Back by Henry Green

What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delivered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he'd loved, that he'd come so far for? Why did she die? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been best if they had killed him, he felt, if instead o a sniper's rifle in that rosebush they had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she's having a jolly good rest.

Charley Summers returns to England, repatriated from a prisoner of war camp in Germany, a little less than when he left: he's missing one leg. Nor is home the same as when he left it: his lover, Rose, has died while he was away. The loss of Rose leaves him bereft and numb, but Rose's father leaves him an address which he says conceals a "surprise"--his illegitimate daughter and Rose's half-sister, Nancy, who looks (to Charley, at least) exactly like Rose, except without her familiar red hair. In his fragile state, Charley is unable to understand what he's seeing; instead of finding in Nancy a new possibility, he convinces himself that she really is Rose, deceiving him and everyone else, and having become a "tart" while he was away.

Back must have been quite personal for Green, who served in the war, though as far as I know he came back intact. But it's a novel about how difficult it is to reintegrate oneself to home, which is never quite the home you leave, after the trauma of war. More than anything it reminded me of Mavis Gallant's terrific story "The Latehomecomer," about a man who comes back home after everyone else has moved on. "Moving on" is exactly what everyone wants Charley to do, including Rose's husband (!) James, who is one of several characters who urge Charley to get married again. And perhaps that advice is right, and Nancy takes to Charley despite the strange manner of their acquaintance, but only when Charley learns to see Nancy for who she is and not a treacherous, mutated Rose, can such possibilities be possible. For her own part, Nancy herself has also been mutilated by war: her husband Phil was shot down and killed in Egypt. Rose and Phil are like wounds that one can't help but scratch at, as much as they try to keep them taboo, they sneak into the conversation between Charley and Nancy. Interestingly, Charley's experience in the prison camp is the one thing that seems so deeply buried--because, it's suggested, it was such a hideous experience--that it rarely pokes its head into conversation.

Henry Green, man. The guy could write. Who else could see "a small crop of red apples half hidden, like sins?" Who else could get away with describing a character's feelings as "one tall question mark?" Because he loved ambiguity in dialogue, Green's novels often feel impenetrable, like smooth surfaces one can't get beneath, but then they'll hit you suddenly with an image of great pathos. In Back, it goes like this: Charley wants to send samples of Nancy and Rose's handwriting to an expert for comparison, but when he rereads Rose's letters, he realizes they give away their affair too clearly, and he can't bear to part with them anyway. Unthinkingly, he cuts them up and reassembles them into a less incriminating letter, only realizing afterward that he's destroyed the only link he has left with the dead Rose: "So, for the evening, he mourned the fact that Rose's treachery had destroyed the last there was left to him, the letters which, for all the months and years in Germany, had been what he was most afraid to find mislaid, or lost, when he got back."

Back is tremendously affecting like that, but there are a couple of other significant traits of Green's writing on display here. For one, he was a great writer about work, whether that's the tedious tasks of professional servants in Loving or the physical labor of foundry workers in Living. Here, Charley has a middle-management job producing some kind of widget for the war effort, a job of invoices and filing card systems that's reproduced in excruciating detail. And Green could be funny, too, as evidenced by a running gag about how many acronym organizations cropped up in England during the war ("We are now seriously behind with our S.E.V.B., S.E.P.Q., and S.O.M.F. contracts"). But the absurdity of English civil society in wartime only serves to deepen the powerful sense of loss experienced by Charley, Nancy, and others.