A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin - 10 out of 10

 A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin

10 out of 10


This chef d'oeuvre is the work of Philip Larkin, acclaimed as the best poet of his generation, perhaps the most important of the last century, in Britain, and it has been included on The Guardian 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list.

The author intended this book to be part of trilogy in which Jill would the first part, representing innocence, A Girl in Winter, as the second part would stand for the loss of innocence, as experienced by the heroine, Katherine Lind.
The Girl in Winter is working in a library, where she is rather unhappy with the atmosphere, her obnoxious, demanding, pretentious boss, who would bring her to the limit of here patience and she is contemplating a resignation.

We know that she has written a letter to the Fennel family and she expects to have an answer from Robin, about whom we are to find out more, although he appears to remain somewhat difficult to understand to the end.
Miss Green works at the same library, in the Junior department and when she is taken very ill by the tooth that had been troubling her, it is decided that Miss Lind should help her get home and that would become almost adventurous, for the sick girl cannot continue on the bus and the heroine decides to convince her to see a dentist right away.

This would be rather difficult, for the one they find near does not work at the time and when he accepts to take the patient in, he intends to use a hypodermic, while Miss Green and her companion are expecting, nay they insist on having 'gas' to anesthetize the suffering girl.
The dentist insists this is not possible since he has no assistant, this being a day off, and the law is very clear and he cannot administer 'gas' without another qualified person present, but he is again convinced to perform the procedure, after which the colleague is taken by kind Miss Lind to her room, given milk and all the support she needs to get over the operation that had extracted the bad tooth.

Unfortunately, Miss Green's handbag had been misplaced at the pharmacy, where her companion had bought aspirins and this is the occasion to find some secrets from the life of the overbearing boss, for in the bag that belongs to a stranger, who had taken the Green handbag, there is a letter signed Lancelot, the bizarre name of the tyrant from the library.
A trip back in time would reveal the connection between the Girl in Winter and Robin Fennel, the one who had written that he would visit Katherine on this busy day, when the operation takes place, the handbag has to be recovered and the small dictator boss confronted.

The heroine had been corresponding with Robin, who is English and we do not know for sure the nationality of the main character, although a very good article in The Guardian presents the reasons why we could be almost sure that The Girl is Jewish and her home country is Germany, listing details like the mentioning of the Rhine, the fact that Robin had been studying the language, the fact that the heroine had experienced a severe trauma, by the time she returns to England as a refugee, first in London and then in a small town.
The excellent article is signed by Carol Rumens.

Katherine and Robin have enlisted with a scheme in which girls and boys from different countries wrote to each other, but the adolescent from England does not seem to be very interesting, in fact, when friends talk about this correspondence, they find the detail that he cycles on his bicycle amusing and start using this nickname for him and joke about the fact that he would write to his pen pal, decades from now, when he is married already and mention his bike trips.
It comes as a shock one day to find that the rather boring boy is inviting Katherine to visit England and stay with his family for three weeks, an invitation that is accepted and The Girl finds that he has a sister, Jane, who is much older for a teenager, given that twenty five seems middle aged for someone who is only sixteen.

Bizarrely, this sister who is an adult, is coming everywhere with her brother and his guest, in spite of the fact that she is always irritated and there are some scenes where a nadir is reached and the tension gathered is transformed into a conflict.
When they play tennis, the visitor first beats Jane, but the fact that she also wins against the boy, on his own turf, appears more surprising and he is not very pleased by it.

However, when he has the idea that he should talk for two hours everyday with Katherine in her own language, his sister is annoyed at first and then aghast, for she does not understand what they say, but she has a feeling that they mock her and this cause a breakdown and then a startling confession.

When the guest tries to apologize to Jane for the silly game, accepting to talk presumably German, the older girl tells the protagonist that she is the one who had invited her over, for her brother would have never thought about it and she was curious to meet someone from another country, especially since she had read the letters - which is upsetting their writer - and she is bored to death under the circumstances, she had abandoned school, for Robin 'has the brains of the family', tried to work for a period with a firm, was sacked, then tried to find something at her father's office and finally, resigned herself to stay about the house of her parents.
This is an emotionally awkward, demanding period for The Girl, since she seems to fall in love with Robin, although it could well be something else, an infatuation, a manifestation of change, growing up.

Reading the psychology Classic The Female Brain, we gather that at about the age of The Girl when she spends her three weeks with the Fennel family, her brain is flooded and transformed.
What happens on the River Thames, in the final chapters make the experiences, emotions, feelings of The Girl in Winter ever more interesting to follow, learn about as much as it is conceivable, intriguing and captivating.

In the aforementioned worthwhile article in The Guardian, its author speaks about this great novel and says something like...'if not a major masterpiece, A Girl in Winter is surely a minor one'

This statement is absolutely correct.