Customer Reviews

Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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4 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Written at the end of the Second World War, sandwiched between 'Once upon a day' and 'they lived happily ever after', a death and a marriage, 'Loving' is a fairy tale of the rarest enchantment. While war and social disruption echo from the 'real' world, 'Loving' offers us a sprawling castle from which we never leave, crowded with brilliant peacocks, doves making love on a huge dovecote replica of Pisa's Leaning Tower, and the most elaborately absurd decor in fiction. Within this rarefied, hermetic milieu, broadly familiar from the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh, unravels a tale of a declining aristocracy (the cuckolded man of the house is at war) and cast of bickering, spying, scheming, anxious, unsettled servants, with the focus, unusually, on the latter, especially Raunce the new butler, and Edith, the beautiful, lively maid, two of the richest characters in fiction, not because they're particularly extraordinary, but because Green, in fleet, tightly packed comic-romantic-ironic-prismatic prose, remains alert and faithful to their every mood, whim, desire and fear, creating a genuine, joyful, life-like unexpectedness, and, in the combination of unreal surroundings and emotional realism, rapture after rapture of epiphany, such as the distant sight of two girls waltzing to a worn phonograph, endlessly reflected in the glass of a chandelier. It is one of my favourite books.

'Living' is an astonishing achievement by any standards, never mind those of a 24-year-old, and one that suggests that Green's peers are not his schoolfriends Waugh or Anthony Powell, but prose-poets like Virginia Woolf or Samuel Beckett who try to capture the quicksilver complexity of human behaviour. Like 'Loving', 'Living' is a story of the working class, here labourers in an iron foundary in Birmingham, and their wives, daughters and children, with their 'superiors' again playing a subordinate, even ridiculous role. The novel's style is at first daunting, spliced into cross-cutting vignettes, and written in a language that approximates a proletarian idiom. This could have been embarrassingly patronising, a la Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett, but actually facilitates an elastic language full of pure, pregnant poetry. The sharp cross-cutting highlights the novel's many divisions - boss-worker, man-woman, young-old, community-individual etc. - but also connects them in unexpected ways. The title is typically multi-layered - meaning the work people have to do; the way it defines their lives; the struggles of people to better their lives, or simply to live well in an atmosphere of mechanical routine; the idea of class or work as a living in the religious sense, as a vocation you can't avoid. Rigid livelihoods and iron works, a world where the public and private are virtually indistinct, paradoxically produce metaphors emphasising flight, water and fluidity.

The focus of these two novels is reversed in 'Party Going', with its cast of brittle Bright Young Things going on holiday to the Riviera. In a startling narrative conceit predating by two decades Bunuel's similar film 'The Exterminating Angel', the entire novel takes place during four hours in a London railway station, as the passengers are stranded by a heavy fog. Wrenched out of a glittering social context, the party-goers' superficial personalities are exposed, their petty selfishness barely masking fears (identity, sexual, social, gender, age, the future etc.) and resentments. As their tempers fray in the railway hotel, the suburban crowd below sing and laugh and grow increasingly irked outside, a terrible mass embodying various hysterical anxieties for the socialites when they can be bothered to notice them. As this structural image suggests, 'Party Going' can be read as a 'State of the nation' allegory, written between 1931 and 1938, and oppressively articulating the general deterioration of a decade Auden called 'low, dishonest' - it is irresistable to see it portending the coming war and social upheaval. The novel begins with a character finding a dead bird, and besides the fog-dark plot inertia that stills the novel, 'Party Going' is suffused with thoughts and images of sickness and death, its minimum narrative unfolding in interminable, sterile tableaux. If this makes it sound like a downer party, I must add that it is Green's funniest novel, with situations and dialogue as laugh-out-loud funny as Waugh, but with the added, mercurial Green poetry (water and birds again) and descriptive geometry, lending dignity and depth to non-entities who don't seem to deserve it.

Three novels - some of the most remarkable prose of the 20th century.

If John Updike is a writer's writer, Henry Green is a writer's writer's writer! This volume is an excellent introduction to this little known, fascinating, 20th century British writer.

"Loving" reminds one of "Remains of the Day" but even though it was written decades earlier is richer in theme (notice the peacocks in the book).

"Living" is my favorite of Green's novels, a lovely evocation of working class life that contains some of the most beautiful prose of the 20th century (stylisticly, Green eschews the use of articles, and this gives his prose an other-worldly poetic quality).

"Party Going" is at once more existential and more funny... upper class silly young things (kindred spirits of Bertie Wooster) are caught in an Ionesco-esqe fog that traps them in a train station (notice the pigeons in the book).

If you love Green as much as I did after finishing this volume, you'll quickly seek out his other 6 books.

Have you ever sat and thought, man, I wish someone would write a book about living? And possibly loving? Well, Henry Green has gone out and done just that. I had never thought that a book about going to parties might be necessary, but after reading it I think that Mr. Green has indeed performed a valuable service. This wonderful collection of novels is, quite frankly, a comprehensive exploration, and no new books need be written on any of these subjects.

In any case, the writing made my jaw drop in spots, it was so good, and Green way of looking at things is funny and humane while being mercilessly clear-eyed. The only reason I think they've stopped teaching his books in colleges is because they don't have the sort of things one can write papers about: complicated networks of imagery and whatnot that can be dug out of the text and have a title slapped on them. Green's book are too alive to have anything particularly systematic going on in them, while retaining the structure and unity of true works of art. Amazing books, go out and read them.

I'm sad that the reader from Maine felt so insulted by Mr Green's work. I can only guess that he or she thought they had bought a contemporary pot-boiler to read on the airplane and were shocked to find they were reading a 20th century classic, because the criticism of the dialogue was entirely unjustified. The dialogue in Loving is wonderful - precisely because it is so clearly of another age. It is through the language of this novel that we understand and become enmeshed by its central themes.

All three of these novels are terrific, but I think PARTY GOING is really Green's masterpiece. It's one of the funniest accounts of the Bright Young Things ever written, but it veers beyond Waugh to say much more serious things about class, modernity, social maneuvering, and abovve all compassion--Miss Fellowes' determination to take care of the dead pigeon, while initially absurd, comes to reach almost Shakespearean proportions in its utter pathos and dignity.

Green is always overlooked by fans of British social comedy simply because his prose is initially so surprising. But there's a real cult around his writings, and if you start with LOVING (the most accessible of his novels, and one of the best), you'll quickly see why.

I have read both of the three-novel volumes published by Penguin, and while I think even the worst of these is at least good, LOVING shines out as one of the best novels that I have ever read. Set in Ireland during WW II and consisting almost entirely of dialogue (no narrative voice worth noting), it tells a poignant yet hopeful story of love in the upper and servant classes of a country castle and estate. The ending is one of the very best that I have encountered, rivaling my other favorite endings (BROTHERS KARAMOZOV, THE WHITE HOTEL, and POSSESSION).

I had serious reservations about the Modern Library list of the 100 Greatest English Novels of the 20th century, but I was delighted to see that they included LOVING.

LIVING is not as strong as the other two books, but PARTY GOING, while not the masterpiece that LOVING is, is nonetheless a very, very fine book indeed.

Party Going alone is worth the price of admission. Don't be put off by Green's style. He isn't flouting the rules of grammar for his own amusement; he isn't experimenting for no good reason. Give him a few pages and you'll learn to love the rhythms of his gloriously weird prose. There are passages here more beautiful than anything else I've read in 20th century English fiction. And he isn't just a stylist: all of his books are coupled by characters that are lovingly developed. They're interesting despite being completely ordinary. They think no deep thoughts; they do nothing that's especially sympathetic or noteworthy; they don't seem to be carrying any sort of symbolic weight. They're just normal people interacting with each other. The book doesn't even move according to anything that could be traditionally considered a "plot."

But somehow you never want to miss a word. These are books that you can read again and again and again without getting bored. I have no idea how Green does it. He's an absolute magician. Read Party Going and Loving, at the very least.

"Party Going" occasionally rises to the heights of world-class satire. The storyline centres on a bunch of irresponsible rich kids fatuously whiling away the hours in a hotel which has barricaded its entrance against the common people outside. The metaphor is powerful. There are hilarious images, too, such as the comparison of silly but very wealthy young women hunting for husbands with camels plodding determinedly through the desert. My only reservation is that sometimes Green's sentences are over-complicated for what should be a smooth-as-ice satire. Green is said to have hugely admired William Faulkner, but perhaps he allowed Faulkner's influence on him to go too far.

"Loving" and "Nothing" are exceptional books and fuse literary experimentation with social satire. "Loving" is possibly the most accessible of his novels; if you dislike it, the chances are good that you will hate everything else he wrote (but you will probably avoid him anyway). But if you enjoy the moments of stunning imagery and artistic innovation -- despite Green's idiosyncratic use of grammar -- you should want to read all of the remaining novels. "Nothing," therefore, is my next recommendation: consisting almost entirely of dialogue, it is a model of parallelism in which four characters move apart, come together again, then shift once more in their emotional attachments (all set within similar repeating scenes) -- a clever overlapping of different generations at a time when old and new worlds were both threatening to fall apart.

"Loving" is one of the better books of the century. In prose that is singularly musical, Green limns the lives of the English servant class. Somehow, also, the book is about war, honor, and human love. Please read it-- Green is to good a writer to be ignored.