this side of Estoril on the coast road, you've probably seen it. All that sort of thing's expanding very quickly now. It's got to, by law. Salazar's seen to that." This is a rather clever observation by Amis of the cliché dictator ploy of offering security for the mere price of giving up a little freedom. As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It took until 1974 for the miasma of Salazar's regime to be fully cast away in the Carnation Revolution, by which time Portugal had been economically and educationally ruined. It is an ongoing malaise it is yet to eject itself from and is unlikely to do for a long time. It is clear that Amis himself disliked this book after writing it, and that while the character may have been somewhat based on Larkin, the experiences were very much his own (a requirement of winning the Somerset Maugham award was the recipient had to travel abroad for three months. Amis, after winning, went to Portugal. He described it to Philip Larkin as a "deportation order"). In the 1975 Paris Review he wrote: "Well, it was written partly out of bad motives. Seeing that That Uncertain Feeling had come out in 1955, and it was now 1957 and there was no novel on the way, I really cobbled it together out of straightforwardly autobiographical experiences in Portugal, with a kind of mystery story perfunctorily imposed on that. The critics didn't like it, and I don't blame them really. I had a look at it the other day and parts of it are not too bad. But it's really a very slipshod, lopsided piece of work." When you read through the book to its end you get a keen sense of what he means. The story lacks suspense or climax and seems to plod along until it arrives at a rather mediocre ending. It is a shame because the concept had much more potential than was displayed. To make matters worse, the story is extraordinarily devoid of the comedic genius of Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling. The worst attempt of humour (actually one of the only true examples of an attempt if you exempt his little in-jokes, such as a dig at W. Somerset Maugham) is the narrator describing a comparison of two portraits of Bowen's wife: "Barbara, on the evidence presented, had changed from the kind of fourteen-year-old one might expect to find hiding in a U.S. Army barrack-room to the kind of concentration-camp wardress who had lampshades made of human skin." Thankfully Amis doesn't lower himself to this level of try-hard for most of the book. This is not to say that I Like it Here is altogether awful, but it is not at all good.
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