I Like It Here by Kingsley Amis

First published: 1958

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: The mid-1950’s

Locale: London and Portugal

Principal Characters:

• Garnet Bowen, a free-lance writer
• Barbara Bowen, his wife
• Bennie Hyman, a publisher and sometime employer of Garnet Bowen
• Wulfstan Strether, a novelist and recluse

The Novel

Garnet Bowen, formerly a journalist, now a part-time reviewer and essayist with ambitions to be a dramatist, lives somewhat hand-to-mouth, supporting his wife and three young children, hoping for something more permanent in the literary trade. He is equally elated and deflated by a commission for an article on European travel which will pay well but obliges him to go to the Continent. Bowen hates leaving London, and particularly despises anything to do with traveling in Europe.

His reluctance to go abroad is further eroded by the chance to make a bit of money and to ingratiate himself with Bennie Hyman’s publishing firm, which he hopes may hire him on a permanent basis if he does a job for them in Portugal which is, by chance, the country his wife wishes to visit.

One of the publishing firm’s oldest novelists, Wulfstan Strether, who supposedly stopped writing some time before, has mailed Hyman’s company the manuscript of a new novel. The editor who had handled Strether’s work has died, and no one in the organization is quite sure if the new novel is really by Strether. Bennie Hyman asks Bowen to visit Strether and, without Strether knowing what he is up to, try to decide if the man claiming to be the novelist is the real thing or an impostor.

Bowen, reluctantly, sets off to the Continent by car (his wife driving), and by sea to take up a house rental in Portugal, which proves considerably less than satisfactory. Bowen meets the putative Strether, who is pleased to entertain someone from the London literary world, but he is not easily manipulated into proving unknowingly that he is the genuine article. Bowen is unhappy about trying to catch Strether out, and Barbara, his wife (when she finds out what Hyman has talked Bowen into doing), is sharply critical of her husband for agreeing to such an underhanded task.

Along the way, Bowen, suspicious of Continentals and irritated by the day-to-day details of travel, looks with a sharp eye at the liabilities of being abroad and finds that, as he expected, the family is exposed not only to food that occasions intestinal revolts but also to bad plumbing, insects, flies, and off-and-on peculation. They manage to escape from their first, unpleasant lodgings through the kindness of Harry Bannion, a retired bank executive and full-time practical joker, who provides temporary accommodation. Bowen’s mother-in-law, the subject of a running negative commentary by Bowen (kept conveniently to himself), takes ill back in Great Britain, and Barbara and the children return home.

Eventually Bowen winds up staying with Strether, who treats him with kindness and generosity but proves to be something of a pompous literary bore. Bowen, still unsure about whether Strether is bogus, and inclined to suspect him, decides that he will not tell Hyman anything. He would, however, like to know, and eventually, through two unrelated incidents, he does discover the truth not only about Strether but also about himself and his long-held aversion to doing anything which is personally discomforting.

The Characters

Kingsley Amis is a satirist and as such is interested in using characters to make points about aberrant behavior (generally social, but not always so), most immediately exemplified by “types” rather than individuals. His characters have an obviously caricatured quality and are rarely, in this novel, seen as other than surface representations of certain exaggerated points of view.

Garnet Bowen is used as the commentator for this consideration of human and social foibles. By profession a writer, by personal inclination skeptical and wary, he is appropriately skilled in commenting upon everything (and usually does) with some aptly scarifying wittiness. This kind of character is the common focus of Amis’ novels. Bowen is educated, intelligent, thin-skinned, and quick to respond to any pomposity or stupidity. He is, however, not lacking in eccentricity himself, and Amis uses Bowen’s prejudices to mock that peculiar British disease, the disdain for foreigners over the water, a hangover attitude from the days of the old Empire. Bowen is a bundle of nerves, responding to the constant bombardments of normal social irritants with constant, witty verbal counter-punching which makes for much of the pleasure of the novel and which ranges from offhand swipes at popular singers (Frank Sinatra), architecture, red tape, and the beastliness of travel, to quirky in-jokes upon the state of modern literature. He is never without an opinion; indeed, it might be said that much of his character is opinions. He is, however, an unaggressive fellow, and he tends to keep to himself his disapproval, which Amis allows into the text in ways which are reminiscent of the “aside” in drama. Bowen talks continually to himself about what he sees; it is his response to the world which pervades the novel.

Other characters are seen through Bowen. Fortunately, given his natural inclination to social jaundice, he is fair-minded. Indeed, in the case of Oates, Bowen might be suspected of being not only reluctant to judge but downright gullible as well. It takes his wife, Barbara, to get him anywhere near irritation about the way Oates is cheating them.

There are only a handful of characters who are able to make a place for themselves, principally because they are so exuberantly larger than life. Bannion, the life of the party, is quite out on his own, beyond Bowen’s usual ability to sum up a character satirically, and the Commie-hating American paranoid on the boat is an example of how Amis uses characters not to make plot, but to make fun of obsessive humans who are mad, if not legally certifiable.

Critical Context

There is a long tradition in English letters which can be traced back to Henry Fielding (whom, significantly, Bowen admires) which has produced some of the best satiric-comic work in the novel. The early twentieth century master was Evelyn Waugh; Amis is his successor and has been so since Lucky Jim was published in 1954. In 1986, his sixteenth novel, The Old Devils, won England’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.

I Like It Here, Amis’ third novel, is in several ways one of his slighter, least ambitious works in the genre. Based in part on his own visit to Portugal (part of an award for winning the Somerset Maugham Prize with Lucky Jim), it is a bit of a loose notebook of impressionistic experiences, clearly less structured than is usual. The intrusion of Salazar and Gomes with their contrasting comments upon the dictatorship of Salazar seems to be forced into the narrative, as if Amis felt something had to be said but was unsure of how to do it. Bowen may be a bit too normal, in fact, to do the kind of dirty work that other Amis protagonists might do on someone such as Salazar. Bowen has his moments of mild lunacy (the amusing set piece of mutual misunderstanding over Grim-Grin is one of these) and his “bum-bum” dislike of doing anything different reminds one, but only faintly, of the manic excesses of the wilder heroes in other books. This is one of Amis’ calmer, nicer books, but the really frenetic energy is sadly missing. Bowen is simply too pleasant to beat up on the natives. The novel does, however, clearly show that Amis, for all his satiric instincts, expects his main characters to act decently in the long run.

Bibliography

Amis, Kingsley. What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 1972.

Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel, 1972.

Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis, 1981.

Green, Martin. “British Comedy and the British Sense of Humor: Shaw, Waugh, and Amis,” in Texas Quarterly. IV (Autumn, 1961), p. 217.