Back

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“Hallucination may be a new revelation of the real world,” the novelist and critic Philip Toynbee wrote in 1946 in the all-too-real world of post-Second World War Britain.1 He was reviewing Back, set in the closing phase of the war, when imminent Allied victory was overshadowed for the British by the effects of years of deprivation and by a new hazard in the form of pilotless missiles — to many people, more terrifying than the blitz of 1940–41. Henry Green had already written about the war’s early years in his novels Caught (1943) and Loving (1945), as well as in some short stories which, as John Updike was to say, operate “at full tilt, bringing to the inferno of blitzed London a descriptive power of almost lurid virtuosity”. Beneath the stylistic fireworks, though, these works were developing a sombre exploration of the human capacity for making chaos — in politics by implication, but above all in personal relationships and in the individual psyche. Back, for all its final elements of optimism, is Green’s most painful expression of this theme: so painful that in the escapist literary climate in which it appeared, few reviewers other than Toynbee had much good to say about it.2 Kate O’Brien, writing in the Spectator, summed up the general reaction when she warned people off this “small, grey, personal book: very sad, very narrow … greyly and coldly misted in small, mad sorrow”.3 It was “a work of art”, she acknowledged, but it was “not for all readers”.

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