A Novel 1939
I intend to real-time review all novels of Henry Green in the tradition of my other marathon reviews of 20th Century authors, and this is my sixth one.
All my reviews of Henry Green to be linked HERE
My previous reviews of literary authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/some-of-my-serial-reviews-indexed/
My review will appear in the comment stream below….
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
It tells the story of a group of wealthy people travelling by train to a house party. Due to a fog, however, the train is much delayed and the group takes rooms in the adjacent large railway hotel. All the action of the story takes place in the hotel.
“Then you won’t be even numbers, dear, will you?”
The first section, a mishmash of characters with hatboxes etc. at the foggy railway station, and do I scry an unintended pass-the-parcel game with a dead and parcelled pigeon?
Cross-referenced with ‘The Uncanny’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/#comment-27949
London Fog laden like that at the start of BLEAK HOUSE, a woman lost in streets walking to the station, her taxi regrets, lost luggage never taken, foggy confusion who was coming on this trip, city roads like dark conduits in the afternoon, and seagulls like shadowy thirds.
My inspired miniatures yesterday and today:
“Inside, dolled up in his top hat, the station master came out under that huge vault of green he called his roof, smelled fog which disabled all his trains, looked about at fog-coloured people, his travellers who scurried though now and again they stood swaying and he thought that the air, his atmosphere, was wonderfully clear considering, although everyone did seem smudged by fog. And how was he going to find Miss Julia Wray he asked, whom he did not know by sight, and when by rights he should be in his office.” – my italics
Station master worried about the fog-coloured passengers and to impart info to the imputed leader of them. All the confused travellers confused further by our own confusion re these soon-to-be interlocking characters, their confused travelling to the station being very well evoked, but alongside one of them, a young lady, still carrying a dead pigeon in a parcel!
“He paid no attention for he was thinking of something he had forgotten.”
“Humming, he likened what he saw to being dead and thought of himself as a ghost driving through streets of the living, this darkness or that veil between him and what he saw a difference between being alive and death.”
Why did Max throw his Scotch and soda on the fire in his room? Putting off Ambel with his dithering about her visiting him? Why does he keep changing his mind about going to the ‘party’? Travel in vehicle machines through wet streets and fog that towers higher than the sun, perhaps. Is it a boat train to France or an airport he heads for? Arrives at the hotel instead?… I am still befogged as the sun machine itself!
“Again there was so much luggage round about in piles like an exaggerated grave yard, with the owners of it and their porters like mourners with the undertakers’ men, and so much agitation on one hand with subdued respectful indifference on the other…”
Much on postage and postmarks, porters prying into people’s luggage, and police come to protect the group as it musters at the hotel!
Those of you non-plussed by my adumbration of the plot can refer to an excellent article here: https://readingbug2016.wordpress.com/2016/06/21/party-going-by-henry-green-1939/
CODA: It’s final ‘elbow’ moment as finale!
‘He put his arm through Julia’s and pressed his elbow tight against it and this to her was as though he knew everything and that he was sorry for anything he might have done and that anyway it was all right. It was like sugar and water fed to plants in a last emergency and was what she had been ordered. “ Well,” he said, as though it was as easy as anything, “ we’ve got to get ready to go, they’ve just rung me up.” / I can’t bear it, Julia said to herself, it’s too wonderful, it’s too much. If we go now everything will come right, but if only we go now this instant minute, it must be at once, oh, please.’