Caught by Henry Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

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