Books like H. G. Wells

Jim Dixon is another cramped, resentful man whose liveliest self survives chiefly in private jokes, grotesque phrases and fantasies of rebellion. Amis turns his precarious university job into a sustained war between natural appetite and institutional pretence, culminating in some of the finest comic set pieces in postwar fiction.

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and hugely influential, Lucky Jim has Mr Polly’s rare combination of anger and release: it knows that mockery can be a form of self-rescue. If Wells’s hero won you over whenever his language became more alive than his circumstances, Dixon’s muttered inventions, imaginary faces and mounting refusal to behave will be irresistible.

Charles Pooter records minor household events with the solemnity of a statesman, never noticing the widening gap between his dignity and everyone else’s view of him. That gap produces exquisite comedy, but the Grossmith brothers do not despise their clerk. Like Wells, they see the vulnerability beneath lower-middle-class respectability and understand how much hope can be invested in a promotion, a new acquaintance or a neatly furnished room.

This compact Victorian classic became a foundation stone of British embarrassment comedy; generations of readers have recognized themselves, uneasily, in Pooter. Its jokes are wonderfully exact, but its secret is affection. You laugh at his pomposity and gradually realize that his small vanities are also what protect him from small humiliations.

Where Mr Polly hesitates, dreams and suffers, Denry Machin improvises. Beginning as an insignificant clerk in Bennett’s Five Towns, he discovers that nerve, timing and a cheerful disregard for social rank can carry him through doors supposedly closed to him. The pleasure lies less in what Denry achieves than in watching his quick intelligence transform embarrassment into opportunity.

Bennett’s warm, briskly paced comic novel shares Wells’s refusal to treat provincial shopkeeping life as spiritually negligible. Every municipal ceremony, business scheme and social distinction becomes material for an ordinary person’s self-invention. The Card is the sunnier companion to Mr Polly: a wonderfully readable reminder that comedy can puncture class deference and enlarge a life.