Henry Green’s Loving appears to only be in print in the U.S. in a volume
Living was Green’s first novel, and was the worst of the three in this volume by a fair margin. The story is, as is typical for Green, thin, revolving around workers in a Birmingham foundry that is poorly managed by its declining owner and that faces upheaval when he dies. The prose, however, is excruciating, because Green chose to omit most definite and indefinite articles, so even strong phrasings become painful to read:
Were tins of pineapple in that shop window and she wondered and languor fell on her like in a mist as when the warm air comes down in cold earth; in images she saw in her heart sun countries, sun, and the infinite ease of warmth.
The closest thing to a central storyline is the secret romance between Lily and Bert, a factory worker who sees no future for himself in Birmingham and decides to elope with Lily and move to Canada. The unraveling of that romance is one of the most absurd ends to a plot that I have ever seen, rivaling Tony Last’s fate in A Handful of Dust.
Party Going, on the other hand, is more conventionally written and, while not classically plotted, at least follows a more defined pattern by showing us a specific block of time for a specific set of characters. Those characters, a group of friends plotting a getaway to the south of France, end up stuck in a railway station and then in its associated hotel when the trains are all delayed indefinitely by fog. Their reactions to various inconveniences (mostly minor) and to the sudden, unexplained illness of the aunt of one member of the party make up the bulk of the action of the novel, although there’s a bit more drama when the crazy girlfriend of one of the characters shows up unannounced as if she was supposed to be on the trip all along.
As bad as Green’s prose was in Living from a readability standpoint, the prose in Party Going is the novel’s greatest strength:
Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone. Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.
Even when he lapses into the modernist style of Woolf or James, he can still craft an image compelling enough to pull the reader through the awkward syntax:
Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances.
Party Going also offers more small humor along the lines of Loving, including some witty dialogue between the characters and other lines demonstrating their lack of self-awareness when trying to treat station workers like servants, while Living was nearly devoid of humor save that of the old-guard managers at the foundry who attempt to stymie the young boss trying to coax changes in the plant’s operations. Green also shifts back and forth deftly between the primary focus on the fatuous upper-class twits at the novel’s center and their beleaguered servants who, by the way, have to wait out the fog in the station while their masters relax in comfort in the hotel.
EDIT: Almost forgot – one thing I did wonder about Party Going, which Green wrote in the late 1930s, was whether the fog represented Nazi Germany, creeping up on an England too wrapped up in itself to notice the impending danger. The fog lifts at the novel’s end, which probably disproves the theory, although I could craft an argument that Green was commenting on the English aristocracy’s reliance on luck, fate, God, or simply on other parties to get it out of trouble.
Next up: The Grapes of Wrath
is the simplest, even with 
. The game board shows the U.S. and Canada, with about 30 cities connected by train tracks of varying lengths. Each player receives 45 trains and begins with a handful of “destination tickets,” with two cities and a point value that represents the minimum number of trains required to connect them; if you complete a route between two cities on a ticket, no matter how convoluted the path, you receive the number of points shown on the card, but if you fail to complete it, you lose that many points. (You do have some flexibility around the tickets you keep.) The tracks come in different colors, and you have to collect train cards of each color to be able to lay trains on those tracks; the longer the track between two adjacent cities, the more points you receive for placing trains on it. Of course, the tracks between cities are limited, so you may end up blocked from your intended route. There’s also a bonus for the longest continuous route (regardless of tickets), and in the “Mega” game variant, a bonus for completing the most tickets. It’s a pretty simple concept and everyone we’ve introduced to the game has picked it up pretty quickly, but the game is completely different each time because of the mix of tickets you receive and the way the board develops. A complete game with two people takes 30-45 minutes; a complete game with four people takes an hour or so.
, which brings the same basic mechanics to a new map, that of Europe in the early 20th century, but with several twists to make game play more complex. The differences include routes through “tunnels” (where the exact number of train cards required isn’t known until after you start building, so you may have to use as many as three extra cards) and “ferries” (which require the use of locomotives, which are otherwise wild cards that represent every color), and train stations that allow you to use someone else’s route between two adjacent cities as part of your own larger route. I found it to be slower to develop, but it requires more route-planning strategy, and the flexibility of the stations means it’s easier to adjust on the fly.
. This map is smaller, designed for two or three people using 40 trains each (you use the trains and train cards from the Europe set, so the Switzerland expansion just comes with the board and new tickets). It was obviously issued hastily, as the instructions are woefully incomplete. Many tickets are extremely short – some require just two trains – which means you end spending a lot of time pulling new tickets, and you will almost certainly end up blocked by an opponent at some point during the game. A smaller board for a quicker game sounded appealing to us, but this implementation didn’t work for me.