Henry Green’s Wartime Novels
Caught
by Henry Green. NYRB Classics, 2016, $14.00 paper.
Loving
by Henry Green. NYRB Classics, 2016, $14.00 paper.
Back
by Henry Green. NYRB Classics, 2016, $14.00 paper.
AT THE beginning of Henry Green’s fourth novel, which was published in 1943 and takes place in England at the start of the war—Richard Roe, an enlistee in London’s Auxiliary Fire Service, is granted a brief leave and takes a train to visit his wife and five-year-old son, Christopher, who have fled to the country. An eight-year-old cousin who came along to the train station to meet him “was old enough to say some of the conventional things when they shook hands,” but what Christopher says and does, at five, is unmediated by convention. He is sometimes difficult, sometimes shy or simply inexplicable. The father is shy too, or anxious to please, or regretful about the distance between them, or baffled, or upset. When he takes his son for a walk, he thinks that such a walk may never happen again: he expects to die in the war. Some moments are companionable and good. “They found a dead mouse,” we read. Like many passages in the three novels Green wrote during the was published in 1945 and in 1946—the scenes about Christopher and his father are painful to read but thrillingly recognizable. There are so many ways in which human beings may fail to understand each other, or act at cross-purposes, or make a connection so brief it ends before they quite realize it has happened.
