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
, one of Larkin's two novels. Shock, horror, I enjoyed every page. Not that it is without faults, but it is very much a piece of juvenilia and Larkin pleads for leniency in the introduction to my 1986 Faber edition.
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 is rather a sweet little book, an interlude in social and literary history, and a pleasant though undemanding read.
, published this week, is novelist Edward Hogan's first book for young adults. I was delighted to receive a copy to review. I am considerably less pleased now to have to write a review because it was so very, very good I'm going to sound like the author's mother. Do others find it hardest to review their favourite books? Anyway ...
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