/Takes massive bong rip.

Hey dudes and dudettes. It’s time for nomonkeyfun’s Forgotten Book Club.

Don’t worry. I fly out to Colorado every time I write this article. I won’t be going to jail, at least as long as Nobama is the President.

So, anyway, this week I want to tell you about Henry Green. If you look him up on Wikipedia you find him described as an author’s author. That is an accurate description, but he is more than that.

Henry Green was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell (another author I plan to discuss).   He wrote his first novel while he was still a student at Oxford. Like Orwell, another contemporary he wrote in large part about his personal experiences.   Unlike Powell, Henry Green was a convinced Tory his entire life.

Don’t let that fact dissuade you from reading his novels. He was a man who was able to write with a spectacular ear for the dialect and feelings of the workingman and woman. His second completed novel, Living, was split between a family of factory workers and the family that owned the factory.

The text of the book was designed to mimic the speech patterns of blue collar Brummies from the 1920‘s.

Brummy speech included here.

Just to let you know the first 20-30 pages are really difficult to get through, once you are used to the speech patterns, you will fly through the book.

His next novel was Party Going, this is the sort of book one would expect from a conservative, who had gone to all the right schools. The entire book is set in a train station, when London is enveloped in such a fog that no trains are leaving the station. A group of people that are heading to a county house for a weekend meets up in one manner or another at the station and its hotel. The most memorable part of the book is in the early stages, involving a dead pigeon. I won’t say anything more about the book, except that it is truly worth a read.

Finally, we get to the war and early post war novels. First is Caught, which is based on Green’s experiences in the London fire brigade during the blitz. The early part of the book is a psychological exposition on many of the blue-collar men Green served with. The second half has the harrowing action of the blitz we all know, and the effect it had on the men who fought the fires day in and day out. There are some strange personal twists and turns that are only appropriate in a novel throughout the book, but they do bring the story together.

After this we come to Back, an early post war experience novel. This tells the story of a young man who comes back from the German POW camps before the end of the war, because he has lost a leg. The real conflict comes, because the love of his life has died while he was in a German POW camp. However, he can’t properly mourn her, because she was married to another man, and had a child by him. Eventually, that woman’s Father puts our protagonist in touch with another woman who is the spitting image of his one and only.

I haven’t mentioned Henry Green’s most famous book. And I won’t describe it. It is called Loving, while he was in the London Fire Brigade, one of his confederates told him that a butler in a country house said that his favorite thing in the world was, “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.”

If there was ever a sentence that was more appropriate for this website I haven’t come across it.

Good Reading.