Richard said that although he had knocked about the world a bit himself he had never come across anything quite like the London Fire Service.

During the run-up to WW2 over 20,000 people were recruited into London’s Auxiliary Fire Service, outnumbering regular firefighters by about 10-1. Stations were set up in buildings all through the city for them to live and work from. Regular firefighters were thrust into training and leadership roles over all these new recruits. And yet for a year after the outbreak of war there was little for them to do. The expected German bombings didn’t materialize, and civilians looked upon them scornfully as army-dodgers.

It is in this setting which Green sets Caught. The central character of Richard Roe is based on Green himself, raised upper-class in the country, now a wealthy London businessman, who takes up a role among the working class men and women of London’s AFS - the other auxiliaries, the two regular firemen attached to their unit, the cooks who make all their meals. In their lengthy idleness Green thrusts the reader into their gossip, their petty workplace politics, their personal family difficulties, and their main diversion of drinking and chasing women.

‘But I say,’ he said, ‘I wonder how many of these people here are going to bed together later?’
‘I don’t know, Dickie,’ she replied brightly, thinking I’m sure most of them are. But you aren’t, not with him my dear, she told herself, oh dear no, because it makes you quite sick to think of it with him, though you know what you are, after a few drinks, but not even then, she concluded, knowing she probably lied again.

This is a far cry from painting the London AFS as it was seen by the time of the novel’s publication in 1943, after the Blitz had happened, after hundreds of these firefighters had died battling the flames caused by German bombers, after they had come to be seen as heroes. Green’s publisher insisted on altering and censoring parts of the novel to try to show the characters in a better light, such as by making Roe a widower, given his affair with a young woman serving as a cook with the unit. But now thankfully we have the novel as Green intended it to read.

Green does not make his novels all that easy to read, in fact. His style is a bit peculiar, with unexpected sentence constructions and not immediately clear subjects and references. Every now and then in Caught I’d wince at a sentence that doesn’t seem to work, but these are far, far outnumbered by, in slight retrospect, impressive ones.

Take this bit for example, in which Green describes a store from which Richard’s young son was briefly taken by the mentally ill sister of the fireman serving as Roe’s station chief. Richard has gone to visit the scene of the crime for himself and looks at a toy fire truck:

The walls of this store being covered with stained glass windows which depicted trading scenes, that is of merchandise being loaded on to galleons, the leaving port, of incidents on the voyage, and then the unloading, all brilliantly lit from without, it follows that the body of the shop was inundated with colour, brimming, and this colour, as the sea was a predominant part of each window, was a permanence of sapphire in shopping hours. Pink neon lights on the high ceiling wore down this blue to some extent, made customers’ faces less aggressively steeped in the body of the store, but enhanced, or deepened that fire brigade scarlet to carmine, and, in so doing, drugged Richard’s consciousness.

It may accurately be said that the effect of Green’s wordy complex prose, in the right mood, will also have a certain consciousness-altering effect on the reader. If not in the right mood, the reader may instead drop the book in frustration. I found myself reading this novel in both moods, depending on when I picked it up.

Choosing to write a novel about the London AFS but largely ignoring that time it spent actually fighting fires during bombing raids, until a few pages at the novel’s end, is an interesting choice. That’s Green though - a writer of dialogue and internal psychological states, not a writer of action and thrills. ( )

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. ( )

>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.

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/caught-by-henry-green/ ( )

★★★.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 by Henry Green
★★★.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.