Jill. Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin states in his 1975 Introduction to my copy of this book, marking its republication, by writing: "As, despite its length, it remains in essence an unambitious short story, chapter-divisions have been dropped, leaving it merely as a narrative with breathing-spaces." And, while one may do well to wonder exactly how "unambitious" it was when Larkin actually wrote it thirty odd years before tacking on this qualifier, it indeed remains a longish, disjointed short story. I would actually go further and dub it a string of loosely connected vignettes. The word that kept leaping to mind as I was reading it was: Inchoate. I suppose the title "Jill" is as appropriate as any - though perhaps "John", if less Romantic, would at least possess the virtue of retaining the title of the character serving as a common thread herein - for Jill, both real and imagined, does not take up more than half the book. Right: Young, fairly bright, extremely industrious lad wins scholarship to Oxford by swotting up for examinations. Once there, rooms with debonair, spendthrift playboy. Young lad, John Kemp, starts drinking, smoking, seeing the world from one angle and then another, invents an imaginary relation named Jill, writes letters to and from her, goes so far as to begin a diary by her. Then he meets a real girl with almost the same name and transfers his affections to her. Oh, by the bye, there's a war on and his hometown gets blitzed by the Jerries. The section in which John ventures back to his hometown to see whether his parents are among the quick or the dead is the best vignette, as it were, in the book. The writing here is superb: "The moon, by day a thin pith-coloured segment, hung brilliantly in the sky, spilling its light down on to the skeletons of roofs, blank walls and piles of masonry that undulated like a frozen sea. It had never seemed so bright. The wreckage looked like ruins of an age over and done with." Top-drawer stuff! Then, John goes on a bender when back at Oxford, catches pneumonia after being pitched into the fountain (after pasting Jill - her real name is Gillian - with a sloppy drunk kiss). The story ends with his parents coming to visit their son in the infirmary with a wry little in-joke on the motto of Oxford for those that know their Latin and have seen the Oxford crest. The problem here is that everything is so higgledy-piggledy. One vignette reminds one of Joyce and Stephen Daedalus, the next of Dante and his Beatrice and the next of Waugh and Brideshead Revisited - really the book to read if you're into this sort of thing. Still, the book has its moments, and Larkin has a surprisingly acute ear for dialogue. Recommended for nostalgic anglophiles who aren't particularly fussy about thematic coherence.

Larkin, generally acknowledged as Britain's finest post-war poet, along with Betjeman, wrote only two novels, both in his fertile early period. 'Jill' is his first serious attempt at sustained prose writing, and the result is a fine, stimulating book.'Jill' began life as a cross between a girls' school novel pastiche and mild pornography called 'Trouble at Willow Gables', an origin that manifests itself throughout the finished work, bubbling salaciously beneath the surface of John Kemp's escapist scribblings. John, of course, is a typically Larkin-esque protagonist - socially awkward, an outsider, and, like his creator, constantly struggling with the remains of a stammer. The portrait is, as only Larkin could draw it, at once affectionately tongue-in-cheek and unremittingly brutal (John's intrusion on the tea-party early on is to die for). What may alarm Larkin's readers (having recovered from the shock delivered by the life and letters) is the deep-rooted distrust of the imaginative faculties emerging in 'Jill'. We watch with horror as John begins to invent a younger sister for himself with a paranoia approaching downright madness. His creation is born from malice and a sense of exclusion, exacerbated by humiliation upon humiliation heaped upon his shoulders and, having its inception in unhealthy emotion, his fantasy sends him spiralling deeper into a delusion culminating in his drunken violation of the girl on to whom he has transferred his invented sibling.'Jill' is a novel of both tremendous wit and cruelty. The Larkin of the poems is clearly visible here, brooding on deception and deprivation, gently self-deprecating. 'Jill' is an essential read for admirers of Larkin, providing an important insight into his life and thought, as well as a glimpse of an angry, ambitious young man before the weariness set in.

Phillip Larkin is known as perhaps the greatest British pPoet of the second half of the twentieth century. This book, of a northern, working class boy's first term at Oxford in the grim fall of 1940, offers unparalelled reading pleasure.Larkin wrote this book in his early twenties, when the war was still very much in progress, and its outcome uncertain. That is only one of the reason I'd recommend it over the many romanticized WW II stories written afterwards, especially in the last decade, when revisionist history takes over, and we sketch characters of the forties as if they had the insights of the nineties. Here you get the real thing. The war is a presence in the gritty little details of life -- the privations, the routine of putting up the blackout in defense of bombing raids. Towards the end of the book, the hero returns to his northern town to find it devastated. I found Jill, and Larkin's second and final novel, A Girl in Winter, also set during war-time, bracing, even comforting reading during the first months of the current war. We see that, despite being shadowed by larger events, the inner workings of personality -- love, identity, pride -- carry on, in spite of all.I wish Larkin had written more novels, or more novelists could write like him.