Writing is all just words, isn’t it? After all, differences in language notwithstanding, each writer uses essentially the same building blocks. Well, there’s nothing like reading a book where an author writes about a relatively unremarkable situation in an apparently ordinary way – yet still produces something utterly distinctive – to demonstrate that there’s so much more at play than only words. Henry Green’s Loving concerns the lives of the servants and masters of an Irish country house during World War Two, is told largely through dialogue – on the surface, nothing too unusual; but the way Green approaches his material turns it into something more.
Reading the dialogue of Green’s characters is rather like eavesdropping on them: sometimes we join them ‘in the middle’ of a discussion, and there’s often a sense of details remaining unsaid, as of course happens in real conversation. Come to that, there’s a naturalistic feel in general to the structures and rhythms of Green’s dialogue; that, and other techniques such as shifting between separate conversations without a scene-break, encourage a slow, concentrated approach to reading, which suits a book that reveals its details gradually and obliquely.
What emerges within the pages of Loving is a portrait ofKinaltyCastle as a building of contested space: the different servants have their own areas, and for one to enter another’s domain has political meaning. Charley Raunce, the head footman, seizes the opportunity to move up in the hierarchy when the old butler dies; but his wish for one of the maids (rather than his own pantry boy) to bring his tea in the morning becomes a bone of contention because of the shift in power it would represent. Even the manner in which one addresses another is important for the relationship it indicates; Agatha Burch, the head housemaid, tells Raunce: ‘you’ll never get a Mr out of me not ever, even if there is a war on.’
Loving begins with ‘Once upon a day…’ and ends with ‘…happily ever after’, though it’s clear enough that conventional fairytale happiness will not be easy for the characters to achieve. Yet there is something of the fantastical edifice about Kinalty: its inhabitants are so isolated from the war and the outside that the castle effectively becomes a threshold between worlds; the vivid imagery Green often uses to describe Kinalty only adds to the atmosphere of intrigue.
Then, as the novel’s title suggests, there is love. From the complex dance of attraction between Raunce and the maid Edith, to Violet Tennant’s (daughter-in-law of the household) dealing with the absence of her soldier husband Jack – and beyond – love manifests itself in various ways as part of the novel’s web. I don’t think I’ve come across a novel quite like Loving before, and would certainly be intrigued to read Green again.
Thanks to Stu from Winstonsdad’s Blog for hosting Henry Green Week, which was what led me to read this book.
Penguin have reissued all eight Adrian Mole books in new editions to mark the anniversary, and it has been interesting to revisit some of them. Certainly The Secret Diary remains a beautifully-crafted comic gem, and its 1984 sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (which begins the day after the first novel ends), is much the same. Through the pages of his diary, we meet Adrian Mole: convinced he is an intellectual, obsessed over the spot on his chin, with a crush on the lovely Pandora Braithwaite; yet unaware of how bad his poetry is, and oblivious to the signs of his parents’ marital turmoil.
In 2009’s The Prostrate Years, Adrian Mole is thirty-nine; living with his wife and young daughter, in a converted pigsty next door to his parents – though his marriage is under strain, and the future of the second-hand bookshop where Adrian works is uncertain. His key character traits are the same as ever, but there’s a bitter sting in that, now, Adrian is trying his best to ignore the signs of prostate cancer. He’s a sympathetic character once again, because of the sense that he is trying to hold on to himself and his life in the face of all that’s happening; the single word ‘treatment’ in many entries gains its force from how much is obviously being left unsaid by this character who has always been so open. The dramatic irony of Mole’s asides carries more bite here than in the earliest books (‘It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there’), and it serves as a reminder that none of us knows what may be around the corner.
Satish Patel was a boy at the time of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the son of an immigrant Ugandan family in an otherwise all-white Buckinghamshire village; he was a key figure in a photograph taken of the village’s Jubilee celebrations, an image which became iconic. Thirty years on, Satish is a successful cardiologist with a habit of helping himself to diazepam from the medicine cabinet; he receives a call from an old friend, telling him of plans to stage a reconstruction of the photo – but Satish is reluctant to take part.
Time for a look at the latest in 
The Mabinogion story of 
