That Uncertain Feeling (novel)

First US edition
(publ. Harcourt Brace, 1956)

That Uncertain Feeling is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1955.^[1]

In 1961, the book was made into a film starring Peter Sellers, with the title changed to Only Two Can Play, to avoid confusion with similar contemporary titles.^[2] It was also adapted by the BBC in 1986 as a television series, starring Denis Lawson and Sheila Gish, this time with the original title.

Plot

A satire on life and culture in a Welsh seaside town, the story concerns a married librarian who begins an affair with the bored wife of a local bigwig. Amis, an English incomer to Swansea in real life, mocks Wales's devotion to culture and learning as false and pretentious.^[3] In The Old Devils, one of the central characters, the writer Alun Weaver, is portrayed as a "stage-Taffy"; Weaver is the memoirist of a fictional Welsh poet based loosely on Dylan Thomas.^[4]

References

1. Nick Bentley (2007). Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Peter Lang. p. 303. ISBN 978-3-03910-934-0.
2. Films and Filming. Hansom Books. 1966. p. 20.
3. Jeffrey Richards (15 September 1997). Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad's Army. Manchester University Press. p. 227. ISBN 978-0-7190-4743-5.
4. Merritt Moseley (1993). Understanding Kingsley Amis. Univ of South Carolina Press. pp. 155. ISBN 978-0-87249-861-7.