Plot, character, writing style -- if you were asked to put them into order of preference, what would it be? I was talking about this to Simon the other day and we both went for writing followed by character followed by plot. If you're a plotty person and couldn't care less about the writing style, I suppose this novel might not be for you. But if you love great writing and haven't read Henry Green, I suggest you get onto him as soon as humanly possible.
I have to admit I'd never even heard of Henry Green myself until very recently. I can't actually remember now how he swam into my radar but as I seem to be on an obsessive quest to read everything written in or about the second world war, and as Loving comes into both those categories, it was an obvious choice. It stayed in the "What I'm Reading" list for rather a long time, though, and that's because I kept getting distracted and because it took me a little while to get into.
Anyway, of course Loving does have a plot. It's set in Eire sometime during the war, and takes place in a grand Anglo-Irish country house. If you think Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey you'll be on the right lines, though here the downstairs people feature a good deal more than the upstairs ones. The owners of the house are the Tennant family -- the widowed Mrs Tennant, and her son Mr Jack, who is away fighting the war, and Mrs Jack, or Violet, who is involved in a passionate love affair with neighbouring Captain Davenport, and the two little girls Miss Moira and Miss Evelyn. Then there are the servants, all but one of whom -- Paddy, the lampman, who also looks after the peacocks -- are English. The novel begins with a death:
Once upon a day an old butler named Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch. From time to time the other servants separately or in chorus gave expression to proper sentiments and then went on with what they had been doing.
After Eldon's death, the role of butler is conferred somewhat unwillingly by Mrs Tennant onto Charley Raunce, the head footman. In his early forties, devoted to his old mother back in England, Charley has long been waiting for such an opportunity, which will give him a chance to increase his income by a certain amount of quiet juggling of the accounts. He's not a bad man, but the extra money will come in useful because he is in love with Edith, the beautiful under housemaid.
He saw Edith. She was just inside the pantry where Bert watched him open mouthed. Raunce eyed her very sharp. He seemed to appraise the dark eyes she sported which were warm and yet caught the light like plums dipped in cold water.
Really, though a good deal happens in the novel, this is primarily Charley and Edith's love story. Charley's unwavering devotion, which gives him dyspepsia, and Edith's unwillingness to commit, are played out in a most adorably enticing way - we are never in much doubt how it will end, but the pleasure of the ups and downs and ins and outs of it all is very great. But of course there are many other relationships within the novel and some wonderful scenes result from them. Edith and her friend Kate share a room, massage each other's feet, sit around half naked (In the light from the open window overgrown with ivy her detached skin shone like the flower of white lilac under leaves) and talk about love. Mr Raunce's Albert, the boot boy, is desperately in love with Edith. Kate is growing closer to Paddy the lampman, whose Irish accent is so pronounced that she is the only person who understands it and she has to interpret for him at mealtimes. Mrs Welch the cook is increasingly drunk but also increasingly happy as she has acquired a small child, said to be her sister's though nobody seems quite sure, who is (very confusingly for the whole household) also called Albert. Edith steals the peacocks' eggs, preserved in waterglass, to apply to her beautiful complexion, and somebody steals Mrs Tennant's valuable sapphire ring.
And of course the novel also deals with the way in which the servants relate to their employers and vice versa, and very entertaining it is. Violet is sometimes found naked in bed with the Captain, which is the cause of much merriment in the kitchen though of course it has to be kept from Mrs Tennant. Mrs T laments the passing of the good old days when servants knew their places, suspects everyone of stealing her ring, but is forced to realise she's made so many insurance claims that she's unlikely to be able to make another one. Miss Moira and Miss Evelyn start by despising Mrs Welch's Albert but soon pick up bad habits from him. They also adore Edith a great deal more than their rather distant and preoccupied mother. And so on and so on.
Henry Green's prose style is not like anything else I have ever read, as perhaps you can see from the sentences I've quoted here. Apparently in an attempt to avoid Victorian English, which he disliked intensely, he based his writing on an 1888 translation of an Arabic travel book -- "I wished to show, and thought I might be able to show, that there was something else", he wrote to his biographer. The result is what John Updike, whose fascinating and erudite introduction is in the edition I read, describes as his "bold phrases roped together by a slack and flexible grammar". You might hate it, of course, but I thought it was magic.
This novel made me laugh, made me sometimes sad, and once I'd really got into it I couldn't put it down. My edition also has Living and Party Going in it, and I'm taking it to France with me tomorrow, so you'll probably be hearing more about Henry Green before too long.
