Loving; Living; Party Going [Paperback]

"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.

'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.

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.