Loving.

Henry Green was an unusual man who wrote unusual books, nearly all with one-word titles ending in “-ing.” One of his best-regarded novels, Loving, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.

The plot is paper thin; it would be more accurate to say it comprises several subplots, including a lost or stolen sapphire ring, the romance between Raunce and Edith, and stories like the daughter-in-law’s affair that are almost background noise behind the nonstop dialogue among the servants. Green’s writing style is peculiar, with abrupt transitions from subject to subject and speaker to speaker and a cavalier attitude towards punctuation:

‘Now me lad she wants that glove and don’t forget.’
‘What glove?’
‘The old gardening glove Edith went birds’-nesting with,’ Raunce replied. ‘Holy Moses look at the clock,’ he went on, ‘ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy.’ He whipped out the decanter while Bert provided those tumblers that had not yet been dried. ‘God rest his soul,’ Raunce added in a different tone of voice then carried on,
‘Wet glasses? Where was you brought up?’

And the setting and subtle humor are reminiscent of Waugh and Wodehouse, two of my favorite authors, although I found Green’s prose a bit offputting until I got used to it.

Next in my queue is Green’s first novel, Living. For more on Green, this review of a biography of Green offers quite a bit of detail on his life and writing career.