I've had a lot of pleasure over the years disliking the poetry of Larkin (like the style, hate the substance) and so it was with little enthusiasm that I opened Jill
John Kemp, fresh from grammar school in northern England, is about to start at Oxford University. We meet him on the train where his social inadequacies (desire to be seen to be doing the right thing combined with no understanding of what that actually is) sees him fail to eat his lunch, and then get ostentatiously and embarrassingly fed by all those sitting near him. This kind of amusing-cum-squirm-inducing moment is where the book's success lies. I can't imagine anyone having quite as many of these moments as John Kemp but we've all had enough of them to feel considerable empathy.
Once at college our young friend gets into worse pickles seemingly by the hour, is intimidated by the public school boys and repulsed by the peculiarities of the other grammar school boys. By page 100 there was still no sign of the promised 'Jill' from the cover but she appears soon after in the midst of John's loneliness and was not at all what I was expecting.
There is more to this than a kind of poor-man's-Alan-Bennett northern boy frustration, but not much more. John is engaging enough to keep the interest in this short book and Jill is a clever little twist. In the end though it is a bit like Margaret Drabble's early work: elegant enough prose, but what's the point? The whole thing is so terribly middle class, and it's a version of the middle class that existed only briefly in the middle years of the twentieth century. It is also full of that rather demeaning distance with which Larkin deals with women. Again, to some extent this was perhaps a natural feature of the age, an age of single sex education apart from anything else, but other characters in the book lack the ineptitude and peculiarities of John (doing my best to avoid spoilers here but one could write reams on attitudes to women as displayed in Jill).
Jill does have one more point of interest though in the history of the novel. This is a sort of 'campus' novel and it has as its focus a working class young man out of his milieu. Larkin, in his introduction, notes that James Gindin has suggested that Jill contained the first such of these working-class heroes but he notes:
...if it is true, I feel bound to say that it was unintentional. In 1940 our impulse was still to minimize social differences rather than exaggerate them.
And herein lies its interest. In 1940, in time of war, one can believe that there was a genuine unifying effect. Larkin's John Kemp is not really horribly out of place: much of his isolation is in his head. It is more the perceived social inadequacies of an unconfident young man than rabid social commentary. This gives the portrait a subtlety that surprises in so young an author, and also in comparison with the rather in-your-face humour of the Lucky Jim style of novel that came shortly afterwards.
In the end, Jill
by Mike French is the most peculiar, luxuriously grotesque and enchanting of books. Isaac Steward has lost his wife and sons, he can't remember how or why and if he does what will the knowledge do to him and how will he ever find a way out of the inevitable abyss? What this densely compact novel does is take us through the psychology of grief and denial in the most weird and inventive ways. Nothing is quite as it seems and the parameters of the story serve to disorientate the reader. Wth a situation so extreme only an extreme handling of language will do. Words are very much Mike French's tools and what he constructs is not quite like anything else I've ever read.
by Patrick Hamilton has been on my bedside heap for ages and I've had twitter conversations with several people about it. It has taken me absolutely ages to read, because of my time constraints, but has been a total pleasure from start to finish. Hamilton is best known for his plays Gaslight and Rope, the second of which may or may not have been murdered by Hitchcock for the film, depending on your point of view. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky you get three novels for the price of one as it was originally published as three separate works: 'The Midnight Bell', 'The Siege of Pleasure' and 'The Plains of Cement'. The overlapping narratives deal with the lives of pub waiter Bob, prostitute Jenny, and plain but good-hearted bar maid Ella. Bob is an aspiring writer with the goodly sum of £80 saved in the bank, he falls for Jenny and the narrative leads us on a will-they/won't-they pathos laden jaunt through those twenty thousand streets, and ordinary workaday London. Hamilton's ability to build a scene and people it with characters that could step off the page is very filmic in quality, and explains his best known successes. On the page not every manoeuvre is totally successful but Bob, Ella and Jenny are beautifully drawn and many of the pub scenes are hilarious. It would make a wonderful screen play and there is a BBC adaptation. I have dropped heavy hints to Santa on that one. All in all it's made me want to read Hamilton's complete works. What a joy if they're anything like this.
by Rose Macaulay. I read and loved The Towers of Trebizond by Macaulay when I had it in stock and kept meaning to extricate it from the business for myself but never got round to it and last week I sold it! The horror! I shall have to buy it now, alongside the delightful Crewe Train. The world it depicts couldn't be more different to that of Twenty Thousand Streets. The heroine Denham is very much in the noble savage mode. Having had a free range childhood under the care of an indolent and careless father in the middle of nowhere (specifically Andorra) she finds herself living in her aunt's home in the heart of literary London. The story of her attempts to adjust and deal with the word-driven people around her is a timely one for those of us who live in a fiction-fuelled frenzy. Denholm shows just how we irritate the unconverted. I love Macaulay's writing and the sense that she keeps the reader at the end of a yoyo string, pulling us in and allowing us to see just as much of her creation as she chooses before she drops us below the line of vision again. One always gets the feeling that her books are like icebergs with so much more we can't see: omitted and deleted scenes that she won't be making available for the DVD. A bizarre and delightful book, the sort to read and re-read.
by Joan Aiken is a spikey offshoot of Mansfield Park. The plot envisages a younger sister to the three Miss Wards (Lady Bertram, Mrs Norris and Mrs Price), Harriet. Harriet is quirky combination of sensitive and practical, alternately ignored or actively disliked by her sisters and father. She is shipped off to relatives in Portsmouth as a young teen and experiences a Fanny Price like existence in the house of her uncle and becomes very close to one of her cousins (like Fanny) whilst in tandem becoming close to the charismatic utopian Lord Camber (oddly more like Jane Eyre). The denouement, when it comes, is unexpected in both its contrast with previous emotional sway of the book and one's prejudices of how a plot should run; it is no less satisfying for that however.
by Patrick deWitt which was part of her anniversary giveaway.
by Christopher Bowden. I very much enjoyed his previous books 
and especially 
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