Concluding - Softcover

GREEN, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860460275 ISBN 13: 9781860460272

Publisher: Harvill Press, 1997

Synopsis

Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker. One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball, as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.

About this title

About the Author:

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was born in 1905 at the family home of his parents, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He worked at the family engineering firm for most of his life and pursued a parallel career as a novelist. He married in 1928 and had one son. During WWII he served in the London Fire Brigade. He died in December 1973.

Review:

“Discomfiting social comedy―think Bunuel meets Forster or Beckett meets Mitford.”
- The New Yorker

“Lush enough to get lost in.”
- The Paris Review

“Green's books live on with ever-brightening intensity”
- The Wall Street Journal

“A novel of projections, protractions, long shots, and shadows flying ahead, a slow fall. Uncommonly close to the quick of experience, the sentences are short but they are glancing―the effect can be magically exhilarating, as when the knife thrower does not pierce but surrounds the living target, and it is the reader whose heart is thereby found. The sinister world of Concluding is beautiful, side-lit and colored like an undersea kingdom.”
- Eudora Welty

“Such rarity, such marvelous originality, intuition, sensuality and finish...”
- John Updike

“The characters and story come alive in an almost incredible way, quite beyond anything achieved by conventional methods of writing.”
- Terry Southern

“The most gifted prose writer of his generation.”
- V.S. Pritchett

“The best English novelist.”
- W. H. Auden

“The freshness and force of the work is somewhat uncanny in his gorgeous, enigmatic Concluding.”
- Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books

“Peculiar and beautiful―I love Concluding for the glorious, syntax-straining sentences that flare out of nowhere, and full of wild energies.”
- Lars Iyer, New Statesman

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1860460275
• ISBN 13: 9781860460272
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224