Party Going

by Henry Green, Tim Parks (Introduction)

A group of rich, spoiled and idle young people heading off on a winter holiday are stranded at a railway station when their train is delayed by thick, enclosing fog. Party Going describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, 20th Century, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Henry 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.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Not Too Much Ado About Nothing", or "Waiting For Fog-Gone", or "Life is what happens while you are talking about something else"?

As for "Party Going", the title is slightly optimistic - mainly because the party is stuck at the train station, waiting for the dense fog to disappear, and also because the party fails to establish anything resembling a party - despite checking in to a hotel and having drinks while waiting. If Pirandello put his poor characters through the ordeal of looking for an author, the protagonists of this story seem to be left without a plot, - not worrying too much about it. All they can do is create an energy field, trying their best to establish some sort of time-space continuum for themselves.

If this were a play, it wouldn't have to worry about the Aristotelian units of time and place at all. It all unfolds in the train station, over the course of a day of waiting for a train which will carry the English upper class party to Southern France.

As for the action, you will need a looking-glass to find it.

It partly consists in an undefined illness. Aunt May is honoured with various diagnoses, reaching from "being tight" to terminal illness. In the end, she is just a bit too weak to join the party when the fog dissolves on the last pages.

As for further action, it consists in a rich young man's choice of women, leading to various bedroom scenes without inappropriate behaviour - if you do not count tiring dialogue. It remains ambiguous, and without any hope for closure in the near future:

"As he sat there he realized he did not know if she was going to come or not. And if she did come out he did not know if she would stay or when she would get it into her head to start home which she might at any time. He realized without putting it into words he did not even know if he was glad she was going to come, or sorry she was going to stay at home..."

And this only accounts for Max' feelings towards one of his three ladies, and those feelings change on the next page, adding the confused thought of "being sorry she was going to come". Let's not try to put into words what his women think. They wouldn't be able to themselves.

As for minor, incidental action, it also consists of gossip and getting your luggage ready and taking a bath and defining your role in the non-party, mixing a drink and reflecting on who put a notice into a newspaper.

That's it. Nothing much happens until the fog clears, leaving the reader to wonder what on earth the characters will do if they ever reach their destination. It also makes one curious to read Henry Green's novel Nothing as it seems rather impossible to fill two hundred pages with anything more appropriately called "NOTHING" than what (not-)occurs in "PARTY GOING".

It is absolutely charming non-action, though, and the characters are masters of nothing-doing, so the party-going (or not-going, as the case may be) is really secondary, as far as their Living and Loving is concerned.

Recommended! I'm off reading NOTHING!

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

and off they go, the pretty young things, the butterflies, brainless and heartless and full of their excruciatingly minuscule plans and ambitions. lacking any true purpose in their movements, any depth in their thoughts. even butterfly lives have more meaning! and to see them off: an old wounded pigeon, barely conscious, immobilized by her spinsterish neuroses and an unwise helping of whiskey. the butterflies fly about her, scarcely seeing her and certainly not understanding her ways. how could they? they are of a different species! the butterflies flutter to and fro, up and down and across, thinking that their little hothouse is the whole wide world.



a novel crammed with dialogue, true to life but only to a certain kind of life: one filled to the brim with willful passivity and micro-aggression; artifice and constant passive-aggressiveness. a book about minutia. Henry Green tracks every small movement, each feint and barb, every blinding bit of quickly shut-down anger, every muffled explosion when some sad person tries to stake a claim then dies just a wee bit on the inside as their barely conceived plots and shallow facades crumble away. but can something without life even die? this novel about various English socialites' attempt at a lark across the channel but stuck waiting for a fogbound train took many years to write, perhaps to get each and every little, little thing just right. the result should have been a chore to read, but it was a tart delight, the participants in this farce too harmless to warrant much more than sneers and snide laughter at the thought of their various trials, tribulations, and heartbreaks. off with their pretty little heads!



but no, that would simply be too cruel, despite what Green may want. his empty vessels are appalling but also amusing, sometimes even fascinating - their minds so full of vague recollections, odd repetitions, and puerile musings misunderstood as meaningful. Party Going is a carefully designed piece of work: a display of tinted glass beads disguised as jewels and colorful vapors pretending to be shapes; a perfect encapsulation of Sartre's "Hell is other people". it is, most of all, a poison pen letter - by turns giddy and melancholy, but always sharply pointed - written to the upper classes of England's yesteryear. let them eat cake, and only cake, for the rest of their so-called lives.





review for Living here
review for Loving here

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Party Going is a piece of human comedy but it isn’t without its tragic overtones and a fine dose of absurdity. The departure of a train was delayed due to the soupy fog so the story is a scrupulous description, full of subtle psychological observations, of the process of waiting.
The tale is told in the cinematographic way and the camera constantly tosses from character to character. There is not a personage without some whimsy or peculiarity and Henry Green is always more profound than it may seem.

Max therefore was reckoned to be of importance, he was well known, he moved in circles made up of people older than himself, and there was no girl of his own age like Julia, Claire Hignam or Miss Crevy – even Evelyna Henderson although she was hardly in it — who did not feel something when they were on his arm, particularly when he was so good-looking. Again one of his attractions was that they all thought they could stop him drinking, not that he ever got drunk because he had not yet lost his head for drink, but they were all sure that if they married him they could make him into something quite wonderful, and that they could get him away from all those other women, or so many of them as were not rather friends of their own.

This is a portrait of the rich host of a party as seen with one of his admirers’ eyes.

It was all the fault of these girls. It had been such fun in old days when they had just gone and no one had minded what happened. They had been there to enjoy themselves and they had been friends but if you were girls and went on a party then it seemed to him you thought only of how you were doing, of how much it looked to others you were enjoying yourself and worse than that of how much whoever might be with you could give you reasons for enjoying it. Or, in other words, you competed with each other in how well you were doing well and doing well was getting off with the rich man in the party. Whoever he might be such treatment was bad for him. Max was not what he had been. No one could have people fighting over him and stay himself. It was not Amabel’s fault, she was all right even if she did use him, it was these desperate inexperienced bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days without one sup of encouragement. Under their humps they had tanks of self-confidence so that they could cross any desert area of arid prickly pear without one compliment, or dewdrop as they called it in his family, to uphold them.

And those are thoughts of the host about his admirers.
Much time of our lives is spent in waiting and many crucial events may happen while we wait…

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stylistically this is similar to the two other Green novels I've just read (Living and Loving). It is breathless dialogue with very little interior monologue, certainly in the modernist tradition. On the surface it is a simple story, but it took Green from 1931 to 1938 to write it.
It is set over 4 hours at a train station. A group of young wealthy socialites meet at a train station to go on holiday to the South of France (this is towards the end of the era of the Bright Young Things). A thick London fog has descended and all trains are stopped. The station begins to fill with people and close contact with the lower and middle classes isn't that attractive, so they take some rooms in the station hotel. They spend most of the novel bickering and flirting. There is also an aunt in tow and she is taken ill and put to bed.
The characters are all pretty vacuous and empty-headed and on the surface it can be seen as a satire on idle rich youth because pretty much nothing happens in the novel. At one level that is true; the characters are in their hotel rooms bickering and looking out of the Windows down on the heaving masses below.
However there is much more going on. At one point there is a description of a picture on the wall of Nero fiddling whilst Rome burns juxtaposed with Max (the main character around whom much revolves) looking out at the crowds below. All the girls seem to be interchangeable, whilst most of the men are just irritants. The girls names are even fluid (Evelyn changes to Evelyna and back). There is also an amorality about it and it does seem as though these rich young people are as amorphous and anonymous as the masses.
Then there is the strange figure who seems to move between the crowds and the group in the hotel, switching accents as he does so and appears to belong in both worlds. There is also the dead pigeon which the aunt picks up and washes before she is taken ill; she carries it wrapped in brown paper.
Green plays with space; familiar space becoming unfamiliar and threatening, members of the group losing and finding each other in the station and occupying the same space at different times before they all move above the familiar space to unfamiliar rooms.The sense of oddness is heightened by the fog with the faces of the crowd having "pale lozenged faces" (as one critic points out, very like Munch's The Scream). Movement and tension revolve around a hollow centre as the crowd become more threatening and the girls worry about being murdered in their beds by the faceless masses.
Of course you could go along with Frank Kermode and see the whole piece as being laced with the imagery of Greek mythology revolving round a Hermes figure.
Green is a very clever writer who teases the reader by hding all sorts of little messages and images. I enjoyed this; it pulls the mind in different directions; but the characters are much less sympathetic than in the other two of Green's novels I have read. It was worth the effort though.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a fog upon L.A.
And my friends have lost their way
We'll be over soon they said
Now they've lost themselves instead.
Please don't be long please don't you be very long . . .

This, maybe the worst Beatles' song, kept droning in my head as I read this novel: because of the fog, because of the droning, because of a trip delayed, and because it's possibly the worst effort of an artist I like. Although it starts well:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

The bird was a pigeon and the feet belonged to Miss Fellowes, who fared only a little better than the pigeon. I missed the significance, even though the author kept bringing it up. That's on me, as professional athletes, who don't mean it, say. I'll try to keep it simpler.

This is a book about insufferable people acting insufferably. They are well-to-do Brits in the 1930s. No one has a job, as far as I could tell. They drink instead, and consider mating. Max, the richest by far, decides they will all go to France for three weeks. They meet at the train station, but the fog that betrayed the pigeon halts all other transport as well.

Thousands of citizens wait, body to body. To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown closely together or thousands of tailors' dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor. But the insufferables repair to three hotel rooms, drinks are served, and mating is considered. Everyone is put out.

There are gender issues: It was all the fault of these girls . . . it was these desperate inexperienced bitches. And, looking down at humanity from their rooms, class issues:

"My dears," she said panting, "they've broken in below, isn't it too awful?" . . . "Why, all those people outside of course," said Julia, "and they're all drunk, naturally. But what are we to do?" . . . "They won't come and kill us in our beds because we aren't in bed." . . . "Oh, but then they'll come up here and be dirty and violent" . . . "They'll probably try and kiss us or something."

As I said, insufferable. But not a very subtle portrayal.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

These people are terrible, unredeemably terrible, like Bret Easton Ellis terrible. Nobody likes each other or even themselves. They make up lies because they can't be bothered to remember what the truth is, and the other person isn't listening anyway. The omniscient narrator is constantly breaking in: "This wasn't true," it casually states. This is the worst group of people in a room since And Then There Were None.

You won't be able to keep any of them straight, which is fine because they can't keep each other straight either, no one cares; like the matching dummy books they each have on their matching shelves, they're mostly empty covers. But here they are anyway:

- May Fellowes, the drunk aunt with a dead pigeon that will never be explained;
- Her bored niece Claire Hignan;
- Her drunk husband Robert Hignan;
- Her friend Evelyn(a) Henderson, who is so boring even the narrator can't be bothered to remember whether her name is Evelyn or Evelyna;
- Hapless Alex who wants to get along with everyone;
- Childlike Julia who is concerned only with her "charms," which are toys, and getting into Max's pants;
- Max, the rich and ambivalent organizer of the whole thing;
- His girlfriend Amabel, who shows up uninvited;
- Angela Crevy the new girl, badly out of her depth;
- Her young man Robin, who pops up occasionally;
- Embassy Richard, who looms unseen over most of the book like an irrelevant Percival.

They're all stuck in this room above a train station because the trains are canceled for fog, which makes this one of the

Top Three Books About Fog
3. Hound of the Baskervilles
2. Party Going
1. Bleak House

It all gets a little metaphorical here, with these smug bastards looking down from their private rooms at the huddled throngs below on the train platform, everyone waiting equally helplessly for the fog to lift so they can leave, but some waiting far more comfortably than others. Not that you need the metaphor, Green isn't bashing you over the head with it like some arch Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's perfectly all right to just have a great time hate-reading it.

Hate-reading the characters, not the book. The book is perfect. It's modernist, with an especial debt to Gertrude Stein's repetitive character descriptions, but not particularly difficult. It's extremely funny - Julia exclaims, faced with possible contact with the lower classes, "They'll probably try and kiss us or something." There are bursts of outrageously beautiful writing. It moves easily, as though it's all a lark, but every step is perfectly calibrated. "If it wasn't so ludicrous it would be quite comic," says Alex about their situation, and the book, and life itself.

[Tim Parks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was one of the most powerful influences on my early writing. In terms of style it is quite unique. Simply there is no other reading experience like it. Just a few pages in you know you're in an entirely new world of feeling and perception.

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

For eons, I have heard the name 'Henry Green' as a mysterious figure out of London who wrote marvelous books. The titles are intriguing because they are mostly one-worded titles such as "Loving," "Living," "Concluding," and the intriguing title of them all, "Nothing." I started my Henry Green by reading "Party Going." It's a very strange book. The narration is a group of wealthy people who are waiting for a train to take them to a party. They can't go, due to dense fog, and therefore they have to wait at the station and later at a hotel near the train station. What we have is a portrait of a class of people who are separated from others, as they notice the comings and goings of people who may be considered lower than them. The book has a sense of humor, but it is also a bleakness that rings through the novel. Written in the 1930s, it may be based on the Cecil Beaton crowd at the time. Or not.

While reading the novel, I got the impression perhaps these people are dead, and they are just waiting at the hotel/station till they decide to either go to hell or heaven. On my part, I think that is a wrong reading of the text on my part. One gets a picture in the mind of being stranded in a location due to the thick and iconic fog of London. I imagine these people are well-dressed and ready to party - but alas, the party doesn't happen, in fact, as the title states, it's 'Party Going.' Not Part Arriving or The Party - it's a party that's moving, but in truth, they are not moving. They're going nowhere.

There are surreal touches such as a dead pigeon, and I thought of Luis Bunuel's later film works while reading "Party Going." But this is a book from a different time (I think...) and aesthetic. It's like a serious version of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. It's a unique novel because I feel that there is nothing else like Henry Green out there.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

a re-reading.
Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

reading Henry Green is like a dream, even what should be tedious, the game playing, teasing and mocking among the vapid rich: the wonderful few, Max with his three suitors at his back, beauty rising from the bath, always the crowd outside emphasising their special-ness. Green shows they don't deserve it, they are frivolous and uninvolved in society-wide issues, although they have the power to make trains wait, but on the other hand they're just humans subject to whims and embarrassments like those in the crowd on the station forecourt. When this mass is individualised the 'working class' come across cheekily, one on top of another's shoulder to reach the maids in an upstairs window, stoic, not bitter, or only individually so, as petty as those locked in too. Death is seeping everywhere like the fog, the ill aunty who people try to ignore or intermittently attend, with her wrapped up dead pigeon, the luggage like tombstones attended by mourners, the dark and the fog obscuring. And every few pages a passage that leaves you floating, touched; like Amabel, Green flirts and teases with you, wooing all the time. So it's a dream but one that makes you feel alert and receptive. His awkward phrasing, (sometimes) blunt images make you back up a bit. The writing sticks in you. It's what you want novels - fiction - to do. Well, me anyway.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of awful people trapped in a couple of hotel rooms at Victoria Station.

Bits:

"Anyone who found herself alone with Julia could not help feeling they had been left in charge."

"'I won't have you watching yourself in the mirror when you're kissing me. It proves you don't love me and anyway no nice person does that.'"

"Already the acetone she had filled this room with its smell of peardrops like a terrible desert blossom."

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1920s England, the phrase “bright young things” was established to describe rich, often aristocratic people who, in the years after the First World War, embodied a way of life marked by excess and disillusionment among the upper classes. I guess they didn’t have much going on, so they chased thrills, didn’t mind being scandalous, had parties and fucked around.

Party Going centres on such a group, en route to a holiday in France—except they’re stuck at a train station. An impenetrable fog has descended over London and no trains are running. The novel unfolds at the station and in the adjoining hotel where they wait.

I loved the atmosphere of chaos, and Henry Green’s agility and deftness as he flits from one character’s perceptions to another’s, and the amusing dialogue. I loved the lightness of the tone, the book’s inherent strangeness, and Green’s poetic flights of fancy.

Green was an original. His style is highly idiosyncratic: the sentences are oddly shaped but always fluid and elegant. He won’t be for everyone, but I love riding the rhythms of his prose. And I just love his voice and wit—there’s a gorgeous marriage, for me, of high style and offbeat sensibility, which is why I find his stories so entertaining, and such an aesthetic treat.

Darkly comic, eccentric, breezy, and wild—I loved it. This is for anyone interested in the fusion of the Evelyn Waugh of Vile Bodies with modernist flair.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a thick fog stops the trains in London, a group of upper class Brits, funded by their richest member, can't leave for their planned holiday in the south of France. They take refuge in the train station's adjacent hotel and continue the ongoing drawing room comedy of their lives, flirting with and and gossiping about one another, fretting about who is most likely to win rich Max's affections, and looking in on a subplot in which a not-so-elderly aunt collapses after a single drink at the bar. For upstairs/downstairs relief, Green's thwarted traveling party occasionally looks out the window at the masses of frustrated commuters pouring onto the platform below and wonders if their personal attendants are managing to keep their luggage safe from the throng's grasping hands.

Party Going is a short novel, whimsically and artfully written, that reads more like a short story. The main characters, not compelled by economic necessity to be other than they are, do not develop. They are like a group of seals tossing balls of plot from nose to nose, barking with pleasure and generally being impervious to what any outside observer might make of them.

This is an antic book full of Green's peculiarly effective dramatizations of wooing and wounding. The scenes in which Amabel decides to have a bath while waiting for the fog to lift and everyone else remains clothed and perturbed about her naked in the tub beyond the door and in which she masterfully manipulates Max (who ultimately figures out how to crawl out of her clutches) are priceless.

Putting his stylistic quirkiness to effective use, Green elides distinct interactions without any transition to highlight the sameness of this social class's features -- it's often unclear who is talking and who that who is, i.e., what's the difference between Evelyn and Miss Crevy, and which of them, if either, is married to Robert?

This is a novel that has echoes of Chekhov in it while ploughing again the English furrows first gouged by Samuel Richardson and William Makepeace Thackeray. And for whimsy let's keep the most original English stylist in mind, Laurence Sterne.
I have one question I need to answer out of personal curiosity. Why did it take Henry Green seven years to write this book? Not that it isn't worth that much time, but what was the hang up when he so obviously knew exactly what he was doing?

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm doing a reread of Green's novels. Green writes crystalline clear prose laced with irony.

There are a group of young people: wealthy, spoiled, extremely self-indulgent. Fog shuts down train service and the group is literally as well as metaphorically going nowhere. Unlike most of the would-be passengers, the group is accommodated in a comfortable hotel but still manage to be petty and irritable. One woman's aunt is at the station and becomes very ill. Her illness and possible death is a repeating note throughout the novel. Her niece, Claire, is intermittently worried about her but no one in this group seems capable of any kind of deep feeling or meaningful relationship.

The drawback of this finely written novel is that the characters are all unlikable. However, the novel is short which allowed me to pay close attention and not turn away from these members of the British upper class on the even (1939) of their destruction.

I'm going to continue re-reading Green's novels. Likable or not the books are deeply engaging. Green may not be to everyone's taste, but if he is to yours, there's not enough of him to satisfy. But there is always the pleasure of rereading.

[Robert Wechsler]

Every few years I give Henry Green a try, since he was one of my mentor, W. M. Spackman's, favorites. With this book, too, I found that the prose style did not pay back its difficulty, as Spack’s does. It’s rarely delightful, and often opaque. Also important is the fact that I didn’t care if I didn’t understand. I kept moving on, not caring about anything.

This is okay if I’m simply watching a master at work; that is more than entertaining enough for me. But either I’m too dim to get what he’s doing, or he’s not a master. I feel more like words master him, and he’s not up to the task. This can be interesting in itself, but it’s not what I’m interested in.

[Brian E Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Party Going is the tale of a group of Bright Young Things as they gather together at a railway station and its adjacent hotel for many hours waiting for the fog to clear so they can train off on a holiday at the continental vacation property of their host, the wealthy and debonaire Max. This was written in 1939 and, in a way, caps off the 1930s literary portrayals of the Bright Young Things started by Green’s friend Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies in 1930. The story involves Max’s attempts to keep his current flame, the beautiful and manipulative Amabel, from knowing about the party’s excursion so he can woo another woman, Julia, in the entourage he has invited to his property.

There are other minor plot events, but the story is largely driven by the character’s dialogue rather than the particular events. The setting is fairly static, almost entirely set in the train station hotel.

As to style, this is my third novel/novella by Henry Green, and each has been dominated by dialogue over narrative. The first two novels, Loving and Living both were dominated by working-class characters so Green chose to use a lot of dialect. That was not a factor in the current novel as it was dominated by upper-crust aristocratic characters.

However, all three of the novellas have had a different style. Loving had an oddly non-omniscient narrator who, in almost the complete opposite manner as stream of consciousness, gave no clues as to the characters’ thoughts behind their words. Thus, everything about a character was derived from the dialogue which was slow going due to the dialect. In Living, Green adopted the odd conceit of eliminating almost all “the” and “a” articles of speech in his narrative. This device gave the narrative a very blunt sounding and choppy rhythm that matched the blunt and choppy rhythm of the dialect-dominated dialogue. Both styles made for reading experiences that started slow and difficult but blossomed into unusual and rewarding ones for me. But for many others it seems to be a plodding and difficult style that never blossoms, a view represented by this comment by a J.M. Walker that “I found reading Henry Green like reading Upstairs, Downstairs in ultra-slow motion.”

In contrast to the style in these two novellas, Green’s style in Party Going is fairly traditional and smooth. Green didn’t use any innovative stylistic choices that slowed the reading down. But while the style may not have been as difficult, many readers have more difficulty with the shallow characters and their correspondingly shallow conversation.

While these characters may have been superficial and spoiled with trivial concerns, I found their interactions to be quite entertaining. These Bright Young Things presented opportunities for satirical observations and humor not offered by the characters in the first two books. I also enjoyed Green’s ploy of having the reader learn about Max through the characters’ discussions of him prior to revealing him, a process he repeats on a longer scale with the entertainingly titled 'Embassy Richard’ character.

Green’s choice of a sleeker style matched well with Green’s choice of the aristocratic social set rather than the working class as his main characters here. As a result, this book turned out to be as rewarding a reading experience for me as the previous two books and perhaps more so. Both the dialogue and setting made this story resemble a 1930’s romantic comedy movie or Noel Coward play.

Superficial people with trivial concerns that kept me smiling throughout most of this read. Call me shallow, but I rate this as 4+ stars.

[Historygirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Party Going by Henry Green reads like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel written by James Joyce. A group of Bright Young Things, along with an elderly aunt, two nannies, two valets, a fiancée, a mysterious hanger on and a crowd of Londoners are caught in a heavy fog that has cancelled all trains. The wealthy young people are headed for a party together via the boat train to the South of France. When the trains are delayed they are able to get sitting and bedrooms in the railroad hotel, because they are rich and influential. Meanwhile the ordinary crowd packs into the station suspended between alternating poles of action representing either the decent English masses or a rioting mob.

The party group is led by Max who is so rich he will pay for everything. He is pursued by two women and hopelessly admired by his gay friend who acts as host and buffer. Max is a cipher, partly by choice, because he refuses to commit to anything. The other characters are very sharply drawn through descriptions of their actions. Green does not use interior dialogue as Joyce and Virginia Woolf did, but he writes around the characters in layers of interaction that clarifies who they might be. The reader remembers them clearly even though little is directly proven.

Green’s language is unconventional. On one hand this short book is deceptively easy to read; on the other the sentences are subtle. The transitions are smooth, but not necessarily logical as his “listening eye” moves from person to person. Don’t expect explanations or resolutions, although the fog does lift.

Reprinted by NYRB press Green’s modernist work is quite entrancing and deserves attention. I plan to read several more.

[Kobe · Rating 3 out of 5]

frustratingly dull but there were some passages imbued with a dreamlike, poetic quality that stood out to me. 3 stars.

[LaMalvenue · Rating 3 out of 5]

inglesi che fanno cose da inglesi, ma con in mano il whisky

[jüri · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

oh!! the bright young things - such glittering people, exemplars of the finest (in their generation) of youth and its manifold stupidities. a characteristic i share with them, being rather young myself. but so often, i ask myself (as i burp, light a cigarette, and finish another damn evelyn waugh novel) where the pathos, the lethargy, and the deep unspoken sorrow are.

party going, then, is evidently the book for me. some young wealthy fools heading to france are corraled into a hotel because their train has been delayed due to heavy fog, ‘so thick a man cannot see his hand before his face’. as they drink and carouse away the three hours in their happy little purgatory, only vaguely aware of the unrest the unhappy working class are brewing over their delayed trains, their lives, topics of conversation, methods of happiness are brutally interrogated and dissected by green. all the while, miss may fellowes (aunt of one of these bright young things, though whose aunt, specifically, is a detail that is continually obfuscated until the very last) wastes away in mysterious sickness in an adjacent hotel room, observed by the two vulture-like nannies of her childhoos; her sickness against this youth acting as the novel’s portable memento mori.

there is passion, stolen embraces; there is gossip, invitations spurned; there is the full-relief minutiae of everyday tragedy as, isolated in a few rooms, the world of our delectably empty-headed protagonists contracts around them and snaps shut. party going is a novel that, for its comic structure, is never delightful and fey and sprightly. one feels the fog, the darkness and the emptiness of the night, one can see the pursing of the lips with the repression of a cruel comment or the stutter of an eyelid as information is withheld, can even taste the gin and cointreau being carelessly drunk, and most importantly, one feels each character growing more and more hateful toward each person that surrounds them - all the while knowing they’re far too well-bred to ever even make it known.

[remarkably · Rating 5 out of 5]

belatedly getting really into Henry Green on ____'s recommendation lo these many years ago, and of course he is just fantastic, something of the Virginia Woolf in how he constructs a narrative (how the anchoring points of it are something altogether other than tedious dull plot events one after the next); something of all of the great modernists in the ‘mythic’ environment here, the purgatorial fog, the dead birds; something cinematic too, the constrained location, the inter-cut points of view, the tremendous use of time — so real-time; but altogether another kind of thing in the marvellous fluidity of perspective and perception. how books ought to be, probably, but they won't — we don't deserve it

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seems to me a book for English majors, which is not meant as a slam. There is something brilliant about the writing. Green makes his article-less prose flow gracefully this time, and he effectively skewers the empty vanity of the life of the English elite in the period between the two World Wars. The dialogue is believable, and generally somewhere between pointless and inane.
These empty-headed spawn of the privileged think about little but appearance, social one-upping and money (having it and not having enough of it). It's all about a hopeless struggle to fit in.

So what happens? Not much that would normally generate a novel. It takes a quarter of the book for the "cast" to arrive at the railroad station, a series of tedious struggles with an unprecedented London fog. A woman bathes a dead pigeon and wraps it in paper. A box of matches explodes. A man with at least three regional British accents comes and goes. A woman takes a bath. Thrilling stuff, right?

I liked the absurdity of some of the above, and loved the line about the decorator who had created a hundred residences for the rich with identical furnishings down to even the book titles on the shelves. That's a compelling burlesque of the absurdity of trying to fit into a social set.

But one index to me of a book's value is how anxious I am to return to it after having put it down, and in this case, I found I was avoiding it and could only manage a few pages of forging ahead at a time. Most of the characters are vaguely sketched (even Max, the central figure) and I could not keep most of them straight. (An exception, though, is Amabel, a virago of memorable self-absorption). The end result for me is a book which is more to think about than to enjoy, more to admire than to like. It's worth reading, but prepare for that to take more time than you had expected.

[Kai Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third Henry Green book I've read this summer (paired with Loving which I liked and Living which I didn't), and it is by far my favorite. The book takes place completely within a few hours at a train station and terminus hotel. A mishmash group of upper class frenemies on their way to the south of France are stranded as a fog rolls into London and shuts down trains. With the concentrated setting and dialogue-heavy writing, the short novel reads more like a play. Henry Green's mastery at developing characters is on full show in this novel - looks and their misinterpretations, the way people are addressed or ignored in a conversation, etc. - it works beautifully. There are lots of characters, and it can get confusing in the beginning, however by the end I genuinely felt I had been stranded in the train station right alongside them. Green contrasts the "living" and the "dying" beautifully, as well as the vapidity of some rich people, the difference between classes, etc. Quite a heavy punch for such a small book.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm on a bad streak. I just couldn't get into this one. And I'm getting to the point where by chapter 3, if it's not showing some returns, I'm going back to Mt. To Be Read and grabbing another. Probably not a bad book. Rebecca West Loved Henry Green, after all. But even good writers can bore me out of my skull sometimes. Not for me.

[Rohan King · Rating 1 out of 5]

The one star is for the dead pigeon, the most engrossing character in the whole story.

[Erin · Rating 1 out of 5]

192 pages and every single one felt like a paper cut to my soul. I'm going to try and articulate why this was the worst and most arduous reading experience of the year (decade?) for me, instead of just giving it the raspberry.

While Green's modernist style and his exploration of the social dynamics among a group of wealthy young people (def what garnered the tragically misleading comparisons to Gatsby) stranded in a fog-bound train station are notable, the execution falls short in several ways:

1. The novel's stream-of-consciousness narrative, while aiming for depth and complexity, often feels convoluted and difficult to follow. The characters' internal monologues blend together, making it hard to distinguish one voice from another. This lack of clarity in the narrative voice detracts significantly from the reader's ability to engage with the story.

2. The characters themselves are largely unlikable and lack development. They come across as shallow and self-absorbed, with little to no growth throughout the novel. Their trivial concerns and petty interactions might be a deliberate critique of their social class, but without any redeeming qualities or deeper insights, it's hard to invest in their fates.

3. The plot is almost non-existent. While Green's focus is clearly on the psychological and social intricacies of his characters, the absence of any significant action or resolution makes the story feel stagnant. The repetitive dialogues and interactions add to the sense of monotony, making the novel a tedious read.

4. The setting, which could have been an atmospheric backdrop, feels underutilized. The fog-bound station is an intriguing premise, but it doesn't evolve into a compelling narrative element. Instead, it feels more like a contrived device to trap the characters in one place without contributing meaningfully to the story's mood or themes.

I wish I could have appreciated the unique narrative style and attempt to delve into the minds of his characters, but alas -- the execution leaves much to be desired. The muddled narrative, unlikable characters, lack of plot progression, and underwhelming use of setting all contribute to a disappointing reading experience. This novel might appeal to those interested in modernist literature and experimental narrative techniques, but for the average reader, it is likely to be a challenging and ultimately unsatisfying read.

[Bobby Musker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Henry Green spent seven years writing this relatively short book. He was famous for taking strange jobs to deepen his life experience and make him a better writer (he worked as a foreman at a factory, and a fireman during the London Blitz), so he may have not been working on the book the whole time, but still! I wonder how much of this time was spent writing and how much was spent editing. I can imagine him carefully working and reworking every aspect of the text like he was making one of the needle-eye sculptures on display at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, his keen eye darting around behind his jeweler's loupe from a finely observed character detail to a beautiful simile, to a perfectly awkward line of dialogue and back again. He's the novelist-as-bonsai-gardener, as ant-farm proprietor.

I wonder if he was influenced by another famous Henry, James. Both are acutely aware of the minutiae of social interaction, the power dynamics always lying just under the surface of seemingly innocuous conversations, and both have a weakness for long, multiclausal sentences that risk coming off convoluted in order to precisely depict the development and expression of a thought or feeling. James, however, was an odd duck, with one foot in the Victorianism, and one in modernism, while Green is a resolute modern. James, especially in his later work which he dictated to a typist and then hammered into shape, never used one word where five could be more fun (for him, not for the generations of students who have slogged through his oeuvre in Lit classes). Green, conversely, I can imagine hunched over his typewritten manuscript, whiteout and red pen in hand, judiciously removing excess verbiage, muttering to himself "No, she wouldn't have said it like that...it would be more...aha!" for seven years straight. This seems like it would make the prose clearer, but sometimes it really, really doesn't. When I recently read James' "In The Cage," there were many moments when I had to read a sentence two or three times over to grasp its meaning (all those semicolons!) but because James can never leave any detail unaccounted for, once the nut was cracked, I had a sublime feeling of "getting it," like solving a math problem or winning a game of solitaire. This was possible, paradoxically, because of James' logorrhea, he puts so many words in there because he wants to fully explain himself. In "Party Going" on the other hand, there were (only a few, but a significant few) sentences that, because key words were removed and the syntax was arranged in such a way, I truly had no idea what he was driving at, like a slip of the pruning shears had cut the wrong branch and left everything lopsided. That's probably a me problem though. By and large, the prose was gorgeous, the kind that makes me step back and think "this is the uncut dope, the proverbial Good Shit."

This still only gets three stars for a few reasons, though. The characters, excepting perhaps the old woman, Mrs. Fellowes, and the two butlers, Thomson and Edwards, were all odious in their own little ways, when they weren't nearly indistinguishable from each other (looking at you, Claire and Evelyn.) The most sympathetic of the rich young people, the chronically anxious Julia and the younger, less experienced Angela each had moments where they revealed their uglier qualities. Green observes their petty psychological manipulations of each other like an announcer at a sports game, calling attention to every subtle shift in the state of play to often amusing effect, but like a pitcher's duel in baseball or a volley in tennis, the longer it goes0 on, the more excruciating the tension becomes. It's a claustrophobic novel; the characters are physically trapped in the crappy station hotel, and psychologically trapped in their interlocking obsessions and resentments.

When Green began his jawdropping description of night falling over the station and the feelings this provoked in the milling crowds waiting there, I couldn't believe that only a few (in book) hours had passed, I thought night had come long before. It reminded me of moments in college when my friends and I would get too intoxicated too quickly and far too early, and someone, under the time-dilating influence of the booze and weed we had consumed, would remark blearily "It's only 10 o'clock!" In fact, a lot of this book reminded me of being in college, of being in a group of friends riddled with minor disagreements and simmering grievances, that sometimes made me wonder if we even liked each other, or if we had just fallen together by chance and through similar circumstance. The passages near the end, where for various reasons characters suppress their negative feelings to "get along" and keep the volley going, so to speak, hit especially hard (e.g. louche, but sharp minded playboy Max one minute thinking he "can't stand" another character and then the next paragraph calling him a "good chap" to someone else; the brutal assessment of the character Alex's annoying qualities, which then shifts to a dispassionate description of his horrible, gothic personal life, before all being brushed away with a "no we love him, though.") My friend's poky, cluttered dormroom was our railway hotel, the fug of cigarette, vape and weed smoke our version of Green's metaphorical fog. We weren't upper class snobs, though, thank God.

The sociopolitical angle is also present. The hotel room full of posh twits looking out onto the faceless crowd was almost too obvious an allegory, and I was glad some of the characters seemed to notice this as well. The plebs in the station are damp, cold and packed together like sardines, but their shared experience of this situation unites them, and gives them something bigger than their own individual grievances to react to. The rich people are relatively comfortable but are lost in private constellations of fear and delusion, constantly drifting further apart. Their obliviousness to the chaos in the station could be taken as a comment on the political situation in England in the 1930s, when their ruling classes ignored the rise of fascism on the continent and batted their eyelashes seductively at it as a solution to the decline of empire and the global economic depression.

Green's accumulation of detail in this novel is astonishing, so expertly compressed, a testament to the amount of time he spent polishing it. I probably missed a lot of little nuggets of insight and symbolism because I read this pretty fast. I thought (mistakenly) that since it was pretty short, it would be a breezy read, it wasn't (this is high modernism, son!), I should go back sometime and really savor all the TLC Green put into this over those seven years, I'll probably like it better.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining, character based, short novel about a group of rich people stuck at a London railway station for four hours due to fog. Given money it not an issue, the group are able to hire railway hotel rooms for their comfort whilst waiting for their train to depart.

I have read two other Henry Green novels, ‘Living’ and ‘Loving’ and would recommend reading either book in preference to ‘Party Going’.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“That’s just what people do.”
“What?”
“Talk about their affairs when they are really upset about them.”

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Long before Seinfeld came along with the show about nothing there were modernist writers writing novels about nothing. The plotless novel, bereft of much in the way of story, depends instead on a focus on daily life and psychological states, and a demanding experimentalist mode of writing sure to trip up less talented authors. Thankfully Henry Green was not one of these, as evidenced by the application of that trite phrase “a writer’s writer” one can find applied to him in various articles and essays.

Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.

Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.

So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:

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. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.

Good Lord that’s good.

[Teaspoon Stories · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d become increasingly aware of this writer from the glowing recommendations by contemporary authors of his on the back covers of books.

But with all that stellar praise from gilded literati such as Elizabeth Bowen, Christopher Isherwood and Graham Greene I actually felt a bit put off. Which just goes to show that over-enthusiastic reviews of a book might actually backfire sometimes.

I’d formed the opinion from all the fulsome quotes that Henry Green would be impossibly high-flown, literary and self-consciously “Modern”. And I began “Party Going”, I have to admit, with a a good dose of reluctance and even suspicion.

The Modernist aspect of the novel is most evident in its style and structure which use experimental features pioneered a decade earlier in groundbreaking works by Joyce and Woolf.

In terms of the reading experience, for example, the most immediately striking aspect of “Party Going” is its punctuation. Or lack of. Initially I found the unpunctuated sentences were just jumbles of words, flows of ideas without structure.

But once I’d got used to it, I didn’t struggle so much with the unpunctuated text. Reading the sentences aloud, under my breath, helped a lot. It meant I worked out for myself where to speed up, pause and breathe, rather than being told where to do so by pesky speech-marks and commas.

The absence of speech-marks is particularly effective in showing how inner thought processes and direct speech weave around each other seamlessly. Think Virginia Woolf and stream of consciousness. For example:

- “So was she going on this trip, too, Miss Fellowes asked, wondering if she were going to faint after all, and Miss Crevy said she was and had Miss Fellowes met Mr Robin Adams?” (p11).

- “And Angela believed her when she said all she had been was late and at once assumed she had always been coming” (p139).

- “Oranges and lemons he suggested was more likely, but no, said Edwards, sardines was all the rage now not blind bloody man’s buff, which was kept for Dartmoor Sunday afternoons” (p158).


The unconventional punctuation is also effective when used in descriptions. Taking away the safety rails, as it were, makes us look at the words, freed from commas, in a fresh and surprising light. For example:

- “So at last they too went in under into one of those tunnels” p9) - where the three unpunctuated prepositions suggest the cavernous entrance of the station.

- “Leaves brilliantly green veined like marble with wet dirt and these veins reflecting each light back for a moment then it would be gone out beyond her and then was altogether gone and there was another” (p17) - part of a much longer, comma-less sentence describing a breathless race to the station through the fog.

- “They were in league against him and watched his back like cats over offal or as if they thought his heart might fall out at their feet feebly smiling and stuck all over with darts or safety pins” (p181).


Another Modernist aspect of the novel is its use of time and space. “Ulysses” famously takes place in a single day in Dublin. The action of “Party Going” is similarly condensed into just four hours - the period of time spent waiting for a train delayed by fog. This provides a filmic and rather surreal framework - the vast railway terminus, as populous, chaotic and ghostly as TS Eliot’s “Unreal City”.

But the experimental style of the novel doesn’t detract from the more conventional aspects which are its intriguing plot and interesting characters. That’s not to say that the characters are presented logically and sequentially by a third-party omniscient narrator. You kind of form a picture of the characters as they emerge subjectively and piecemeal through the fog and smoke of a London railway terminus.

The main characters are the group of friends waiting in the station hotel to board the boat-train that will take them down to the South of France for a luxurious three-week house-party.

The group mostly seem to have known each other since childhood and they’re bound to each other by certain shared childhood memories (repeated regularly, metaphorically, as in Woolf’s “The Waves”) such as playing in the overgrown artichoke-patch of a kitchen garden.

They also gossip, scheme and squabble, as they look down at the crowds on the station concourse below (like the Gods on Olympus perhaps?). The party-goers are:

- Max Adey, a trust-fund man-about-town, well-connected and generous but evasive and enigmatic - believed (perhaps unfairly) to be a society womaniser.

- Evelyn Henderson, who’s organising the group on behalf of Max and has all the travel tickets and reservations.

- Claire Hignam (pronounced with stiff upper-lip as Hinnem). She’s privileged, entitled and “used to having everything done for her” (p30). Claire and Evelyn love gossiping, especially about Max.

- Robert Hignam, Claire’s long-suffering, henpecked husband, who spends most of the time in the bar to avoid the others in the party.

- Angela Crevy, a bland, golden-haired girl who’s only recently got to know Max and his friends and who feels a bit out of her depth. This makes her silly, self conscious and rather tiresome.

- Julia Wray, rich and spoiled, silently preoccupied with her obsession with Max Adey.

- Alex Alexander, waspish, highly strung and duplicitous. He’s gossipy and camp, full of “pansy” affectations (p118).

- The oddly-named Amabel [sic], gorgeous, wealthy, selfish and scheming, rebuffed by Max Adey and more persistent as a result. She turns up late at the station hotel in pursuit of him (“She knew well she could deal with Max but he was always escaping” p147).


Various followers-on, including those who’ve come just to wave goodbye, include:

- Robin Adams, Angela’s young man. Practical and straightforward, he dislikes Angela’s pretentious friends and thinks they’re all “a bloody lot of swine” (p44).

- Miss May Fellowes, middle-aged and a tad eccentric (she carries around a dead pigeon in a parcel), come to wave off her niece Claire Hignam. She ends up tipsy and poorly in a hotel room.

- Richard Cumberland, called “Embassy Richard” by the party-goers on account of his occupation, who doesn’t appear in person until the final pages but whose escapades are endlessly discussed and argued over.

- Claire Hignam’s old nanny with her nanny friend (both “dressed in granite with black straw hats and white hair” p8), who come to see off her grown-up ward.

- Thomson, Julia Wray’s chauffeur, who’s left on the station concourse looking after the huge pile of luggage that the travellers have brought with them.

- Edwards, Max Adey’s enigmatic man-servant, who helps his boss with ruses to avoid the women who pursue him.

- Mr Wray, a director of the railway company, who expects strings to be pulled for his niece, Julia.

- Mr Roberts, the station controller, who arranges for the stranded party to be put up in the station hotel, just as it’s shuttered off from the station concourse because of the dangerous overcrowding.


I thought I’d find the novel tedious with its idiosyncratic style and its cast of self-entitled, air-headed socialites (“Not of course that it isn’t heaven our all being here together and all that, only there is so little to do but have baths and gossip” p190).

But it actually turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable and interesting read. I suspect some of this might have been the location which I soon recognised as London’s Victoria Station - a place where I spent far too many hours during my two decades of commuting, waiting (like the cast of “Party Going”, but much less comfortably) for endlessly delayed and cancelled trains.


… Finally, just to show I was paying attention: so how did posh Amabel and her maid, Toddy, manage to get into the hotel - arriving late as she did AFTER the steel shutters had already been closed to keep out the hoi polloi … ?