Disconcerting his readers has long been a speciality of Amis. Since Lucky Jim (1954) announced a talent for inventively comic writing, he has seldom been content to stay still. Even in that early novel, the memorable and splendid farce of the burnt bed-clothes and drunken lecture has to take its place alongside the developing relationship between Jim Dixon and the neurotic Margaret, where the writing is less assured and more tentative as the material is less scathing and more weighty. A disturbing co-existence of two distinct types of writing is often to be found in an Amis novel. In I Want It Now (1968), for example, satire of the trendy and corrupt world of chat-show television celebrities goes along with celebration of one such man's triumph over the predatory upper-class world. The character of Ronnie Appleyard is not strong enough to support writing which is now appropriately incisive and now...