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Caught
During the Blitz, Henry Green served on the London Auxiliary Fire Service, and this experience lies behind Caught, published when the bombing had only recently ended.
Like Green, Richard Roe, the hero of this resolutely unheroic book, comes from the upper class. His wife remains at their country estate, far from the threatened city, while Roe serves under Pye, a professional fireman whose deranged sister once kidnapped Roe’s young son, a bad memory that complicates the relationship between these two very different men. The book opens as the various members of the brigade are having practice runs and fighting boredom and sleeping around in the months before the attack from the air. It ends with Roe, who has been injured in the bombing, back in the country, describing and trying to come to terms with the apocalyptic conflagration in which he and his fellows were caught, putting into question the very notion of ordinary life.
Caught was censored at the insistence of its publisher, Leonard Woolf, when it came out in 1943. This is the first American edition of the book to appear as Green intended.
Like Green, Richard Roe, the hero of this resolutely unheroic book, comes from the upper class. His wife remains at their country estate, far from the threatened city, while Roe serves under Pye, a professional fireman whose deranged sister once kidnapped Roe’s young son, a bad memory that complicates the relationship between these two very different men. The book opens as the various members of the brigade are having practice runs and fighting boredom and sleeping around in the months before the attack from the air. It ends with Roe, who has been injured in the bombing, back in the country, describing and trying to come to terms with the apocalyptic conflagration in which he and his fellows were caught, putting into question the very notion of ordinary life.
Caught was censored at the insistence of its publisher, Leonard Woolf, when it came out in 1943. This is the first American edition of the book to appear as Green intended.
191 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1943
28 people are currently reading
1252 people want to read
About the author
Henry Green
59 books210 followersHenry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke.
Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with successful business interests. His father Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham. His mother, Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham, was daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended Eton College, where he became friends with fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, Blindness. He studied at Oxford University and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh.
Green left Oxford in 1926 without taking a degree and returned to Birmingham to engage in his family business. He started by working with the ordinary workers on the factory floor of his family's factory, which produced beer-bottling machines, and later became the managing director. During this time he gained the experience to write Living, his second novel, which he worked on during 1927 and 1928. In 1929, he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, also known as 'Dig'. They were both great-grandchildren of the 1st Baron Leconfield. Their son Sebastian was born in 1934. In 1940, Green published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate autobiography. During World War II Green served as a fireman in the Auxiliary Fire Service and these wartime experiences are echoed in his novel Caught; they were also a strong influence on his subsequent novel, Back.
Green's last published novel was Doting (1952); this was the end of his writing career. In his later years, until his death in 1973, he became increasingly focused on studies of the Ottoman Empire, and became alcoholic and reclusive. Politically, Green was a traditional Tory throughout his life.
Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with successful business interests. His father Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham. His mother, Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham, was daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended Eton College, where he became friends with fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, Blindness. He studied at Oxford University and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh.
Green left Oxford in 1926 without taking a degree and returned to Birmingham to engage in his family business. He started by working with the ordinary workers on the factory floor of his family's factory, which produced beer-bottling machines, and later became the managing director. During this time he gained the experience to write Living, his second novel, which he worked on during 1927 and 1928. In 1929, he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, also known as 'Dig'. They were both great-grandchildren of the 1st Baron Leconfield. Their son Sebastian was born in 1934. In 1940, Green published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate autobiography. During World War II Green served as a fireman in the Auxiliary Fire Service and these wartime experiences are echoed in his novel Caught; they were also a strong influence on his subsequent novel, Back.
Green's last published novel was Doting (1952); this was the end of his writing career. In his later years, until his death in 1973, he became increasingly focused on studies of the Ottoman Empire, and became alcoholic and reclusive. Politically, Green was a traditional Tory throughout his life.
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March 10, 2025
Henry Green started his writing career as a modernist… The modernist he did remain…
The main character seems to be vaguely based on the author himself…
He visited his son in the country and on returning he remembers how not long time ago his son was abducted in the shop by a woman not quite right in her head…
At first everything is quiet… Performing duties from day to day is no burden… His relations with his superior officer aren’t quite easy… Then bombs start falling down…
Whatever happens one must do one’s bit.
The main character seems to be vaguely based on the author himself…
When war broke out in September we were told to expect air raids. Christopher, who was five, had been visiting his grandparents in the country. His father and mother decided that he must stay down there with his aunt, and not come back to London until the war was over. His mother, Dy, went away to join him.
The father, Richard Roe, had joined the Fire Service as an Auxiliary. He was allowed one day’s leave in three. That is, throughout forty-eight hours he stood by in case there should be a fire, and then had twenty-four in which he could do as he pleased.
He visited his son in the country and on returning he remembers how not long time ago his son was abducted in the shop by a woman not quite right in her head…
At first everything is quiet… Performing duties from day to day is no burden… His relations with his superior officer aren’t quite easy… Then bombs start falling down…
Almost twelve months to a day after this conversation Richard was number one, that is in charge of a pump, called during the night blitz to an incident at which two heavy bombs had fallen within a hundred yards of each other.
Whatever happens one must do one’s bit.
April 10, 2018
Have you ever been CAUGHT?
Think about if for a moment. There are so many ways to interpret that question. Actually, I might catch you off guard, and make you confess something you hadn't planned on telling me, just because your idea of being CAUGHT makes a certain situation in your memory stick out. CAUGHT you!
People can be CAUGHT doing illegal or inappropriate things. But most of the time, they are CAUGHT in the process of committing quite banal crimes, like secretly leaving work early, and have a colleague "cover" for them. Or they are CAUGHT sponging on a friend in a bar, or telling a lie, or being a coward.
How does it make one feel - being CAUGHT? What do people do to cover their tracks or smooth over their mistakes?
Henry Green, the master of dialogues, embarrassed silences and telling body language, lets a whole set of people - working at a wartime fire station in London - be CAUGHT in various situations, ranging from child abduction and secret love affairs to small mistakes without legal impact but of immense importance for the person's standing in the group.
If you are CAUGHT doing something you should not be doing, you share a secret, which can be passed on as gossip to others, in bits and pieces, and as a consequence, you can be CAUGHT spreading rumours as well. You can be CAUGHT in your painful past, or in an unhealthy relationship or in your worries and feelings. A conflict can catch fire, and several colleagues find themselves CAUGHT in an unpleasant situation. And most of all, you can share the experience of being CAUGHT in the nightmare of the London Blitz, and the horror of a city burning bright.
And the whole question can be turned around, and regarded from the other perspective as well. Have you ever CAUGHT anyone?
And if so, what did you feel, what did you do? Did you "cover" for him or her? Or did you pass your knowledge on as gossip among friends? Did you tell your parents or teachers or boss about it? Did you feel a moment of power? Or did you use it to your advantage? CAUGHT in a tricky situation, what would you choose to do?
I was CAUGHT by Henry Green, and he won't let me off the hook until I have fully explored his universe of catchy words and phrases, of his characters CAUGHT in spider webs of actions and feelings, of causes and effects expressed in small symbolic gestures and loosely connected dialogues.
In CAUGHT, there is more dramatic plot and action than in any other Green novel I have read so far, and the characters are CAUGHT in nightmares they can't escape by mere talking. They are on the run from situations they can't handle, playing "Catch me if you can" with each other, while the reader is CAUGHT by the heartbreaking inevitability of their failures - it's humanity CAUGHT off guard, shown naked, and delivered in Greenish perfection!
Perfect reading pleasure, no catch!
Think about if for a moment. There are so many ways to interpret that question. Actually, I might catch you off guard, and make you confess something you hadn't planned on telling me, just because your idea of being CAUGHT makes a certain situation in your memory stick out. CAUGHT you!
People can be CAUGHT doing illegal or inappropriate things. But most of the time, they are CAUGHT in the process of committing quite banal crimes, like secretly leaving work early, and have a colleague "cover" for them. Or they are CAUGHT sponging on a friend in a bar, or telling a lie, or being a coward.
How does it make one feel - being CAUGHT? What do people do to cover their tracks or smooth over their mistakes?
Henry Green, the master of dialogues, embarrassed silences and telling body language, lets a whole set of people - working at a wartime fire station in London - be CAUGHT in various situations, ranging from child abduction and secret love affairs to small mistakes without legal impact but of immense importance for the person's standing in the group.
If you are CAUGHT doing something you should not be doing, you share a secret, which can be passed on as gossip to others, in bits and pieces, and as a consequence, you can be CAUGHT spreading rumours as well. You can be CAUGHT in your painful past, or in an unhealthy relationship or in your worries and feelings. A conflict can catch fire, and several colleagues find themselves CAUGHT in an unpleasant situation. And most of all, you can share the experience of being CAUGHT in the nightmare of the London Blitz, and the horror of a city burning bright.
And the whole question can be turned around, and regarded from the other perspective as well. Have you ever CAUGHT anyone?
And if so, what did you feel, what did you do? Did you "cover" for him or her? Or did you pass your knowledge on as gossip among friends? Did you tell your parents or teachers or boss about it? Did you feel a moment of power? Or did you use it to your advantage? CAUGHT in a tricky situation, what would you choose to do?
I was CAUGHT by Henry Green, and he won't let me off the hook until I have fully explored his universe of catchy words and phrases, of his characters CAUGHT in spider webs of actions and feelings, of causes and effects expressed in small symbolic gestures and loosely connected dialogues.
In CAUGHT, there is more dramatic plot and action than in any other Green novel I have read so far, and the characters are CAUGHT in nightmares they can't escape by mere talking. They are on the run from situations they can't handle, playing "Catch me if you can" with each other, while the reader is CAUGHT by the heartbreaking inevitability of their failures - it's humanity CAUGHT off guard, shown naked, and delivered in Greenish perfection!
Perfect reading pleasure, no catch!
October 12, 2020
A Poetry Of Chaos
Henry Green in Caught is not for the faint-hearted or those with limited leisure. Here are two examples from the main theme about life in the Auxiliary London Fire Service which tended to bomb damage while the bombs were still falling during the war:
His father had regrets. He wished it had all been less, as a man can search to find he knows not what behind a netted brilliant skin, the eyes of a veiled face, as he can also go with his young son parted from him by the years that are between, from her, by the web of love, or from the remembered country by the weather, in the sadness of not finding.
This is a typically enigmatic sentence by Green. The structure is purposely awkward. What does the first comma signify in a place that calls for a full stop? What are the pronominal references for 'it', ‘her’? What is this absence that eludes the finding and presumably creates the sadness? Are we to expect something explanatory latter in the text? Do the netted skin and veiled eyes refer to his wife, the son's mother? Are the net and veil analogues of time? And if so is the web of love meant to imply a displacement of memory from the person to the emotion? Meaning doesn't float, it hides in Green.
Here is another:
At the station they used to pitch the escape and climb up that sharply narrowing, rattling ladder, red, but it would by now be too dark to see, up to the head painted white for work at night with, in this dusk, a voice from the sea bellowing advice below, all of them getting out of breath, fumbling, some telling themselves, and even each other, not to look down. After the first few times they were handy at it, but in the beginning, and most of all before they had been sent up, he would get wet in the seat of his trousers as he walked past the half seen tower at six o’clock, unlike by more than the time of day that other under which, on sun-laden evenings, the windows for seven hundred years had stained the flags, as it might be with coward’s blood.
Even more purposely complex grammar than in the first example, with its subordinate clauses and repeated interruption of the line of thought. There is the strange adjectival placement (‘red’); and the ambiguity of the references is challenging (escape and climb? Now?) The reader is forced to re-read, not just to comprehend the structure but to identify and understand the relevance of what might be called external facts (‘the sea’, ‘wet in the seat of the trousers’, ‘coward’s blood’) that are left loose as indicators without a definite object and no prior context. The paragraphs are arranged in a similar way. Each new paragraph is often an element in a sequence that shifts chaotically among physical locations, persons, and time.
This is writing that does not flow but jerks along as if over rapids and falls. There are eddies and somewhat peaceful backwaters where understanding is helped by straightforward subject-object links but these only emphasise the generally rough ride. This is very dense prose poetry. It takes patient attention to master. Not as difficult, one must admit, as Finnegans Wake, but it rates for sure.
Henry Green in Caught is not for the faint-hearted or those with limited leisure. Here are two examples from the main theme about life in the Auxiliary London Fire Service which tended to bomb damage while the bombs were still falling during the war:
His father had regrets. He wished it had all been less, as a man can search to find he knows not what behind a netted brilliant skin, the eyes of a veiled face, as he can also go with his young son parted from him by the years that are between, from her, by the web of love, or from the remembered country by the weather, in the sadness of not finding.
This is a typically enigmatic sentence by Green. The structure is purposely awkward. What does the first comma signify in a place that calls for a full stop? What are the pronominal references for 'it', ‘her’? What is this absence that eludes the finding and presumably creates the sadness? Are we to expect something explanatory latter in the text? Do the netted skin and veiled eyes refer to his wife, the son's mother? Are the net and veil analogues of time? And if so is the web of love meant to imply a displacement of memory from the person to the emotion? Meaning doesn't float, it hides in Green.
Here is another:
At the station they used to pitch the escape and climb up that sharply narrowing, rattling ladder, red, but it would by now be too dark to see, up to the head painted white for work at night with, in this dusk, a voice from the sea bellowing advice below, all of them getting out of breath, fumbling, some telling themselves, and even each other, not to look down. After the first few times they were handy at it, but in the beginning, and most of all before they had been sent up, he would get wet in the seat of his trousers as he walked past the half seen tower at six o’clock, unlike by more than the time of day that other under which, on sun-laden evenings, the windows for seven hundred years had stained the flags, as it might be with coward’s blood.
Even more purposely complex grammar than in the first example, with its subordinate clauses and repeated interruption of the line of thought. There is the strange adjectival placement (‘red’); and the ambiguity of the references is challenging (escape and climb? Now?) The reader is forced to re-read, not just to comprehend the structure but to identify and understand the relevance of what might be called external facts (‘the sea’, ‘wet in the seat of the trousers’, ‘coward’s blood’) that are left loose as indicators without a definite object and no prior context. The paragraphs are arranged in a similar way. Each new paragraph is often an element in a sequence that shifts chaotically among physical locations, persons, and time.
This is writing that does not flow but jerks along as if over rapids and falls. There are eddies and somewhat peaceful backwaters where understanding is helped by straightforward subject-object links but these only emphasise the generally rough ride. This is very dense prose poetry. It takes patient attention to master. Not as difficult, one must admit, as Finnegans Wake, but it rates for sure.
October 19, 2022
It has been said that some of my reviews are nothing to do with the actual book. That can be true, I plead guilty. So here is a two parter – first part is about something I found out by reading this, and second part is about the book. I always listen to critics.
PART ONE : WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS??
On page 36 we read :
The conversation of hanging, civilian faces in bowler hats up at the counter seemed mostly of the pet they had had put away that very morning, in accordance with instructions issued against gas attack. Or, if they had drowned the dog themselves, then they would ask each other whether the dustmen would reject a bin in which there was a body.
What were they talking about? Killing their own pets?? Google brought me to this
The pamphlet said: "If at all possible, send or take your household animals into the country in advance of an emergency." It concluded: "If you cannot place them in the care of neighbours, it really is kindest to have them destroyed."
I found an article quoting a historian Hilda Kean. She explained :
It was one of things people had to do when the news [that the war had started] came - evacuate the children, put up the blackout curtains, kill the cat.
Why? The main reason was because there was no food ration provided for animals. People could not afford pets anymore. The article says 750,000 cats and dogs were euthanised in one week in September 1939. A year later the first days of the Blitz produced another great surge of pet killings.
The historian said that the reason this is not very well known is because it’s not a very nice story, British people being famous for their kindness to animals and all that.
PART TWO : THE CURLING DISCLOSURE OF THE HEART
I five-starred Living by Henry Green, and you know I do not give five stars out lightly. It was weird and wonderful, written in 1929. This one from 1943 is just as weird but not so wonderful.
He turned to her and she seemed his in her white clothes, with a cry the blackbird had flown and in her eyes as, speechless, she turned, still a stranger, to look into him, he thought he saw the hot, lazy luxuriance of a rose, the heavy, weightless, luxuriance of a rose, the curling disclosure of the heart that, as for a hornet, was his for its honey, for the asking, open for him to pierce inside, this heavy, creamy, girl turned woman.
It's an autobiographical novel about the author’s experiences in the London Auxiliary Fire Service, the men who fought the blitz. You might think this would be very dramatic – there is a brilliant drama-documentary called Fires Were Started about the very same thing
which came out the same year as Caught, 1943. The Blitz happened between September 1940 and May 1941. Between 40,000 and 43,000 civilians were killed, so roughly around 150 civilians every day for 9 months. Plenty of drama. But Caught prefers to dawdle with the cor-blimey-wotcha-mate fire crew during the phoney war period, the year before the fireworks started, when there was much looming anxiety and gallows humour and exercises and affairs and office politicking and drinking tea and complaining but not that much to do except murder the family dog.
PART ONE : WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS??
On page 36 we read :
The conversation of hanging, civilian faces in bowler hats up at the counter seemed mostly of the pet they had had put away that very morning, in accordance with instructions issued against gas attack. Or, if they had drowned the dog themselves, then they would ask each other whether the dustmen would reject a bin in which there was a body.
What were they talking about? Killing their own pets?? Google brought me to this
The pamphlet said: "If at all possible, send or take your household animals into the country in advance of an emergency." It concluded: "If you cannot place them in the care of neighbours, it really is kindest to have them destroyed."
I found an article quoting a historian Hilda Kean. She explained :
It was one of things people had to do when the news [that the war had started] came - evacuate the children, put up the blackout curtains, kill the cat.
Why? The main reason was because there was no food ration provided for animals. People could not afford pets anymore. The article says 750,000 cats and dogs were euthanised in one week in September 1939. A year later the first days of the Blitz produced another great surge of pet killings.
The historian said that the reason this is not very well known is because it’s not a very nice story, British people being famous for their kindness to animals and all that.
PART TWO : THE CURLING DISCLOSURE OF THE HEART
I five-starred Living by Henry Green, and you know I do not give five stars out lightly. It was weird and wonderful, written in 1929. This one from 1943 is just as weird but not so wonderful.
He turned to her and she seemed his in her white clothes, with a cry the blackbird had flown and in her eyes as, speechless, she turned, still a stranger, to look into him, he thought he saw the hot, lazy luxuriance of a rose, the heavy, weightless, luxuriance of a rose, the curling disclosure of the heart that, as for a hornet, was his for its honey, for the asking, open for him to pierce inside, this heavy, creamy, girl turned woman.
It's an autobiographical novel about the author’s experiences in the London Auxiliary Fire Service, the men who fought the blitz. You might think this would be very dramatic – there is a brilliant drama-documentary called Fires Were Started about the very same thing
which came out the same year as Caught, 1943. The Blitz happened between September 1940 and May 1941. Between 40,000 and 43,000 civilians were killed, so roughly around 150 civilians every day for 9 months. Plenty of drama. But Caught prefers to dawdle with the cor-blimey-wotcha-mate fire crew during the phoney war period, the year before the fireworks started, when there was much looming anxiety and gallows humour and exercises and affairs and office politicking and drinking tea and complaining but not that much to do except murder the family dog.
September 10, 2018
Perhaps, like Sherman, you think War is Hell.
But Prudence, in bed with Pye, is longing for John, a pilot now said to be marrying someone else. War, she thought, was sex.
I won't weigh the profundities, of Prudence versus Sherman, but I believe that War, like Sex, is defined often by a point of view. Prudence has her epiphany while Pye is lamenting small matters of command, she listening with an utter lack of interest . . . for bed was all they had, and were not to have for much longer, in common.
In the next paragraph our protagonist, Richard Roe is in bed with Hilly (not his wife). She wriggled over on top, held his dark face and drank it with her eyes. She had never been to Venice. She murmured to herself, "This man is my gondola."
In the next paragraph, Brid at that instant was crying. She missed her Ted, so feckless in everything except when he loved her. . .
So, maybe it's Sex is Hell.
Henry Green (his pen name) was an English aristocrat born to great wealth and privilege. He began writing novels while still at Oxford. In 1938, in anticipation of war, Green joined London's Auxiliary Fire Service. This novel is based on his wartime experiences. The character Richard Roe is a writer born with a silver spoon who likewise joins the fire service. I don't know how much of the plot is imagined.
The things that happen, at least until the end, happen while the men prepare for the war that is to come. They train and follow pedantic military rules. There are bars. There are women. For Roe, there is a wife at home, and a son. War gets complicated.
They mark time. Norway is invaded. Then the low countries. Then Dunkirk. The men are looked on with favor. Then shunned as shirkers. Then revered as saviors.
Roe and Hilly go to a nightclub. The War has not come home yet. There is a torch singer there. Green does something spectacular, the song taking on a prophetic tone:
As she stood there, gently telling them in music, reflecting aloud, wondering in her low, rich voice, the spot light spread a story over her body and dazzled her cheeks to bend and blend to a fabulous matching of the mood in which she told them, as she pretended to remember the south, the man who had gone, as she held all theirs with her magnificent eyes guardedly flashing, slowly turning from one couple to another, then again dropping her voice, almost sighing, motionless, while beads of sweat began to come like the base of a tiara on her forehead as she told the audience that he could see only as the less dark below her and whose clouded heads, each one, drew nearer to a companion's in this forced communion, this hyacinthine, grape dark fellowship of longing. The music floated her, the beat was even more of all she had to say, the colour became a part. alive and deep, making what they told each other, with her but in silence, simply repeatedly plain, the truth, over and over again.
Still, they waited, the peril drawing closer and heavier . . . Prudence, for the spring and summer months, would be as safe as houses.
War, you know. Or something else.
I finished this late last night and went to sleep. I awoke a few hours later, rain pounding on the roof, as it has for days. I felt this book, then. Not just that I was thinking about it, or thinking what I would say about it. I mean I really felt it, like it was clinging to me. Like I had just left perhaps safely from some smoke-filled room. And I could not lose the smell.
But Prudence, in bed with Pye, is longing for John, a pilot now said to be marrying someone else. War, she thought, was sex.
I won't weigh the profundities, of Prudence versus Sherman, but I believe that War, like Sex, is defined often by a point of view. Prudence has her epiphany while Pye is lamenting small matters of command, she listening with an utter lack of interest . . . for bed was all they had, and were not to have for much longer, in common.
In the next paragraph our protagonist, Richard Roe is in bed with Hilly (not his wife). She wriggled over on top, held his dark face and drank it with her eyes. She had never been to Venice. She murmured to herself, "This man is my gondola."
In the next paragraph, Brid at that instant was crying. She missed her Ted, so feckless in everything except when he loved her. . .
So, maybe it's Sex is Hell.
Henry Green (his pen name) was an English aristocrat born to great wealth and privilege. He began writing novels while still at Oxford. In 1938, in anticipation of war, Green joined London's Auxiliary Fire Service. This novel is based on his wartime experiences. The character Richard Roe is a writer born with a silver spoon who likewise joins the fire service. I don't know how much of the plot is imagined.
The things that happen, at least until the end, happen while the men prepare for the war that is to come. They train and follow pedantic military rules. There are bars. There are women. For Roe, there is a wife at home, and a son. War gets complicated.
They mark time. Norway is invaded. Then the low countries. Then Dunkirk. The men are looked on with favor. Then shunned as shirkers. Then revered as saviors.
Roe and Hilly go to a nightclub. The War has not come home yet. There is a torch singer there. Green does something spectacular, the song taking on a prophetic tone:
As she stood there, gently telling them in music, reflecting aloud, wondering in her low, rich voice, the spot light spread a story over her body and dazzled her cheeks to bend and blend to a fabulous matching of the mood in which she told them, as she pretended to remember the south, the man who had gone, as she held all theirs with her magnificent eyes guardedly flashing, slowly turning from one couple to another, then again dropping her voice, almost sighing, motionless, while beads of sweat began to come like the base of a tiara on her forehead as she told the audience that he could see only as the less dark below her and whose clouded heads, each one, drew nearer to a companion's in this forced communion, this hyacinthine, grape dark fellowship of longing. The music floated her, the beat was even more of all she had to say, the colour became a part. alive and deep, making what they told each other, with her but in silence, simply repeatedly plain, the truth, over and over again.
Still, they waited, the peril drawing closer and heavier . . . Prudence, for the spring and summer months, would be as safe as houses.
War, you know. Or something else.
I finished this late last night and went to sleep. I awoke a few hours later, rain pounding on the roof, as it has for days. I felt this book, then. Not just that I was thinking about it, or thinking what I would say about it. I mean I really felt it, like it was clinging to me. Like I had just left perhaps safely from some smoke-filled room. And I could not lose the smell.
August 6, 2016
Re-reading Henry Green into 2017 as NYRB reissues all nine of his novels.
First blog post on Henry Green as I re-read Caught, now up here.
First blog post on Henry Green as I re-read Caught, now up here.
September 5, 2022
I came to this for craft: I'd heard about his marvelous way with speech and idiom. So much so true. Oddly, the beginning scenes are done in indirect speech, but then the dramatist-novelist steps in. I like novels or scenes of novels that are halfway to plays.
Content? Is perversely bland for the most part--ordinary, with the Auxiliary Fire Service in wartime London exposed in its petty inglory. Until the end, the last sustained action scene told in reportage, Roe post-trauma to his not-listening wife, which seriously won me. We even saw a glimpse of glory.
A lot about class, and scads about the pursuit of women in wartime, all characters exhaustingly sexist. An interesting sideline in mental disorder and hospitalisation. An ill-judged plot device from Freud (but who knows, this may have been real-life material, as Roe's experiences in the Fire Service seem to cleave to the author's).
Aside from idiomatic speech offset by poetic narrative, the time shifts are rather experimental and quite fascinated me.
I somewhat surprised myself by immediately starting on his next short wartime novel, Back. Must have been that last bravura section.
Content? Is perversely bland for the most part--ordinary, with the Auxiliary Fire Service in wartime London exposed in its petty inglory. Until the end, the last sustained action scene told in reportage, Roe post-trauma to his not-listening wife, which seriously won me. We even saw a glimpse of glory.
A lot about class, and scads about the pursuit of women in wartime, all characters exhaustingly sexist. An interesting sideline in mental disorder and hospitalisation. An ill-judged plot device from Freud (but who knows, this may have been real-life material, as Roe's experiences in the Fire Service seem to cleave to the author's).
Aside from idiomatic speech offset by poetic narrative, the time shifts are rather experimental and quite fascinated me.
I somewhat surprised myself by immediately starting on his next short wartime novel, Back. Must have been that last bravura section.
April 23, 2020
"It brings everyone together, there's that much to a war."
One of the more odder experiences I've had as an NYRB completist (or "nerb"). At first, I wasn't sure I liked this novel at all. The scenario is certainly engaging: upperish-class guy volunteers for the Fire Service just before the London blitz and hangs out with a bunch of people far below his station. By coincidence, his station chief is the brother of the mentally disturbed woman who kidnapped his son a few months before. The two men's relationship is a tad strained, as you can imagine.
Having finished the novel, I can say that Green, like his contemporary Brits Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and J.L. Carr, is a supreme stylist, probably slightly edging the others out. He has a very weird style, one I can't easily describe. After you get used to it and realize that his strange turns of phrase in the narrative parts, coupled with the jawy, raw lower-class dialect bits in the actual dialogue, is a thinly-veiled almost Surrealist poeticism, you can settle back and enjoy the very strange little tale unfolding before you.
One of the more odder experiences I've had as an NYRB completist (or "nerb"). At first, I wasn't sure I liked this novel at all. The scenario is certainly engaging: upperish-class guy volunteers for the Fire Service just before the London blitz and hangs out with a bunch of people far below his station. By coincidence, his station chief is the brother of the mentally disturbed woman who kidnapped his son a few months before. The two men's relationship is a tad strained, as you can imagine.
Having finished the novel, I can say that Green, like his contemporary Brits Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and J.L. Carr, is a supreme stylist, probably slightly edging the others out. He has a very weird style, one I can't easily describe. After you get used to it and realize that his strange turns of phrase in the narrative parts, coupled with the jawy, raw lower-class dialect bits in the actual dialogue, is a thinly-veiled almost Surrealist poeticism, you can settle back and enjoy the very strange little tale unfolding before you.
July 29, 2009
"War, she thought, was sex." -- A book about the Auxiliary Fire Service during WWII, and people "driven to create memories to compare...hungrily seeking yet another with whom they could spend their last hours." It's a quiet book, but leaves an impression.
May 27, 2018
Not so good as expected.
3* Loving
2.5* Caught
TR Living
TR Party Going
TR Back
3* Loving
2.5* Caught
TR Living
TR Party Going
TR Back
Read
June 15, 2023An extraordinary book. Henry Green is one of the best kept secrets of 20th century literature, hiding in plain sight.
April 11, 2017
A tour-de-force of prose artistry, a deft ear at dialogue that delineates the gradations of social stratum, a master class in constructing a novel.
January 21, 2016
���������.5
Caught is a book that depicts the lives of auxiliary firefighters during the Blitz in London. The majority of the book occurs before the bombings. Protagonist Richard Roe is a wealthy widower who joins the auxiliary service and sends his son to the country to live with his sister in law. While Richard is the protagonist, the author provides us with multiple points of view, frequently shifting from one character to another. Many of the characters feel as if they are suspending in time waiting for the Blitz. There is a complicated relationship between Richard and fire chief, Pye, whose sister abducts Richard���s son (the focus here is not on the actual abduction but rather the psychological consequences that this has on those involved.
This was a slow and quiet book. The majority of the time they are waiting for the bombings to start, Most of the book centers on the waiting period and relationships between members of the auxiliary force and not much happens. Despite being bored for the first half of the book, I started to become more engaged the more I read. I liked the writing style and liked how the narrator would switch from one character to the next and gave us insight into truth of the situation vs. the character���s description of the situation. For example, characters would state certain things and through use of parentheses the narrator would drag us outside the character���s point of view to obtain a more objective reality. I found it interesting that while there were some key events in the book, the focus was never on those events but more on the consequences of those things on the relationships between characters.
Caught is a book that depicts the lives of auxiliary firefighters during the Blitz in London. The majority of the book occurs before the bombings. Protagonist Richard Roe is a wealthy widower who joins the auxiliary service and sends his son to the country to live with his sister in law. While Richard is the protagonist, the author provides us with multiple points of view, frequently shifting from one character to another. Many of the characters feel as if they are suspending in time waiting for the Blitz. There is a complicated relationship between Richard and fire chief, Pye, whose sister abducts Richard���s son (the focus here is not on the actual abduction but rather the psychological consequences that this has on those involved.
This was a slow and quiet book. The majority of the time they are waiting for the bombings to start, Most of the book centers on the waiting period and relationships between members of the auxiliary force and not much happens. Despite being bored for the first half of the book, I started to become more engaged the more I read. I liked the writing style and liked how the narrator would switch from one character to the next and gave us insight into truth of the situation vs. the character���s description of the situation. For example, characters would state certain things and through use of parentheses the narrator would drag us outside the character���s point of view to obtain a more objective reality. I found it interesting that while there were some key events in the book, the focus was never on those events but more on the consequences of those things on the relationships between characters.
June 5, 2017
A deeply surprising book – not for its plot of which there is barely any – but for its writing. In the introduction,* James Woods describes Green's "almost Shakespearean talent for inventive spoken poetry." This is exactly right. The novel oscillates between the garrulous comedy of working class speech ("His eyes started out of his head like a little dog's testicles") and modernist elisions worthy of Woolf. The poetry pops up out of nowhere, often in a phrase or two swept along by the flow.
____
* Read last: it tells too much.
he came out into a gin-clear air pasted with blue moonlightMost of the novel unfolds in the early months of 1940 in London where Richard Roe, the narrator, apolitical and upper class like Green himself, is serving on the London Auxiliary Fire Service; the big events (Hitler's invasion of Norway, the fall of France, Dunkirk) feel far away. When the Blitz finally hits we hear of it only elliptically, when Roe, recovering from injuries back at his country house, describes it to his bored-but-patient wife. Even then the story reverses itself.
"The first night," he said, "we were ordered to the docks. As we came over Westminster Bridge it was fantastic, the whole of the left side of London seemed to be alight."This isn't a page turner, not even close, but there are elemental echoes of England that reminded me of passages from DH Lawrence or John Cowper Powys, as well as the distinctive voices of men and women that burn and buzz and disappear into the static of the past.
(It had not been like that at all…)
____
* Read last: it tells too much.
March 26, 2018
My eighth Henry Green novel. I've loved everyone. Very British, between the wars, between classes. This one follows the goings on of the members of an auxiliary fire service in London before and during the Blitz. As a 2016 New Yorker profile nicely put it, "The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction." I don't think anyone writes a dance or restaurant scene better than Green. In fact, Green convinces me, at least within the confines of his novels, that life is a magnificent dance, of which you can simultaneously appreciate all its disparate parts.
July 23, 2013
A book about the auxiliary fire service during World War II in London. It is mostly about waiting for anything to happen. It is about the pickering that goes on when there is nothing to do. It is about kissing up to superiors. It is about love at desperate times. About a father who does not connect with his son.
It was hard to follow what was going on in the book because sometimes the story shifted to other people/places/times without any hint of it happening. And you understand that things have changes in the middle of a paragraph.
It was hard to follow what was going on in the book because sometimes the story shifted to other people/places/times without any hint of it happening. And you understand that things have changes in the middle of a paragraph.
August 22, 2019
Further evidence of Green's mastery of the short novel.
November 22, 2024
4.5 stars
March 5, 2018
Survivors of war invariably edit their experiences and tailor their responses for their audience, and rarely like to revisit the more traumatic moments that they experienced in combat. It might seem that a contemporary historian can get a true horror of the Second World War from the abundant black & white newsreel footage, and the diaries and memoirs, and eye-witness accounts of survivors, but, however graphic and agonising these reminiscences might be, they are invariably written with publication in mind omitting the more scandalous and uncomfortable personal truths. Families hide their secrets.
But thanks to two wartime novels - Henry Green’s ‘Caught‘ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Heat of the Night’ - I have deepened my understanding of the climatic and confused emotional hiatus experienced by so many and the unexpected opportunities suddenly presented, and and so these narratives have illuminated what my parents omitted, especially about wartime love and romance. With these two absorbing novels I feel that I can get as close, as I ever will do, to experiencing the London Blitz, and how my parents’ generation felt the thrill and fear of wartime London, and time spent underground taking shelter, or in cafes, restaurants, clubs and bars, life in the black-out, and the heady excitement of being alive at such a thrilling time, despite the constant danger and threat of death. Both novels address these feelings with a wonderful directness, but Henry Green’s writing carries a stronger erotic charge.
In 1938 as the prospect of European war grew ever closer so author Henry Green served with the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, believing that this experience would prove fertile ground for his writing ‘to learn about the lives of ordinary people’. And certainly it did just that, on the evidence of this beguiling novel which defies categorisation but gave him first hand account of the random nature of death and appalling destruction in the capital.
At times parochial and insular, as the firemen, both regulars and the auxiliaries making up the London Fire Service, tease one another during their long periods of inactivity, enduring the ‘Phoney War’ , but also the bigger picture, when the Luftwaffe squadrons finally arrive bringing death from the air. Now this motley cohort of firefighters, lay aside their petty jealousies, if not their promiscuous behaviour, as they are catapulted onto centre stage, at the front of the nation’s fire-fighting during the Blitz itself.
In the first two thirds of the novel the author takes great pains in developing portraits of all the diverse characters in the Fire Station depot, both the ‘Regulars’ and the ‘Auxiliaries’. The normal rules of behaviour are suspended and our narrator, Richard Roe, shows us his fellow fireman, separated from wives and girlfriends, and their families now evacuated from the city, and so they are seizing every opportunity for amorous adventure, and conducting affairs, both clandestine and openly. Beautiful young girls engorged with love, and drowsy with lack of sleep, are shown ‘love-walking’ and taking it on themselves, as their patriotic duty, to give their servicemen out on the town on their last night, something special to remember before they go overseas. Far from satiated by these emotional farewells the same girls go hunting for more farewells, ‘Darling, darling, darling it will be you always.’
There are many moments in this tense novel that feel like reading a script for a play, where conversations are recorded accurately carrying the narrative and creating real melodrama. Long and interminable days of inactivity at the depot are punctuated by boozy visits to the local pub, where conversations lurch uninhibitedly to the personal, and thence quickly to lurid sexual gossip as colleagues, feeling the erotic charge of danger, indulge in openly flirtatious behaviour.
Then in the final twenty pages Richard, when convalescing in the West Country far from London’s Blitz, tells his step-sister, in retrospect, just what happened, when after months of inactivity, the first Luftwaffe raids started. Here is a visceral evocation of the horrors of indiscriminate bombing and the dense poetic prose provides a graphic narrative that reads like Dylan Thomas,
“ Nearby all had been pink, the small coughing men had black and rosey faces. The puddles were hot, and rainbow coloured with oil. A barge, overloaded with planks, drifted in flames across the black, green, then mushroom skin river water under an upthrusting mountain of fox-dyed smoke that pushed up towards the green pulsing fringe of heaven....
“ But what a night. Think of the way we had waited a whole year behind those windows, then suddenly to be pitchforked into chaos. We used to think we get some directions. Instead we had about 8 acres of flames and 60 pumps with the crews in a line pouring water on, when the bombing did not drive them off. And, because of the size of the whole thing, doing practically no good at all. And no know orders whatever.”
But before the cataclysmic firestorm engulfs London the period of calm allows Green to develop his characters, revealing themselves through extensive dialogue, rendered in carefully wrought colloquial prose. But if, as many would have us believe, Henry Green’s greatness as a writer came from his conviction that we can never really know what anyone is thinking or feeling, then I would say he gets closer than any novelist I know to revealing characters from the inside out.
Take the scene between Richard and Hilly in the jazz club. We are transported into that night club, sitting at the table beside them, in their heads and aware of their thinking, seeing what they will say next, and feeling their growing excitement, we wonder how they will complete their mutual seduction. We feel the stifling heat in the subterranean cellar and note the changes in the light, and hear the frenzied beat of the music, and the excited timbre of their voices, hearts racing with desire. It is a slow sensuous seduction and the reader is drawn into the exciting erotic confusion of the would-be lovers enjoying the danger of their rapid descent into carnality.
“ It was warm in the half dark of the club…lights were low from table lamps with violet shades…the deep light from a gentian bulb infuses the room with a seductive glow and … now with excitement so that his throat was constricted because of her nearness, fat, soft and soft-eyed with sea flower fingered..’
‘She had been wafted off’.. ‘enchanted not entirely by all she had had to drink and which was released inside her in a glow of earth chilled above a river at the noisy night harvest of vines, not altogether by this music, which literally was her honey, her feeling’s tongue but as much by sweet comfort, and the compulsion she felt here to gentleness that was put on here by these couples, by the blues, by the wine, and now by this murmuring night haunted softness shared.’
Their first breathless kiss reminds Richard of “..moist wet lips and open figs wet at the dead of night in hothouse….of a thousand moist evenings in August on her soft skin and, on the inner side of her lips, where the rouge had worn off, opened figs wet on a wall…They are caught up in a forced communication a grape dark fellowship of longing.”
Sebastian Faulks sums it up perfectly when he says of novelist Henry Green, “He seemed to have redrawn the familiar triangle between reader, writer and character, so that you somehow had the impression that you knew his characters better than he himself did.”
Interesting that Henry Green is not so widely read today given that two esteemed poets wrote glowingly of his attributes in the 1950s, W. H. Auden calling him “the best English novelist alive, ” and T. S. Eliot cited Green’s novels as proof that the “creative advance in our age is in prose fiction.”
But thanks to two wartime novels - Henry Green’s ‘Caught‘ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Heat of the Night’ - I have deepened my understanding of the climatic and confused emotional hiatus experienced by so many and the unexpected opportunities suddenly presented, and and so these narratives have illuminated what my parents omitted, especially about wartime love and romance. With these two absorbing novels I feel that I can get as close, as I ever will do, to experiencing the London Blitz, and how my parents’ generation felt the thrill and fear of wartime London, and time spent underground taking shelter, or in cafes, restaurants, clubs and bars, life in the black-out, and the heady excitement of being alive at such a thrilling time, despite the constant danger and threat of death. Both novels address these feelings with a wonderful directness, but Henry Green’s writing carries a stronger erotic charge.
In 1938 as the prospect of European war grew ever closer so author Henry Green served with the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, believing that this experience would prove fertile ground for his writing ‘to learn about the lives of ordinary people’. And certainly it did just that, on the evidence of this beguiling novel which defies categorisation but gave him first hand account of the random nature of death and appalling destruction in the capital.
At times parochial and insular, as the firemen, both regulars and the auxiliaries making up the London Fire Service, tease one another during their long periods of inactivity, enduring the ‘Phoney War’ , but also the bigger picture, when the Luftwaffe squadrons finally arrive bringing death from the air. Now this motley cohort of firefighters, lay aside their petty jealousies, if not their promiscuous behaviour, as they are catapulted onto centre stage, at the front of the nation’s fire-fighting during the Blitz itself.
In the first two thirds of the novel the author takes great pains in developing portraits of all the diverse characters in the Fire Station depot, both the ‘Regulars’ and the ‘Auxiliaries’. The normal rules of behaviour are suspended and our narrator, Richard Roe, shows us his fellow fireman, separated from wives and girlfriends, and their families now evacuated from the city, and so they are seizing every opportunity for amorous adventure, and conducting affairs, both clandestine and openly. Beautiful young girls engorged with love, and drowsy with lack of sleep, are shown ‘love-walking’ and taking it on themselves, as their patriotic duty, to give their servicemen out on the town on their last night, something special to remember before they go overseas. Far from satiated by these emotional farewells the same girls go hunting for more farewells, ‘Darling, darling, darling it will be you always.’
There are many moments in this tense novel that feel like reading a script for a play, where conversations are recorded accurately carrying the narrative and creating real melodrama. Long and interminable days of inactivity at the depot are punctuated by boozy visits to the local pub, where conversations lurch uninhibitedly to the personal, and thence quickly to lurid sexual gossip as colleagues, feeling the erotic charge of danger, indulge in openly flirtatious behaviour.
Then in the final twenty pages Richard, when convalescing in the West Country far from London’s Blitz, tells his step-sister, in retrospect, just what happened, when after months of inactivity, the first Luftwaffe raids started. Here is a visceral evocation of the horrors of indiscriminate bombing and the dense poetic prose provides a graphic narrative that reads like Dylan Thomas,
“ Nearby all had been pink, the small coughing men had black and rosey faces. The puddles were hot, and rainbow coloured with oil. A barge, overloaded with planks, drifted in flames across the black, green, then mushroom skin river water under an upthrusting mountain of fox-dyed smoke that pushed up towards the green pulsing fringe of heaven....
“ But what a night. Think of the way we had waited a whole year behind those windows, then suddenly to be pitchforked into chaos. We used to think we get some directions. Instead we had about 8 acres of flames and 60 pumps with the crews in a line pouring water on, when the bombing did not drive them off. And, because of the size of the whole thing, doing practically no good at all. And no know orders whatever.”
But before the cataclysmic firestorm engulfs London the period of calm allows Green to develop his characters, revealing themselves through extensive dialogue, rendered in carefully wrought colloquial prose. But if, as many would have us believe, Henry Green’s greatness as a writer came from his conviction that we can never really know what anyone is thinking or feeling, then I would say he gets closer than any novelist I know to revealing characters from the inside out.
Take the scene between Richard and Hilly in the jazz club. We are transported into that night club, sitting at the table beside them, in their heads and aware of their thinking, seeing what they will say next, and feeling their growing excitement, we wonder how they will complete their mutual seduction. We feel the stifling heat in the subterranean cellar and note the changes in the light, and hear the frenzied beat of the music, and the excited timbre of their voices, hearts racing with desire. It is a slow sensuous seduction and the reader is drawn into the exciting erotic confusion of the would-be lovers enjoying the danger of their rapid descent into carnality.
“ It was warm in the half dark of the club…lights were low from table lamps with violet shades…the deep light from a gentian bulb infuses the room with a seductive glow and … now with excitement so that his throat was constricted because of her nearness, fat, soft and soft-eyed with sea flower fingered..’
‘She had been wafted off’.. ‘enchanted not entirely by all she had had to drink and which was released inside her in a glow of earth chilled above a river at the noisy night harvest of vines, not altogether by this music, which literally was her honey, her feeling’s tongue but as much by sweet comfort, and the compulsion she felt here to gentleness that was put on here by these couples, by the blues, by the wine, and now by this murmuring night haunted softness shared.’
Their first breathless kiss reminds Richard of “..moist wet lips and open figs wet at the dead of night in hothouse….of a thousand moist evenings in August on her soft skin and, on the inner side of her lips, where the rouge had worn off, opened figs wet on a wall…They are caught up in a forced communication a grape dark fellowship of longing.”
Sebastian Faulks sums it up perfectly when he says of novelist Henry Green, “He seemed to have redrawn the familiar triangle between reader, writer and character, so that you somehow had the impression that you knew his characters better than he himself did.”
Interesting that Henry Green is not so widely read today given that two esteemed poets wrote glowingly of his attributes in the 1950s, W. H. Auden calling him “the best English novelist alive, ” and T. S. Eliot cited Green’s novels as proof that the “creative advance in our age is in prose fiction.”
June 8, 2022
>Recommended to me by Proustitute, Henry Green's fourth novel Caught is one of six of his novels included in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 edition). I've bolded them in the list below.
Blindness (1926), on the TBR
Living (1929)
Party-Going (1939)
Caught (1943)
Loving (1945), see my review
Back (1946)
Concluding (1948)
Nothing (1950), see my review
Doting (1952), on the TBR
During the war, perhaps mindful of the possibility of not surviving the Blitz, Green also wrote a memoir called Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940). He was in the Auxiliary Fire Service, a poorly equipped and hastily mobilised volunteer force in which 800 men died because it was such dangerous work. This AFS experience also forms the backdrop for Caught.
Caught is cited in 1001 Books as an ambivalent novel.
But by describing in vivid dialogue the solidarity that develops between men and women of different classes brought together by the war, Green also shows how they fail to communicate with each other. There is a chasm between the contrasting central characters, the affluent (married) Roe and Pye, a retired fireman. Though they share the same flippant attitude to wartime sex, and the long hours waiting for the call during the Phoney War were conducive to sharing intimacies, their dialogue is mutually incomprehensible. The awkwardness between them is not just because Pye's mentally disturbed sister once abducted Roe's son Christopher. It's that both of them think in terms of their own superiority. There is a hint that things may change when by the novel's end, Roe is confronted by the absence of separate nursery teas so that #ShockHorror he has to be with his own children for meals — and #sarcasm even worse, courtesy of that awful local school Christopher calls him 'dad' instead of 'daddy'. But in the Introduction by James Wood, it is said that Green was only interested in observing class differences, not wanting to change them, and indeed he spent most of his life in uncomplaining upper-class comfort, supported by servants. So these seem more like observations of wartime 'privation' than a commentary on inequality. For Green, English society remained as hierarchical as ever it was.
The one-word title is clever. There are many ways that the characters are 'caught'. Both Roe and Pye are caught up in Pye's sister's crime. But they are also caught in a war, caught in the web of class-consciousness, caught by the expectations of their community and caught by the gossip that swirls around them. Men and women are caught up into brief meaningless liaisons and all of them are caught in misdemeanours that would be trivial in peace time but have different consequences in war.
Stylewise, Caught is tricky to read (and not just because I have Covid-brain). The prose flips from modernist wordiness that needs re-reading to make meaning, to a strangely poetic mimicry of working-class dialogue.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/06/08/c...
Blindness (1926), on the TBR
Living (1929)
Party-Going (1939)
Caught (1943)
Loving (1945), see my review
Back (1946)
Concluding (1948)
Nothing (1950), see my review
Doting (1952), on the TBR
During the war, perhaps mindful of the possibility of not surviving the Blitz, Green also wrote a memoir called Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940). He was in the Auxiliary Fire Service, a poorly equipped and hastily mobilised volunteer force in which 800 men died because it was such dangerous work. This AFS experience also forms the backdrop for Caught.
Caught is cited in 1001 Books as an ambivalent novel.
The story examines how people are kept apart by social and sexual differences and studies their attempts to affect and really feel sympathy for each other. It is a realist novel, exposing social and class contradictions. p.422
But by describing in vivid dialogue the solidarity that develops between men and women of different classes brought together by the war, Green also shows how they fail to communicate with each other. There is a chasm between the contrasting central characters, the affluent (married) Roe and Pye, a retired fireman. Though they share the same flippant attitude to wartime sex, and the long hours waiting for the call during the Phoney War were conducive to sharing intimacies, their dialogue is mutually incomprehensible. The awkwardness between them is not just because Pye's mentally disturbed sister once abducted Roe's son Christopher. It's that both of them think in terms of their own superiority. There is a hint that things may change when by the novel's end, Roe is confronted by the absence of separate nursery teas so that #ShockHorror he has to be with his own children for meals — and #sarcasm even worse, courtesy of that awful local school Christopher calls him 'dad' instead of 'daddy'. But in the Introduction by James Wood, it is said that Green was only interested in observing class differences, not wanting to change them, and indeed he spent most of his life in uncomplaining upper-class comfort, supported by servants. So these seem more like observations of wartime 'privation' than a commentary on inequality. For Green, English society remained as hierarchical as ever it was.
The one-word title is clever. There are many ways that the characters are 'caught'. Both Roe and Pye are caught up in Pye's sister's crime. But they are also caught in a war, caught in the web of class-consciousness, caught by the expectations of their community and caught by the gossip that swirls around them. Men and women are caught up into brief meaningless liaisons and all of them are caught in misdemeanours that would be trivial in peace time but have different consequences in war.
Stylewise, Caught is tricky to read (and not just because I have Covid-brain). The prose flips from modernist wordiness that needs re-reading to make meaning, to a strangely poetic mimicry of working-class dialogue.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/06/08/c...
April 2, 2016
I can be really short about this novel. I didn't like it.
Virtually all the male characters are misogynist without realising they are. The environment in which these men find themselves is dominated by men, there's a lot of fake manly men buffoonery going on, no single character seems to truly get a deeper personality because Green keeps coming back to their superficiality. While critics praise the novel as Green's best, and a must-read, I cannot see the appeal at all. Granted, Green manages to show the different experiences of men and women throughout the war and the subsequent misunderstandings and disconnections, the difficulty of expressing oneself and one's experiences intelligibly to someone who has different experiences and can, therefore, essentially never truly grasp what you mean.
Read this for a seminar on WWII writing, and I can see its value within that frame, but I still feel many, many better novels have been written in this era that express the world view of people in a clearer and less male-focused way. Persepone Books has published many novels that address the gap between the sexes so much better than this novel does, that I'd strongly recommend that those interested in this era search their catalogue rather than pick this book up.
Virtually all the male characters are misogynist without realising they are. The environment in which these men find themselves is dominated by men, there's a lot of fake manly men buffoonery going on, no single character seems to truly get a deeper personality because Green keeps coming back to their superficiality. While critics praise the novel as Green's best, and a must-read, I cannot see the appeal at all. Granted, Green manages to show the different experiences of men and women throughout the war and the subsequent misunderstandings and disconnections, the difficulty of expressing oneself and one's experiences intelligibly to someone who has different experiences and can, therefore, essentially never truly grasp what you mean.
Read this for a seminar on WWII writing, and I can see its value within that frame, but I still feel many, many better novels have been written in this era that express the world view of people in a clearer and less male-focused way. Persepone Books has published many novels that address the gap between the sexes so much better than this novel does, that I'd strongly recommend that those interested in this era search their catalogue rather than pick this book up.
March 1, 2018
I've read all but one of Green's books now (Blindness remains), and enjoyed them all. But there is a clear, short shelf of his books that are masterpieces, where the plot somehow fits perfectly into Green's idiosyncratic, descriptive technique and the act of reading becomes an all encompassing "experiencing." The majority of the novels actually don't quite "work" for me. The plot feels totally irrelevant and we keep reading because the language is so startling and lovely. For example, Back, also a wartime book, never quite coheres into a working story. But Loving, Party Going, and now, this one, really grip and emotionally move, on top of the enchantment we can rely on Green's language delivering. Caught is a perfect little novel about the London blitz. Caught beautifully brings to life the London of the blitz; on finishing there's a feeling of having lived through a little sliver of it.
(This edition, published in 2016, seems to be the first time Americans have had access to the book in an uncensored edition. The introduction, however, should be an afterword; it reveals far too much of the plot.)
(This edition, published in 2016, seems to be the first time Americans have had access to the book in an uncensored edition. The introduction, however, should be an afterword; it reveals far too much of the plot.)
February 2, 2013
Set in the months preceding the Blitz, 'Caught' deals with the lives of men and women in a London auxiliary fire station. A quick and interesting read, although the working-slang dialogue sometimes really bugged me...
March 30, 2011
Interesting book which relates the story of men and women in the auxillary fire brigade, how they relate to each other and the wait for the raids to start.
November 9, 2016
Too sad and jagged to read this sad and jagged book right now. Starting something less so.
December 14, 2024
This was my first Henry Green and I was really impressed. The writing style is unusual as it often moves outside conventional grammar to convey movement of thoughts and of physical surroundings, then goes back to straightforward prose or dialogue. I found that interesting, and I also liked the beauty of the descriptions of London at night.
The story itself is one of inner trauma and insecurities, shown through the complex relationship between two members of the Fire Service during the early part of WWII. Roe is an Auxiliary, an educated and wealthy man, and he is assigned to serve under the professional fireman Pye. The early days of inaction and practice at the station suddenly erupt into the reality of the Blitz, and Roe is left trying to come to terms with everything.
I appreciated the way Green dealt with trauma, the way he gave life to characters of different classes without making them stereotypes, and the way he used language to achieve his aims. I am looking forward to reading more of Green’s work.
The story itself is one of inner trauma and insecurities, shown through the complex relationship between two members of the Fire Service during the early part of WWII. Roe is an Auxiliary, an educated and wealthy man, and he is assigned to serve under the professional fireman Pye. The early days of inaction and practice at the station suddenly erupt into the reality of the Blitz, and Roe is left trying to come to terms with everything.
I appreciated the way Green dealt with trauma, the way he gave life to characters of different classes without making them stereotypes, and the way he used language to achieve his aims. I am looking forward to reading more of Green’s work.
November 30, 2025
De vez em quando, interrogo-me sobre se a afinidade com um dado autor nos torna incapazes de detectar falhas, exageros ou insuficiências da parte destes. Admiro Henry Green de forma intensa e absoluta desde que, um pouco por acaso (como sucede quase sempre), comecei a descobrir a sua obra de romancista. “Caught”, quarto romance de Green, baseia-se nas suas experiências muito recentes como membro de uma brigada de combate a incêndios, em Londres, antes e durante os bombardeamentos alemães da segunda guerra mundial. Uma das premissas principais do romance é, já de si, francamente inverosímil: a personagem principal, Richard Roe, é colocada numa brigada cujo chefe é o irmão da mulher, mentalmente desequilibrada, que, pouco tempo antes, raptara durante algumas horas o seu filho. Esta coincidência está na origem directa de algumas peripécias e interacções entre as personagens, mas funciona mais como pretexto para situações narrativas do que como factor estruturante, merecedor de desfecho ou resolução. Outros aspectos da estrutura e do conteúdo do livro parecem também desequilibrados ou arbitrários: por exemplo, a súbita desconfiança, por parte do chefe de brigada, de que a sua primeira experiência sexual pode ter sido com a própria irmã, que ele teria confundido com outra pessoa por causa da escuridão. As transições entre a Londres à espera dos bombardeamentos e incêndios e a casa de campo onde o filho e a mulher de Roe se refugiaram são bruscas e aparentemente aleatórias; as prolepses brevíssimas, que nos mostram a cidade devorada por incêndios pavorosos, contrastam violentamente com a placidez do tempo presente da narrativa, preenchido por quezílias profissionais, infidelidades, expectativa e conversa de circunstância. Se estas supostas falhas me fossem apontadas por um leitor de Green menos prosélito, é possível que eu me desse ao trabalho de sugerir que essa súmula de desequilíbrios e fragilidades reproduz admiravelmente aquele que eu adivinho ter sido o ambiente daquela época e daquele local, marcado pelo estilhaçar de todas as certezas e rotinas e pela necessidade de dosear a atenção dedicada ao trabalho, às conjecturas sobre o futuro, ao bem-estar dos entes queridos e aos gestos de comer, beber, dormir e amar. Se não estivesse com energia para esse tipo de explicação, que provavelmente soaria pouco convincente, talvez me limitasse a encolher os ombros e a admitir que é assim que eu gosto dos romances de Henry Green: com pontas soltas, arestas irregulares e mistérios, provavelmente de importância menor. E, acima de tudo, com esta mistura talhada de linguagem popular e explosões líricas de uma intensidade e sensualidade sem par, que nunca nos deixam esquecer que a proximidade e empatia com as personagens retratadas são apenas uma parte do trabalho do escritor, e que de pouco valem sem o distanciamento próprio de quem transforma a vida em literatura.
January 27, 2025
Set in London during the early WWII years. The novel tells the story of Richard Roe, a well to do auxiliary fireman who joins the fire service in London just before the war. His wife has died, leaving him with a young son, Christopher. The son is taken by a mentally ill woman whilst shopping with his nanny. Christopher is found and returned soon after by the ill woman’s brother. The woman is placed in a mental asylum.
By coincidence, Richard Roe is posted to the fire station of the mentally ill woman’s brother, Pye. Pye is in his mid thirties and the war has lead to Pye being a boss, a position he is unsuited to.
The novel explores the relationships of the men and women who work for the fire auxiliary station Richard works from. Activity at the fire station is very staid initially, but later, with the bombing of London, Richard finds his job quite challenging.
A well written novel with very well developed characters and an interesting account of life for auxiliary personnel during World War II.
This book was first published in 1943.
By coincidence, Richard Roe is posted to the fire station of the mentally ill woman’s brother, Pye. Pye is in his mid thirties and the war has lead to Pye being a boss, a position he is unsuited to.
The novel explores the relationships of the men and women who work for the fire auxiliary station Richard works from. Activity at the fire station is very staid initially, but later, with the bombing of London, Richard finds his job quite challenging.
A well written novel with very well developed characters and an interesting account of life for auxiliary personnel during World War II.
This book was first published in 1943.
December 16, 2018
I attempted Green's novel "Blindness" about 30 years ago and didn't get far; he's not so much a difficult writer as difficult to get used to. His style somewhat resembles that of George Saunders, vacillating from straightforward storytelling to almost abstruse metaphor, simile and description, at a glance far-fetched and arbitrary, at a second glance very individualistic, whatever character's associations,perceptions or in one case, hallucinations, defining her/ him. Green obviously read Woolfe but I find his interior explorations more plausible than Woolf's: dreamy, fuzzy, distracted. He occasionally misses his mark--contrived or overreaching--but on the whole comes through with flying dreamy, fuzzy colours./ The book has two elements: the high drama of GB's fire brigade apprehensively anticipating the inevitable blitzkreig and their inner lives. Ironically, there is very little about the actual blitzes, the bulk of the semi-autobiographical novel focused on months-long pre-blitz boredom, booze, infidelity, petty rivalry, internecine gossip and homesickness, the most interesting dynamic between Richard Roe (based on Green) and his superior Pye, whose sister abducted Roe's little boy before the war and was put in an asylum. (Kinky abuse is ruled out halfway into the book as the sister asks visitor Pye about "her child".)/ Green's voice is low-key throughout; whereas Simon's WW ll novel "The Georgics"' implicit philosophical didacticism and fever-pitch descriptions (nature and war akin in their violence and spectacle) have you join in on the agony and confusion, Green instead explores war's periphery and magically stands it alongside other of life's mysteries and problems.
July 22, 2018
Henry Green is a writer's writer's writer whose prose style is undeniably brilliant but sometimes, in his other books, can lose me in its thickets of descriptive clauses, internal asides, and play between registers of tone and idiom. CAUGHT, though, is a sweet, sharp, clear narrative of a man working the Auxiliary Fire Brigade during the London Blitz. Green delivers a brilliant sense of how people communicate across great distances--whether across class lines, as strangers are jammed together in a single company for the first time because of the war, or across the distance created in a relationship when a woman is shuttled off to the countryside while her husband remains in the city, neck-deep in the Blitz. CAUGHT is exquisite in its interplay of what we say to each other, explicitly, while thinking to ourselves something quite different. CAUGHT is a fantastic depiction of decent people trying to reach each other across impossible distances in tortuous circumstances.
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