3.0
Concluding
ByPublisher Description
Henry Green considered Concluding the finest of all his books
Concluding—set in a single summer day—has at its heart old Mr. Rock, a famous retired scientist: he lives in a cottage on the grounds of a girl’s boarding school. Living with him is Elizabeth, his somewhat unstrung granddaughter; his white cat; his white goose; and Daisy, his white pig. Miss Edge and Miss Baker—the two inseparable spinster harpies who run the school—scheme to dislodge him from the cottage. Concluding opens with the discovery that two of the schoolgirls have vanished in the night: searching, eavesdropping, worrying, jostling, and giggling all ensue. A love affair, a dance, that magnificent pig, small joys, and low ambitions all stream together, crowding up to the reader’s eye, as Henry Green brews up an enchanting, heartbreaking, and darkly sunny novel.Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesConcluding Reviews
3.0
“Picnic at Hanging Rock by way of Muriel Spark . . . which should make it my favorite book of all time. And yet I felt let down. There was a lot of mildly comical dithering amidst lush scenery, but very little concluding of any sort. This is the Henry Green way, but in Loving, glimmers of urgency light up the inconsequential from the inside; here they stay fully submerged within opaque characters without destinies. It's a very Greenian gag for all the girls at the State school to have names starting with "M" (Mildred, Mary, Marion, Merrotte, etc.), transforming them into an anonymous seething horde, but as with the similar gag in Loving of never directly quoting the Irish character, it's a silencing irony. Here, it fatally undercuts the stakes of the missing-girl plot (whereas in Loving the stakes of the offscreen war were tied to characters with voices). Works best as a satire of the way government bureaucracy penetrates even the idyllic English countryside.”
About Henry Green
Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing nine novels in his spare time. Anthony Burgess found his books “as solid and glittering as gems.” He also wrote an astonishing memoir, Pack My Bag, published by New Directions.
Other books by Henry Green
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