That Uncertain Feeling (novel)


That Uncertain Feeling is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1955.
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. It was also adapted by the BBC in 1985 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. 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.