Loving

Henry Green is one of those English authors I've known about for years, but never actually read. His real name was Henry Yorke; his family was well off, with some pretentions to aristocracy on his mother's side and success in business on his father's. He attended Eton, where he struck up a friendship with Anthony Powell, and Oxford, where he began his friendship with Evelyn Waugh. His books were fairly popular, and he was considered an important modern novelist. His three novels Living (1929), Party Going (1939), and Loving (1945), were among his best regarded. Each deals with a different stratum of English society.

I settled on Loving as my first experience of Green for the simple reason that I already had a copy in my library. Knowing little of Green's fiction, I was prepared for anything, and at first expected another country house book, when I saw that it was set on a large old country estate in Ireland during World War II. But I was surprised by the extent to which Green kept his focus on the life of the servants rather than their masters. Loving turns out to be a sort of foretaste of BBC serials like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey. The main characters are Charley Raunce, a rascally footman who has just risen to the rank of butler after the death of his much respected superior, and Edith, a parlor maid who welcomes Charley's affectionate attentions. Theirs is the central love affair of the book, although their relationship is rather strained by their circumstances and personalities, which are often in conflict.

There is also a central mystery regarding an expensive sapphire ring that's been misplaced by the mistress of the house, Mrs. Tennant, who has her doubts and suspicions regarding Charley, but also fears to upset him or the other servants lest she be left short of staff during the war. While she is away in London with her daughter-in-law visiting her son who is on leave, Charley and Edith carry on their courtship and try to solve the mystery of the misplaced ring. Although Mrs. Tennant's daughter-in-law is a source of drama, she can hardly compete with the staff below stairs, who are far more sensitive to the complications and existing hierarchies of country house life in wartime Ireland.

I found the book very entertaining, and I'd like to read some of Green's other novels, which treat very different strata of English society, but I was rather disappointed by the way he chose to end his story. (Perhaps I should include a spoiler alert here.) After building up to a potentially tragic concluding conflict, he brings everything to a swift and unrealistically happy conclusion. I wondered whether I was meant to take this as irony or even cynicism, but I'm not yet prepared to say. I'll withhold judgment until I've read more. Perhaps I will also try to read Green's autobiography, Pack My Bag (1940), which would be a good addition to the other memoirs and autobiographies I've read by English authors of his generation.