The Real Thing

CAUGHT (196 pp.); CONCLUDING (254 pp.)--Henry Green--Viking (each $3).

One trouble with most contemporary novelists is that they keep putting words into the mouths of their characters. They also make them do things that seem out of character. English Author Henry Green is an exception and a rare one. Reading his best novels is like eavesdropping on his characters. They say and do the things they would if Green and his readers weren't around, but, without knowing it, they say and do them the way Green wants them to.

Three of Green's novels (Loving, Nothing, Back) have been published in the U.S. during the last 15 months. They are books by a writer of uneven talents, but one of them, Loving (TIME, Oct. 10, 1949), is as fresh and full of life as green grass. Both Loving and Nothing edged onto bestseller lists, and U.S. critics generally agreed that, while Green at his worst is mannered and irritating, at his best he is one of the finest writers alive. Publication of Caught and Concluding on the same day makes the point perfectly. Caught, a novel about fire fighters in London in the first years of the war, is mannered and artificial, and dull enough to have been written by a tired fireman. Concluding, a story about a government school for young girls, shows Green near his best.

Sherry & Law. The school is in the country outside London, the time is in the future--some time between tomorrow and 1984--and the teen-age girls are being trained for "State Service" under socialism. The Misses Edge and Baker, who run the school, are plain and loveless. Since their authority and comfort are all they have, and all that life and their government are apt to allot them, they spend their time trying to expand the first and deepen the second. They tipple sherry and sneak smokes, their word is law, and all seems for the best in the best of possible worlds. Nonetheless, they have their trials. For one thing, two of the girls have slipped out of the dormitory and disappeared into the night. Another bothersome fact is the existence of old Mr. Rock, a distinguished scientist who lives in a cottage on the school grounds with his granddaughter Liz, a cat named Alice, a goose named Ted and a pig named Daisy. The Misses Edge and Baker want Rock off the place so they can have his cottage. A third vexation: Sebastian, one of the instructors, is making a fool of himself with the old scientist's somewhat addle-brained granddaughter.

What Author Green does with these spare and seemingly trivial bits & pieces is beyond the reach of most novelists. He has said that novels "should be concerned with the everyday mishaps of ordinary life," and in Concluding Green gives such mishaps an atmosphere of both urgency and mystery.

Comedy & Fable. A school party for the girls, with the spinsters in charge and old Scientist Rock enjoying the adulation of the students, becomes comedy, character study and charming fable all in one. In a brief, seemingly unambitious book, without spelling anything out, Green gets a great deal said, and more understood, about what people are really like. The querulousness of old age, the cunning and hardness underneath girlish innocence, the selfishness that sparks a lot of human behavior, good and bad, are all explored without an explicit statement about any of them. Even the pall of living under an unimaginative socialist regime is understood without being underscored.

Perhaps the simplest key to Green's success is his use of dialogue. It is not merely that he has a fine ear for colloquial speech. In Conceding, as in Loving, his people give themselves away when they speak--their secret hopes, wild fears, niggling frustrations. It is Green's great gift that what they say makes a readable, even a memorable, novel.

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