A nice comfortable (for the reader) traipse through 50s England, a picaresque quite similar to Waugh's Decline and Fall. Could see this also being read as unfocused and unplotted (especially in comparison to likes of Lucky Jim and Room at the Top) but the writing is quick and funny enough for it not to matter.

Some middle class prat graduates and wants to set himself outside of the class structure he was raised into, so takes up a series of odd jobs and adventures. Nicely shows the completely different worlds people inhabit separated only by small turns of luck. Our protagonist goes through the full wringer - at first I thought he was going to find some Daoist acceptance that would really let him float outside of society, but in the end he finds a role he can really settle into. Happens to everyone - you go full Bartleby or you get a job.

Notable point that this renunciation of society that these 50s writers were struggling with could have gone either way politically but seemed to turn into I'm-Alright-Jack Thatcherism as time went on. Maybe not dissimilar to the American hippies turning into free market boomers.

"What annoyed them was that he did not even seem to be trying. Though they could not have put it into words, their objection to him was that he did not wear a uniform.

If he had worn the uniform of a prosperous middle-class tradesman, like Robert, they would have approved of him. If, on the other hand, he had seriously adopted the chic dis-order of the Chelsea Bohemian, they would at least have understood what he was at. In their world, it was everyone's first duty to wear a uniform that announced his status, his calling and his ambitions: from the navvy's thick boots and shirtsleeves to the professor's tweeds, the conventions of clothing saw to it that everyone wore his identity card where it could be seen."