We Are All Guilty

by Kingsley Amis

Teenager Clive Rayner becomes involved in a raid on a warehouse in which the night watchman is accidentally injured. In the aftermath, Clive is reassured by his mother, the vicar and the social worker that it wasn't really his fault, when in fact his need is for confirmation of his guilt.

Genres: Young Adult

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Best known novels of British writer Sir Kingsley William Amis include Lucky Jim (1954) and The Old Devils (1986).

This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.

William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.

Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner

Reviews

[Mike Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an oddity. It was based on a TV play that Amis had written some years earlier. We Are All Guilty was made by the British TV company ATV and shown in August 1975. Quite recently I was researching TV programmes that I half-remembered from the 1970s, and was surprised to find that Amis had turned We Are All Guilty into a novella, which was published many years later, in 1991 – not long, in fact, before he died. I don’t know why he did this, unless it was a case of “never waste good material”. It is mainly described as having been written for young people (though I wonder if it was), and is largely forgotten.

The plot is thus: A teenage layabout and his friend break into a warehouse. The security guard chases them, and in so doing he crashes through a faulty safety rail to the floor below, incurring injuries that look permanent. The teenager, Clive, finds himself in the criminal justice system. The trouble is, it’s full of social workers and vicars who see crime as a social disease and want to see him, not the injured guard, as the victim. The play ends with Clive wishing that someone would blame or punish him for the mess he’s made. It sounds like a right-wing rant about the state of society. (As does the latest from Amis fils. Perhaps we all get like our parents in the end.)

The original TV programme We Are All Guilty was part of a series of stand-alone dramas made by ATV called Against the Crowd, but I can find little information about it, except that one of the other episodes was written by a well-known science fiction writer, Nigel Kneale, and another by Fay Weldon. This seems to be the only one written by Amis. He was only 53 in 1975, but had long ceased to be the enfant terrible of Lucky Jim (in fact son Martin was emerging as terrible in his own right). His personal life was complex, and he drank. But he was far from finished as a writer, and several of his best books were still to come. (The Old Devils, which would win the Booker, wasn’t to be published until 1986.) He had also changed his politics. A Communist Party member as a young man, by 1975 he had been moving to the right for years. We Are All Guilty was a snapshot of the way Amis père saw his world.

Both the book and the original had some nice touches. In the play, a social worker offers Clive a cigarette; he takes it and leans forward to light hers, but she hasn’t got one – she doesn’t smoke. In the book, Clive and three of his friends eat in an Indian; they are plainly bored, with the place and each other, and you sense that Clive’s problem is not that he is evil or stupid, but that there is just not enough in his head.

However, when the novella came out, 16 years after the play, Kirkus Reviews were not impressed. Amis, it wrote, “seems as oblivious to the real roots of Clive's antisocial behavior as his adult characters are; he even gives Clive the (unlikely) option of easily finding a job, and depicts him as bored with the girls he hangs out with. It all smells of the establishment believing that the lower classes would be all right if they'd just shape up.”

Amis’s political views were indeed not always attractive, but Kirkus might have missed something. To be sure, Amis doesn’t think that we are All Guilty; he thinks Clive’s responsible. But the book is not a rant – it’s satire, which should be no surprise from Amis. There may even have been satire in his rightward shift. As The Independent said after his death, that shift was sincere, but: “There was always an element of deliberate provocation and self-parody in this stance... As soon as left-wing attitudes became trendy, as they did in the late 1960s, Amis's innate scepticism was turned upon them and their proponents.” In any case, what comes strongly from the book is not that Clive gets off nearly scot-free. It is that he himself does not understand why he has, and feels the need to expiate his guilt – but is not allowed to. By being forgiven, he is denied absolution. This was at least as important as any political point that Amis might have wished to make.

The book is not Amis’s best; some of the dialogue is stilted – one senses he knew very few Clives – and he could have done more with the plot than this slim novella. His son Martin Amis would have, I am sure. We Are All Guilty isn’t classic Amis. Yet, reading it 40 years after seeing the TV play, I found it cohesive and oddly satisfying. It’s a minor effort from a major writer, but I think I can stretch to four stars.

[Melissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a short, forgettable British novel. Clive is a teenage boy who does not get along with his parents. He ends up in trouble with the law when he breaks into a building and while running away a security guard falls and ends up bedridden. The rest of the short novel is spent with Clive trying to get people to say it is his fault and not the fault of society. You don't empathize with Clive or the bed-ridden man, so there is not much to recommend here besides the fact that it's short. Thumbs down!

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Clive and his friend Terry break into a warehouse for a lark, thenight watchman falls while chasing them and is seriously injured. Although Clive feels guilty, the social worker, the vicar and his parents portray him as innocent causing him to feel even worse.

[Tomoya]

I read this book. This book is about guilty. I recommend this book.

[Orxan]

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