Jill
by Philip Larkin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip LarkinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1984-08-22
ISBN: 0879519614
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Overlook TP
Book Reviews of Jill
Book Review: Tumble After Jill, If You Will
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
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