Caught by Henry Green

In night clubs, it has been described, or wherever the young danced, couples passed the last goodbye hours abandoned to each other and, so Richard felt, when these girls were left behind alone as train after train went out loaded with men to fight, the pretty creatures must be hunting for more farewells. As they were driven to create memories to compare, and thus to compensate for the loss each had suffered, he saw them hungrily seeking another man, oh they were sorry for men and they pitied themselves, for yet another man with whom they could spend last hours, to whom they would murmur darling, darling, darling it will be you always; the phrase till death do us part being, for them, the short ride next morning to a railway station; the active death, for them, to be left alone on a platform; the I-have-given-all-before-we-die, their dying breath.

Richard Roe is a London aristocrat who, on the evening of World War II, does what he feels his duty: he joins the Auxiliary Fire Service, a hastily cobbled-together organization whose mission is to put out the fires started by German bombs. By a strange coincidence, his superior in the Auxiliaries is Albert Pye, whose sister has been placed in an insane asylum for having abducted a young boy from a department store--that is, Roe's child, Christopher.

The incident forms a strange, mostly unspoken relationship between the two men that colors their experience of the Auxiliaries. Neither man has initiated it, and both would be happy to divest themselves of it, but it's there, totally unlike any other relationship that might be recognizable--friend, authority, or enemy. For Richard, it's an unwelcome reminder of a life from which he has temporarily excused himself; Christopher and his wife Dy have been sent down to their country estate while he lives it up in the local and carries on an affair with a woman volunteer. For Pye, it's a threat to the authority that his been thrust upon him unwanted by the war.

Most of Caught, interestingly, takes place during the year before the Blitz, when the Auxiliary Fire Service existed only in preparation for the war to come. The firemen's day is taken up with drills and idleness. Some even stop them, who will later be considered heroes, in the street to accuse them of having joined to shirk their duty in the army. Green is less interested in war than he is the social politics of idle institutions; the firemen fight their boredom by engaging in petty gossip, of which Pye's sister's abduction of Roe's child will become of course an essential part. The ad hoc culture of the Auxiliaries is a backdrop for Green to explore the class politics of London: Roe responds to the discomfort of his aristocratic background among the Cockney firemen by standing everyone's drinks at the pub. Minor skirmishes of personality and class are circumscribed by bureaucracy; the worst possible sin is to be "adrift," that is, away without permission--a sin of which Pye, besotted with a pair of local girls, bears the greatest guilt. To be found out would be, like his sister was, the "caught" of the title.

Green is so slippery; Caught seems like many novels at once. It's a comedy of manners, rich in Cockney slang and speech, about how the war brings a collision between the upper and lower classes. Perhaps none of Green's other novels so perfectly illustrated the intense tension between his earthy ear for dialogue and his own spiked, serpentine prose. It's a war novel, too, as flash-forwards to the conflagrations of the Blitz show, written in a way that only Green could accomplish. And at times it's a novel of penetrating psychology and sexual repression that seems straight out of Green's American contemporary, William Faulkner. Pye, incensed by his sister's institutionalization (and the demand that he help pay for her upkeep), driven to instability by the pressure of his new position, forms a conviction that her impropriety is rooted in his own incest with her--something that he seems to have invented from a collection of muddled memories:

Without any warning, and with a shock that took all his breath, Pye saw the dry wood shaving creep, bent in the moonlight, the back ways to their cottage. He saw it again as though it was before his eyes, which he now tried to draw away from the doctor's. He had never before thought of his sister's creeping separate from his own with Mrs. Lane's little girl. In a surge of blood, it was made clear, false, that it might have been his own sister he was with that night. So it might have been her voice, thick with excitement and fright and disgust, that said "Will it hurt?" So in the blind moonlight, eyes warped by his need, he must have forced his own sister.

Caught's final chapter finds Roe back with his wife, having been incapacitated by a falling bomb. He tries in vain to tell her about the single night's experience in the Blitz, but he can't find the words and gets frustrated with her disinterest. (Green interrupts him from time to time to inform us that, despite his best attempts at description, the blaze was really "not like that at all.") Richard, we understand, has finally had the transformative experience that war and heroism have promised, and come back home only to find that not only can he not explain it, he barely seems to understand it himself. What makes him angriest, interestingly, is his wife's continued distrust of the (now-dead) Pye, brother to Christopher's abductor. What is it that makes him speak up in Pye's defense? Is it the bonds forged in war? Or the bonds formed in some other way, in the crucible of bureaucracy, of the institution, of the firehouse?