Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, published in 1954. It tells the story of young Jim Nixon, who is in his probationary year as a lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial university. He loathes the pretensions of his colleagues, and wages a vendetta against the son of his boss, a second rate artist with first rate belief in his own genius.

And yet while those colleagues and egotistical artists are useless fakes, so too is Jim. He seems to hate his subject, only taking medieval history because it had been the soft option when he was studying for his own degree. He doesn’t like teaching, ignores the one conscientious student the university seems to posses, while favouring prettier, less able ones. He bluffs his way along with the rest of the staff, living in mortal fear of losing his detested job.

Meanwhile in his personal life he is in an uneasy relationship with Margaret, an emotionally volatile fellow academic, who seemingly tried to commit suicide following a previous failed relationship. Jim feels compelled to continue with her even after meeting another girl with whom he seems much happier.

These personal and professional tensions all lead up to a chaotic climax at a lecture Jim is obliged to give on the theme of Merrie England. He is expected to extoll the lost virtues of a society engaging in summer morris dancing and winter mummers’ plays.

I suppose, getting to the end, I was asked to accept that there was a difference between Jim’s fakery and the fakery he was surrounded by. While Jim was an honest faker, the other staff were of the dishonest variety, especially it turns out, Margaret – I will leave you to discover the details there. So then I had to ask myself, is it possible to have this sort of distinction between good and bad fraud? I then wondered, thinking of the bigger picture, if we are perhaps being asked to accept that novels are themselves a kind of honest sham? After all, Lucky Jim is rather self-consciously a novel, in the sense of having novel-like things in it, such as an enemies to lovers scenario, and proving your love by racing to catch someone before they board a train at a station. Can you get more truth from this sort of thing than say, an academic paper on fifteenth century ship building? Maybe life is, and always has been something of a swindle. There was no age of innocence, no Merrie England. And there is no place of innocence. Universities are not some sanctuary offering the truth and fairness lacking in the rest of society. A university is just another work place dominated by favouritism, internal politics and saying what the boss wants to hear.

Maybe the fakery of a novel is the best way to get to the truth of such a situation. Maybe in the end Jim is lucky to be a character in a pretend novel rather than an academic at a real university.