gift. `Laboriously, 1 am transcribing reality.'
Personally, I preferred the more straight- forward adventure of Caravans, clearly designed, by the author of Sayotiara and South Pacific, for a super-colour film of the same type. Hardly an incident or conversation takes place except to give us loads of information, historical, social, geographical, etc., about Afghanistan, all inter- twined, however, with a goodish quest-plot and the splendid star-spangled silence of the desert. Recommended to those who like the novel as information and who, like me, don't know a darn thing about Afghanistan.
An Oxford Group
Jill. By Philip Larkin. (Faber, 21s.)
Jill was first published in 1946. `Kingsley [Amis] wrote to say he had enjoyed it very much, adding that its binding reminded him of Signal Train- ing : Telegraphy and Telephony, or possibly Ciceronis Orationes.' In the present re-issue the production is luckily reminiscent rather of Faber per sang than of combative or praetorian topics. ,Equally luckily, the text has been left almost completely unchanged. Anyone casting in Jill for portents of the notable poet-to-come will find only few and skimpy fish rising to the fly. The same goes for people wanting an autobiographi- cal catch. The same, again, goes for sociological- trend gaffers: a pity, but there it is. Although Jill may have been a disregarded good book, it wasn't a disregarded early masterpiece.
John Kemp, a nervous, intelligent working- class boy, finds himself room-mate at Oxford in 1940 with Christopher Warner, a boisterous kind man with a background completely different from Kemp's own. Kemp likes Warner, and is flattered at being inducted into Warner's round of beer, betting, chitchat about sex, academic idleness, unintermittent social life. The social life would be all right from Kemp's point of view but for the fact that Warner's circle includes nasty people as well as nice ones. In an attempt to impress this mixed gang. Kemp imagines for himself—in detail, and on paper--a delectable fifteen-year-old sister called Jill.
The effect of this girl is considerable—on Kemp. Obsessed with her, muddled and more than a little desperate, he makes a pass at a real- life Jill roughly resembling her, getting doused for his pains. Bronchial pneumonia develops. Kemp's parents come and take hint away from Oxford to recover. The things which are specially good about this are, first, the beautifully-handled invention of the (invented) eponymous heroine; and, secondly, the raw nightmarishness of the climax. Even so, it would be disobliging as well as stupid to pretend that Jill is brilliant. Its story- line is slow in getting clear of. the quayside. Occasional disparate influences (Waugh, D. H. L., Betjeman, K. Mansfield) combine imperfectly. Flickers of prose-poetry tend to lose on the swings of sentimentality what they gain on the roundabouts of accuracy. And although the trappings belong to the Oxford Mr. Larkin him- self knew, much of the incident harks back to
Previous page
