Back [Paperback]

Henry Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1981

One-legged Charley Summers is finally home from the war, after several years in a German prison camp, only to find he must now deal with the death of his lover Rose. A shell-shocked romantic—slow, distant, and dreamy—he begins to have trouble telling Rose's half-sister Nancy apart from Rose herself, now buried in the village churchyard. Coping and failing to cope with the quiet realities of daily life, Charley's delusions elevate his timid courtship of a practical and unremarkable young woman into an amnesiac love story both comic and disturbing. A contemporary of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green was one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, and Back is his most haunting and personal work.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

First published in England in 1946, this takes its place with his other titles- Loving, Nothing, etc. Full of air and fluff and rose light, and sometimes more serious too, Back is about Charley Summers- a very quiet man who returns from war and a German prison camp with a couple of strikes against him; his lady love Rose is dead and he now has a peg leg. Set for the most part in a suburb and in an office in London, Charley tries to adjust to a Roseless world- a world which insists on being diffused with rose colors, rose words and horrid rose puns. Dead Rose devours him on the one hand and government contracts (he deals in parabolam, bird droppings, needle valves, etc.) on the other, and one day he meets what he supposes to be Rose. Actually she is Nance, Rose's half-sister-through a misdemeanor on Rose's father's part. There are unholy coincidences scattered throughout which give the impression that this Henry Green world is a wild, unsafe, but haphazardly genteel place to live. The skillful coupling of love talk and office terminology, the dexterous handling of characters who seem at first glance to be picked bone clean but who turn into cream, and the view of a world just a little off center make Back a delightful, wispy and original experience. For his established audience.—Kirkus Reviews

"Green belongs to the mad tradition in English literature—Sterne, Carroll, Firbank, and Mrs. Woolf." --V. S. Pritchett

"Nobody writes novels quite like Henry Green . . . His characters . . . dance to a tune of his own as precise and stylized as a sonata."—New York Herald Tribune

"The best writer of his time." --Rebecca West

"Green's books remain solid and glittering as gems." --Anthony Burgess --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Henry Green was the pen-name of Henry Yorke, the son of a prosperous Midlands family with aristocratic roots. He was born in 1905 near Tewkesbury and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He entered the family business—producing beer-bottling machines—on the factory floor, and went on to run the firm while writing novels in his spare time. He is the author of Pack My Bag, a memoir, and nine novels including Blindness, Nothing, and Doting. Green died in 1973. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (April 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811207986
• ISBN-13: 978-0811207980
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,972,309 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars weirdness made compelling and finally lovable, September 10, 2010

By 

Lydia Alix Fillingham (Watertown, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Back (British Literature Series) (Paperback)

First, there IS no one who writes like Henry Green, and it is hard to describe the experience of reading him. He has his own cadences, both in words and phrasing, and in the passing of time. It is as if one has entered another universe, but one that is more firmly our own. It is not realism, except that it makes you feel piercing intense emotions that feel too real to bear.

Second, he isn't for everyone. I knew my husband wouldn't like it because the main character cannot expresses his emotions at the beginning, and cannot by the end. Also I gave my husband an outline of the plot, and he said, "But that is just too ridiculously unbelievable."

Then, just after I finished reading the book, I picked up the book my husband was reading, Roth's "American Pastoral," started reading it, and thought, wait, is this Henry Green I am reading? It sounds just like him. No doubt there are unexplored similarities between Roth and Green, but what I think was happening was that Green's voice is simply so all-encompassingly strong, that at that moment anything I picked up would have sounded like Green.

So it is great because it makes you see the world anew, I mean, that is a cliche of greatness that he does pull off, but what is it here that we see here? For me, an appreciation of the effects of war on the men caught up in it, even though the book only gives ever one small detail of the 4 years Charley has spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp. A feeling for how much confusion can be brought to us by love that doesn't work out as we would wish, and of the sheer stubbornness of the brain when it doesn't want to accept things.

It's also about how a writer can create characters out of bits and scraps, and we soon start rooting for them. But then it turns around and we see we are all just made up of bits and scraps.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roses around the headstones, May 14, 2009

By 

Noddy Box (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Back (British Literature Series) (Paperback)

Two quick but more or less final conclusions on finishing this quietly devastating English novel from 1946: You are never once allowed to forget that you are reading words intricately and even eccentrically arranged by the inimitable Henry Green. Yet the quixotically deranged character of one-legged Charley Summers is rendered so vividly and so indelibly as to make the writing appear all but invisible.