Concluding by Henry Green

She had been looking at the other curtains, and now she rose from her place to walk daintily across. She paused an instant, then, courage in both hands, she swept these back as dramatically as the scene disclosed shone on her now smiling eyes. Because, except for what still hung over the water, the mist was evaporating fast, the first beech trees away to the right were quite freed, her Park itself was brilliantly clear, the sun up, a lovely day had opened and, as she watched, a cloud of starlings rose from the nearest of her Woods, they ascended in a spiral up to the blue sky; a thousand dots revolving on a wave, the shape of a vast black seashell pointed to the morning; and she was about to exclaim in delight when, throughout the dormitories upstairs, with a sound of bees in this distant Sanctum, buzzers called her girls to rise so that two hundred and eighty nine turned over to that sound, stretched and yawned, opened blue eyes on their white sheets to this new day which would stretch on, clinging to its light, until at length, when night should fall at last, would be time for the violins and the dance.

Henry Green's Concluding takes place over a single day at a state-run school for girls. It's Founder's Day, a holiday ending in a schoolwide dance, but in the morning two girls are discovered missing from their beds, which have not been slept in. Over the course of the day, one girl is discovered in the woods in torn pajamas; later, the still missing girl's doll--painted to look exactly like her--is discovered, too. This mystery, you might think, would wholly occupy everyone at the school, but for the most part it lurks in the minds of each behind their personal preoccupations: There's Mr. Rock, an aging scientist who has been gifted a cottage on the institute's land for his services to the state; Edge and Baker, the school principals who are set on scheming Rock out of the same cottage for the institute; Rock's granddaughter Elizabeth, staying with him while recovering from a vaguely alluded-to mental breakdown; and her lover, a charmless economics teacher named Sebastian Birt. The girl's disappearance brings these characters together, but as is typical in Green's novels, all conversation produces only crosstalk and misunderstanding; these people are too wrapped up in their own concerns to even hear each other, much less collaborate to solve an urgent mystery.

Green's toryism runs through Concluding. The institute--school seems like hardly the right word--is part of a vast future welfare state that has subsumed England. The red tape of bureaucracy circumscribes the characters' lives completely, and regulations loom over every possible action: a teacher's suggestion that they cut down fir branches instead of azaleas for the evening dance, for example, is dismissed out of hand as being against strict protocol. Regulations prevent Edge and Baker from interrogating the discovered girl, Merode, until she has been cleared by a doctor; yet they are all too happy to let the regulations prevent them from the task of finding the missing girl, Mary. Far from wanting to find the missing girls, they resent them for "laying their Institute open to the Grand Inquisition of a State Enquiry, and the horror of reports."

It's possible to read Concluding, then, as a jeremiad against the growth of the modern welfare state, which compartmentalizes moral obligation, sectioning it off as someone's--and always someone else's--parochial duty. Green is sharp in the ways that bureaucracy enables and justifies the baser ambitions of bureaucrats; the moral question of Rock's cottage, for example, is intentionally obscured by questions of protocol and paperwork. The resulting dehumanization is represented by the frustrating interchangeability of the institute's wards, all of whose names begin with M: Mary, Merode, Moira, Marion, Melissa, etc. The sixteen-year old girls, brimming with incipient sexuality and bright futures, parade through the novel as a mass dressed in white, becoming something like livestock, like Rock's white goose, white cat, and white sow. At the dance, Mr. Rock is escorted down to a mysterious basement door by a flirtatious student, and we feel that we are about to be ushered into the secret of what happened to the girls, but it's only a secret club: a place outside of the bureaucratic strictures of the institute and the state, where the girls can be at last themselves.

Concluding is a curious title: in one respect, I think it refers to the final stages of life of the aging Rock, whose retirement and residence are the urgent question that hangs over the immediate crisis of the day. It suggests also the deliberation and solution of a mystery; but--spoiler alert--the novel never comes close to revealing what happened to the absent Mary or the hapless Merode. Instead, the novel provides a series of images of occlusion: the veiling fog of the early morning, which gives way to the obliterating light of the afternoon, which in turn gives way to the difficult darkness just outside the nighttime dance. Green's world is one in which people always jump to conclusions because life and people give them so little to work with. Talking to someone else is only a variation of conversing with the version of the person we invent in our heads. We may never know what happened to Mary or why she left, but that's only a little less than we know about those in front of our faces.