Concluding by Henry Green

Concluding Reviews

• 
  BlackOxford

  Master of Similes
  
  Henry Green’s versatility as a stylist is astounding. His first book, Living, is a 1920’s experiment in Midlands dialect. Caught, written during WWII, on the other hand, is a stream of consciousness, neologistic piece to rival Joyce. Concluding is something else altogether: a post-war tale of bureaucratic Britain told through a sequence of similes that are sprinkled like poppies in the herbaceous borders of an English country house that has been turned into a state-owned St. Trinian’s.
  
  This English garden simile is, I hope, apt. Azaleas “sway their sweetness forwards, back, in silent church bells to the morning.” The branches of a fallen beech tree “that hung before him bent to the tide, like seaweed in the ocean.” A young girl lies half hidden under a tree which has toppled over “in the fallen world of birds, buried there like a piece of tusk burnished by shifting sands.” And rhododendrons have “flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country.”
  
  Concerned about gardening, Green has an understandable obsession with the weather: The summer sun appears through the clouds “like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it.” And then almost immediately the flowers are hidden as the fog, “redescending, blanketed these off again; as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window...” In the mansion kitchen of the now state-run country pile, the sun pours in “like soda-water through transparent milk.” Not yet done with its influence, that same sun has a certain invasive fluidity, “like a depth of warm water that turned the man’s brown city outfit to a drowned man’s clothes.” The sunlight moves “across his pig’s flanks like pink and cream snails.”
  
  And similes are not just the literary currency of the natural world; they allow Nature to intrude upon Civilisation. Two old men “moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.” One of them feels the rising curiosity of an old woman “like the smell of a fox that has just slunk by, back of some bushes.” A middle aged woman kisses her lover “fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost its arms to the propellers of a tug.” The girl under the beech tree has “heavy hair a colour of rust over a tide-washed stovepipe on a shore.” The teaching staff of the institution consider “our main function, [is] that of spinning like tops on our own axis.”
  
  Continuing the nature in mankind theme, birdsong is a favourite of Green. A girl’s young school mates titter about her “like birds at long awaited dusk in trees down by the beach.” Later “their talking was a twitter of a thousand starlings.” When in assembly they have an “outburst of talk as of starlings moving between clumps of reeds to roost.”
  
  The found girl doesn’t merely bathe after her ordeal but stretches out in her tub “like the roots of a gross water lily which had flowered to her floating head and hands.” She herself feels “as though she were bathing by floodlight in the night steaming lake, beech shadowed, mystically warmed.” And so on, and so on.
  
  Green also makes an interesting similetic innovation: a ‘sounds-like’ simile. Mr. Rock, the aged pensioner, is hard of hearing. So he, in a manner my wife says I mimic on a daily basis, mis-hears and repeats phrases. “Spoiled the peace and quiet...” becomes in Rock-speak “Pooled the diet?” The question “You mean the weather?” Is transformed into “Did you say ‘end of her tether?’” “You and your sort” becomes “Lose the fort.” Which then gets echoed back from another curmudgeon as ‘Booze the port.” I can personally attest to the inaccuracy of consonants in the hearing of the aged. Everything sounds like something else, often comically so.
  
  There is one other aspect of Concluding that also suggests Green’s intentions. The story is permeated by sexual frustration and a consequent social morass of sexual innuendo and suspicion. The disappearance of two girls is linked by rumour to every male character. The senior girls are portrayed as Lolitas out to exploit all the available men. There are intimations of rampant lesbianism - among the girls as well as between the two women who run the school, one of whom attempts to seduce the 76 year old Rock. Rock’s grand-daughter has sex with her boyfriend in the place where one of the girls is found.
  
  Building on this sexual theme, one of the more enigmatic phrases that pops up is “Who is there furnicates besides his goose?” This is but one of the offences against what the state-bureaucrats call “The odious deviations from what is usual.” Is it too much to infer that this sex is the binding simile of the entire narrative? Something like ‘The State we are creating is like a state of suppressed sexual rage and fear.’ Speculative at best; but perhaps that’s what good novels are meant to do - provoke speculation.
  
  I don’t think, therefore, that this density of similetic prose in Concluding is incidental or an idle stylistic affectation. It is meant to do work. Green is using it to make a point, to create an effect. The story of Concluding is a comedic attack on bureaucratic Britain, or at least Green’s idea of where the welfare state was headed: a proceduralised set of institutional rules which are used by skilful state employees to avoid responsibility and keep themselves in power, a somewhat more benign 1984. The literary problem of how to make believable a world that is not yet entirely arrived but that only threatens is significant. The reader must feel it to be possible. One of his characters states the problem directly, “You know, sometimes I feel as if I’d something in my head and I simply can’t get out the words.”
  
  I have no external proof but I believe that Green addressed this literary problem using the linguistic theory of ‘expressives’ developed by the American pragmatist philosopher C. I. Lewis. The academic explanation of this theory is complicated. But the common-sense version isn’t. Put simply the theory is that all language is self-referential; words only refer to and are defined by other words; the connection between words and things is not just tenuous but impossible to establish reliably.*
  
  Philosophical readers will recognise this as an issue of epistemology, that discipline which inquires about how we can know what we think we know: who to trust; what to believe; what constitutes something ‘real’. The ability to distinguish rumour, fables, lies, and suppositions from facts is one which we can all appreciate in the age of Trump and his fake news.
  
  Green establishes the epistemological theme in the search for the whereabouts of a missing girl and in the uncertainty about the decision that Mr. Rock must make about his future. But he also employs Lewis’s insight that the self-referentiality of words isn’t a circular trap but in fact offers the possibility of a helical advance in understanding the world.
  
  Words are the only thing we can connect to other words but we can make many, perhaps an infinite number of, connections among words. And every time we add a connection we move ‘upward’ not just round and round, getting more accurately expressive as we go. T.S. Eliot makes just this point in his poem Ash Wednesday when he uses the trope of the spiral staircase.
  
  Lewis specifically cites simile as the figure of speech most effective for addressing the epistemological issue of writing, especially the writing of fiction. If I am correct in my guess, Green has used Lewis’s theory of expressives as his primary literary device in Concluding in order to accomplish his objective of making the book a credibly imminent, or at least impending, picture of British society. For him, despite the unremitting sunshine diffused throughout the book “Everyone was frozen in the high summer of the State.” To melt his audience Green had to orient them with as many similetic cues as he could. And he does.
  
  *A good introduction to this theory is provided in ‘C. I. Lewis: Similetic Certitude and Epistemic Assimilation’ by SANDRA B. ROSENTHAL, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 3 (FALL, 1976), pp. 55-63
  
  Postscript: the following piece on Karl Jaspers appeared in my feed today. Jaspers’s theory of ‘ciphers’ is remarkably similar to Lewis’s ‘expressives’ in its attempt to deal with the Kantian problem of the disjunction of language and reality.
• 
  Lisa

  As I was eager to conclude my Henry Green reading with CONCLUDING, I jumped to conclusions and thought it would be concerned with CONCLUDING in the sense of COMING TO AN END. That, of course, was wrong, and I should have known it, CONCLUDING from my experience of eight previous Green novels that the word is never used in one single, defined straightforward manner.
  
  CONCLUDING is much more about BEGINNING in fact. It is about how we interpret selectively received evidence, make conclusions, and begin to spin a narrative around our ideas and the information we have got.
  
  If one character “jumps to the obvious conclusion”, another fabricates a story based on “the only possible conclusion”, which is, as you will be CONCLUDING by now, completely different from the “obvious” one, and also opposed to the “inescapable conclusion” which a third character offers.
  
  The situation of the characters is left ambiguous and vague, leaving the reader with little evidence for CONCLUDING what is real, and what is unsubstantial gossip.
  
  A girl disappears from a State School, and that sets in motion an endless chain of insinuations and guesses, all based on what individual protagonists prefer to be CONCLUDING for their own benefit. At the end of a turbulent day, the girl is still missing, and nothing is solved, but the characters are CONCLUDING that they have made progress in their respective narratives, which are only loosely connected to each other, despite the intimacy of their shared life.
  
  I am CONCLUDING my Henry Green reading now, feeling a bit shaken by the journey which started with the surprise of
  Loving, and moved on through the universe of Henry Green’s
  Living characters. I have been
  Doting on each novel, and early on decided I had to continue reading until
  Nothing was left, being
  Caught in the magic of his dialogues, cherishing the sharp analysis of the
  Blindness of human interaction. I kept coming
  Back for more until there was nothing left but CONCLUDING that I am the
  Party Going, as I am done.
  
  How to conclude such a brilliant reading experience, letting me dig deeper into the heart of Greenworld with each novel I add? How to let go of the peculiar era in which his characters move - marked by the Second World War in different ways? I decided that I am not CONCLUDING at all. I am BEGINNING, in the sense of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, uttering maybe the most famous CONCLUDING words in cinematic history:
  
  “I think this is the BEGINNING of a beautiful friendship”, she concluded!
  
  
• 
  Lisa

  Glittering with ambiguity, there is no conclusion in Concluding.. Set in an all-girls school, the events swirl around the disappearance of a student. The school administrators prevaricate about her absence, hoping they won't have to fill out a dreaded Report. The girls share secrets and rumors with shifting blame. Mr. Rock, a retired scientist living with his adult daughter in a cottage on the grounds, is seen as alternately sinister and benevolent.
  
  This is a book that I read slowly, often re-reading dialogue to decipher the perplexing intent of the speakers. What do they mean? Are they lying to each other? Are they missing each other's meaning like Mr. Rock does with his occasional deafness? And there are sentences that deserve to be re-read, just for their startling beauty. A disquieting, intense novel.
• 
  Dan

  What really happened to Rebecca/Becky/Bex, and Mary and Merode?
  
  I’ll start these reflections on Henry Green’s Concluding by admitting that I especially appreciate his novels, in the same way that I do, in no particular order, fiction by Anita Brookner, Alice McDermott, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth. For whatever reasons, even when I find a Henry Green novel confusing, frustrating, or unsettling, I always feel as if I want to reread it again and again.
  
  Concluding was Henry Green’s seventh novel, initially published in 1948. Concluding’s early pages disappointed me: it contains none of the idiosyncratic grammar, disconnected dialog, seemingly random character appearances that characterize his earlier novels to greater (Loving and Living) or lesser (Back) extents. In the first 171 pages of my New Directions edition, Concluding focuses on a single main character, the 76-year-old retired scientist Mr. Rock (alternatively referred to as “the sage” and “Gapa”), who waits anxiously to learn whether he was elected to the Academy of Sciences, together with the supporting characters of his beloved and devoted granddaughter, Elizabeth, her boyfriend and perhaps fiancé, the economics tutor Sebastian Birt, and the Misses Baker and Edge, the two senior staff of the State boarding school for girls, which provides the campus on which Concluding takes place. As Concluding proceeds, three plot lines intersect: the disappearance of Mary and Merode, two students at the school; Baker and Edge’s determination to proceed with the evening’s Founder’s Day Ball despite the disappearance of the two girls; and Baker and Edge’s plotting to evict Mr Rock and Elizabeth from the cottage on the school campus that was awarded to him in recognition of his service to the State. As the day wears on, Merode is discovered, much the worse for wear, although she refuses to speak about the circumstances of her disappearance. Mary remains missing. Has she run off with a man? Has she been murdered? Is she hiding in the basement of the great house? Green provides hints but no answers. The mystery of Mary and Merode’s disappearances and Mary’s continued absence is never unraveled for us. Concluding revolves less around the mystery of the disappearances iteself and more around the reactions of the characters to the disappearances.
  
  The Henry Green familiar to me from his six earlier books returns at about page 173 in Concluding. It’s the evening of the ball: music is blaring; the girls, the staff, and Mr. Rock dance “valses”; and overlapping conversations occur throughout the evening. The reader is left to figure out just what’s going on and to wonder when Concluding concludes about what went on and what will occur in the coming days. Will Mary re-emerge alive or will she be found murdered? Will Elizabeth and Seb marry? Will Mr. Rock receive his much anticipated honorific? Will Mr. Rock and Elizabeth be evicted from their cottage? Will the school, as directed by the State, open a pig farm to teach the girls “practical management”?
  
  Does any of this remind you of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13? Yes, me too. The mystery of Mary and Merode’s disappearances and the school community’s reaction to them remain at Concluding’s core, just as the disappearance of Rebecca/Becky/Bex and the village’s reaction to it remain at Reservoir 13’s core. The passage of time provides the superstructure for both Concluding and Reservoir 13, although Green’s novel occurs over a single day and McGregor’s occurs over thirteen years. The community in Green’s Concluding is a boarding school rather than McGregor’s village. Green and McGregor both deal beautifully with nature, although it plays a less prominent role in Concluding than in Reservoir 13. Green and McGregor both expose a tension between an underlying structure in social relationships and interactions and an inherent chaos in their respective communities. Green and McGregor illustrate the tension between social structure and social chaos against the backdrop of community rituals: in Concluding, the tamasha provides the backdrop; in Reservoir 13, the year’s turning provides the backdrop. For those of you who enjoyed Reservoir 13 and either already admire Green’s novels or are interested in introducing yourselves to his novels, I recommend Concluding, this most conventional of Green’s first seven novels.
  
  On an incidental final note, any of Green’s six first novels would have been worthy contenders for the today’s Goldsmiths and Living, Caught, and Loving would still be worthy Goldsmiths winners, fully as innovative today as when they were first published up to ninety years ago.
• 
  Dave H

  Well I really like this book. Green's writing is as lovely as ever, spun through an almost spooky lace of mystery. If you haven't read Henry Green, this may be the best place to start.
• 
  Alan

  fabulous. It is suffused with beauty and mystery even if it's about a crotchety old man and his pet goose. And a few other things.
• 
  Chris Gager

  Based on a New Yorker article ... never heard of this author before. I guess he's a cult-fave of some readers. We'll see ... starting tonight.
  
  And here we go into the unknown - to me - world of Henry Green. One of many somewhat obscure(to American readers) English novelists of the 20th century. He and John Cowper Powys might be reasonably grouped together as writers highly thought of by a cult following but otherwise somewhat lost to history - in this land at least. I got onto this via a recent New Yorker article. So far I can say that is both familiar and strange to me. The story? No need to describe it here other than to say that it seems to be functioning COMPLETELY as a means of giving the author some things to say about English culture. And these aren't little things at all. Mr. Green's prose is occasionally baffling(a la Hardy) but generally unique, interesting and challenging. A sample ...
  
  - The unflappable/inscrutable inspector visits: "His face was traditional, the colour of butcher's meat." Now there's a sentence heavy with ... something.
  
  - Mr. G. draws his characters SO WELL, and they're all infuriating and insane!
  
  - Some of the poetic prose is baffling ... unnecessary ... self-indulgent ... annoying etc.(I no longer believe this. I just took me a while to "accept" it)
  
  - WHY is no one looking for the lost girl????? The whole attitude seems to be "She'll turn up some time," and meanwhile everyone goes around protecting themselves and furthering their agendas.
  
  - NO doubt the author is making points about willful English obtuseness and about how language and speech is bent to the aim of maintaining appearances. The doings here seem to be very ... allegoric? ... symbolic? ... metaphoric?
  
  - Perhaps the ineffectual Marchbanks is an example of what comes of treating young women like little girls - another point of the book.
  
  - Ms. Edge is well-named!
  
  - Insistent biology and sexuality - even old men are seen as interesting to the love/sex-starved girls.
  
  - I wonder if Ed. St. Aubyn's two-word titles are a tribute to this author and his one-word titles?
  
  - Suggestions here of "Picnic at Hanging Rock."
  
  - Sebastian and Elizabeth are textbook English twits/lovers. But ultimately quite sympathetic.
  
  I did my usual stayed-up-late-to-finish thing with this the other night. What a strange(to me) book. But what a great one as well. Mr. Green takes these tiny, trivial doings and gives them a great air of import and ... psychological/poetic significance(?). I'm going to read it again and will possibly raise my rating to 5*. I say this despite having the feeling that I missed half of it! That's why I want to go back. What's it about? Other than what I already wrote I'm not sure. It's about the challenges of getting old. That part of the understanding of it is easy. Beyond that it's about the mysteries of Mr. Green's writing style. Reminds me of William Trevor and Alice Munro(though she's much more straight-forward), two of my most favorite. A LOT of his observations, particularly of physical settings, are sort of mystical and mysterious. His dialogue is written with an attempt at understanding of what REAL conversation between these folks might be like and he includes a running commentary about their psychic states while they're talking. What a challenge! More tomorrow when I have my notes.
  
  - The state "thing" has some significance here but I'm not sure what it is. Anti-socialism in post-war England?
  
  - There's something here that reminded me of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" but I can't remember what. The disappearance I guess...
  
  - The big celebration scene at the end goes on and on. It's awesome, terrible, weird and moving. Where are the guys? One is reminded of the whole vestal virgin thing and other pagan rites of Anc. Greece.
  
  - Mrs. Blain = Mrs. Bridges
  
  - The author chooses "brilliants" instead of "brilliance"!
  
  - The world according to Edge and Baker - upright, "Christian" and very weird. No men ...
  
  - Mr. Rock has dem ole man blues. He's trying to hang in there.
  
  I'm 25 pages into my repeat read and already have noticed and understood many things better than the first time around. Clues to the mystery, of which there are multiple here ...
  
  Back into my re-read last night and things are definitely going better the second time around. But ... much of this "plot" is but a confusing, dead-ending muddle, and those readers with conventional expectations will be frustrated. And then comes the ending - more frustration! I have to remind myself that it's not about the plot - stupid! Later on I read the recent(October) New Yorker article about Mr. Green(a pseudonym) by a literature analyst???? who was about as difficult to "get" as the author himself. Mr. G. lead a strange and interesting life. Kind of like Wallace Stevens in a way. He was in a London fire brigade during the blitz. In a way I feel like I should give this a 5* rating. It strikes me rather like "Pale Fire" and "Blood Meridian" - so different and challenging.
  
  - Reminds me a bit of Iris Murdoch, another author I need to read more of.
  
  - Even though I'm paying more attention now to clues about Mary I don't expect to solve the mystery - gives me a headache.
  
  - Lots of scenes of people willfully talking past each other - misunderstanding abounds.
  
  - The "state" thing is interesting but I'm not sure what HG is getting at. Everyone here is connected to it and vulnerable and controlled to some degree. It's a bit like 1984.
  
  - All the clues he gives point everywhere and nowhere.
  
  I'm still in a race to finish this second read before the book is due back. Should finish tonight with the whole celebration scene and the enigmatic but somewhat sinister ending. What to make of it all?
  
  - According to the state, "no domestic animal is self-sufficient" - scary!
  
  - The characters in this tale are like characters in a play or pieces on a chessboard. HG moves them around and they interact - but to what dark and hazy purpose.
  
  - HG shifts abruptly between settings in paragraph after paragraph. Takes a bit of getting used to.
  
  - Mrs. Blain = in her own world. Well out of it all in her kitchen.
  
  - "Watched the copper in its shed." - ????????? a boiler, cooker - or a butterfly ...
  
  - The Mary story builds up in bits and pieces but there's not to be any "solution."
  
  - Random gossip and dubious bits of information go flitting around the story, the scenery and the characters.
  
  - "It wants thought." = a great sentence with two quite different possible meanings.
  
  - The starlings-at-dusk scene reminds me of a scene in Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer."
  
  Well, I finished my re-read of this VERY interesting and entertaining book last night. I can give it back to the library now and it can find its way back to the library at the University of Maine at Presque Isle(UMPI). But first ...
  
  - "black and white" is s repeated theme - what's it about? What's a black and white farm?
  
  - Another ambiguous sentence: "Light was dark in the passage."?????
  
  - Upon further review(an immediate re-read), I give this book a 4.75* rating. Seems like a one of a kind thing to me, but I suppose Mr. Green's other books are in a similar vein. I'll have to start checking them out as well. Lovely, indeed ...
• 
  N N

  Was an odder book ever written by a major writer? One can well understand why no book of Green's is alleged to have sold over 10,000 copies (except presumably Loving). He famously compared Joyce and Kafka to cats which have licked their plates clean, so that it's no use following in their footsteps. In Green's own case, the plate is not even there. Reading this was more an experience than a pleasure, and each particular scene seemed more artfully put together than the overall flow (at each dip the water was as cold as the first time), but it's not a book that lets go easily. The totalitarian background, mostly hinted at, predates 1984 by a year. Curiously, housing problem, one of the major concerns of the Soviet literature (and life), is at the heart of the plot. Green seems to have read at least some of the Soviet masterworks.
• 
  Robert

  I find Henry Green's books enjoyable and imaginatively written. Part of their charm lies in the general uncertainty of the narrative--who just said that? why does so-and-so care? does it matter he proposes or not? Another facet of their charm is the dazzling quick-footed prose, the arresting similes, and the overall tenderness with which Green approaches his often benighted characters.
  
  Concluding, in my judgment, certainly isn't one of his best books, but I didn't know the when I read a completely over-the-top introduction by Eudora Welty, a serious writer enchanted by Green.
  
  The problems with Concluding lie not so much in captivating uncertainty and more in characters--with a few exceptions--who are stick figures. There are too many such types, and they interact in a diffuse "plot" that doesn't conclude at all. The major questions-- will she marry him? will he keep his cottage? will the girl be found?--are not answered as far as I can tell.
  
  So I didn't enjoy this novel until a handful of rich pages toward the very end where I thought somehow Green was going to pull it off...and then he didn't.
• 
  Megan

  This book has been very frustrating to me, so I've temporarily abandoned it. People seem to be solely self-interested, and no one actually listens to what anyone else is saying. It is realistic, but maybe I've had enough of that kind of reality.
• 
  Michalle Gould

  A twin to Picnic at Hanging Rock, but which is the good twin and which the bad? I think they're both the bad. Which is very good!
• 
  Sam

  An able dissection of a very English crisis - the disappearance of two students at an all-girls' boarding school. The plot is revealed almost entirely through dialogue.
  
  
• 
  Dan Honeywell

  As always I enjoyed another Henry Green book. I would've liked a little more closure at the end...
• 
  Janet

  I was going to give this book only three stars, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really enjoyed this book, it's certainly comparable to Partygoing. I felt frustrated that one of the main characters was nearly deaf, and many scenes centered around his misunderstanding conversations around him. As I can see that my hearing is not as acute as it once was and working with an older colleague with impaired hearing, I think I relived a lot of my frustration.....but let me tell you, the characters are unbelievably drawn, and interesting, and Green's idiosyncratic descriptions and scene setting were fantastic. The setting and the plot drew you in, even though they still had that touch of quirky fantasy and otherworldliness that sneaks into Green's work. Not a book to change your life, but amusing and fun. (And I avoided spoilers....)
• 
  hmmm

  henry green is so good what the hell
• 
  Siobhan Burns

  I was, frankly, lost. Couldn't place these people, didn't understand them, appreciated the sense of dread that the author built but felt the book didn't go anywhere.
• 
  Bob

  Green's taut prose style and a classical unity of place and time (18 hours on the grounds of some sort of state-run school for girls) make for an oddly disconcerting narrative in which the reader never quite gets comfortable. Something shocking and overtly bad seems about to break through the uneasy surface at any moment but never quite does. There are various threads which could lead to better or worse outcomes were the story to extend over some months, but it is not open-ended in the sense that one is left considering any of those possibilities.
  The two (almost stereotypically "spinster") women who run the school make continual references to the expectations and requirements of the State, and what they are prepared to do in its name. This is another slightly ominous theme in the book that never gets fully manifested but since it was published in 1948, it is easy to infer that writers other than George Orwell were feeling a change that year in the stance of the government and its degree of involvement in private life.
• 
  Amy Gentry

  Picnic at Hanging Rock by way of Muriel Spark . . . which should make it my favorite book of all time. And yet I felt let down. There was a lot of mildly comical dithering amidst lush scenery, but very little concluding of any sort. This is the Henry Green way, but in Loving, glimmers of urgency light up the inconsequential from the inside; here they stay fully submerged within opaque characters without destinies. It's a very Greenian gag for all the girls at the State school to have names starting with "M" (Mildred, Mary, Marion, Merrotte, etc.), transforming them into an anonymous seething horde, but as with the similar gag in Loving of never directly quoting the Irish character, it's a silencing irony. Here, it fatally undercuts the stakes of the missing-girl plot (whereas in Loving the stakes of the offscreen war were tied to characters with voices). Works best as a satire of the way government bureaucracy penetrates even the idyllic English countryside.
• 
  Amy

  Everything you read about Henry Green says that he's one to look at for dialogue and reticence, though I actually enjoyed reading examples pulled from his work and discussed more than reading this novel. I think this says more about me than Green. I was impatient at the time of reading, and the book requires a little patience. I could tell, though, that it was a very good book, just not what I wanted to be reading at the time. Anyway, five stars.
  
  This is the story of a day at an English school for girls. Two students go missing and not a lot's done about it, there's a dance, there's some hanky-panky in the woods, there are, of course, power struggles. It's a shifting point of view that works beautifully, the shifts are seamless, all of the characters whose thoughts we get access to compelling. And the ending's knockout. Scary and haunting and unexpected and perfect. I'll try Green again, certainly.
• 
  John

  another brilliant beauty by green, this one more enigmatic and mysterious than NOTHING or DOTING. set in a sort of training school for girls, the story circles around the disappearance of two girls; the cross-purposes between the school's two principals and a mr. rock who lives in a cottage on the school grounds; and also between mr. rock's daughter recovering from a breakdown and her romance with one of the school's instructors. all in the shadow of an impending school dance. what green nails as always is the way people speak and totally misunderstand each other, all the while creating a seamless setting with his lyrical, idiosyncratic prose. you end up feeling like you understand a little more the inexplicable dance of life.
• 
  Terry94705

  4.5 stars. Really enjoyed his "Loving" so I stuck with this even when I felt a little lost ...and it paid off. Dialogue involves a deaf and (justifiably) paranoid old man, a young woman recovering from a mental breakdown, a narcissist who makes "silly talk", deluded school administrators, and young girls in their own fantasy worlds. This cast of characters often talk to cross purposes and rarely actually communicate with one another. This can make for tough going on the reader. Nevertheless, it's a fairly brilliant book and Green is an incredibly innovative and experimental writer.
  
  The action takes place in one day at a state school where orphaned (or abandoned) girls are trained for service. It's impossible to place the date.
• 
  Kate Foley

  This was quirky to say the least. I liked all the different storylines, the fact that the entire book is set during one day, and the bizarre ending, but it was hard to keep track of everything. All of the girls at the boarding school have names that start with 'M,' which made it nearly impossible to set them apart. And since the story is set during one day, a lot of the book was long and dull.
• 
  Gabriel

  This is as well written as any, although there is a character that I believe the author based on himself that I found a little pathetic. I couldn't get this out of my mind while reading.
• 
  Jonathan

  "Frozen in the high summer of the State..." -- A quiet book about a not so future world, from which there are just a few things conspicuously missing.
• 
  Doc

  A gem of a novel, and prime evidence, as so many writers contend, that Henry Green was the finest English language novelist of the twentieth century.