September 1960
The girl is Jenny Bunn from the North of England coming south to a country town near London to teach in a school and board in a bleak house owned by an ineffectual bonhommous crook and his desperate and rather nasty wife. The moment she arrives she meets Patrick Standish who teaches in the college on the hill, and from then on the book is mostly about their relationship and whether she should go to bed with him or not. Upbringing, and even some (finer?) instincts are against this, but everybody gets what they think they want in the end.
Mr. Amis is at his best with inanimate objects; he can be very funny about boilers and food and cars and bars; but except when he finds his people absurd - when they are also funny - they are simply dull, and they are dull an awful lot of the time.