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Charley Summers is also a mid-twentieth-century version of that avatar of European individualism, the questing knight of medieval and later romance: a man injured in combat, searching for a rose which is both a specific young woman and a symbol of lost peace. Much of Green’s work is characterized by an experimental mixture of registers, the most flamboyant of which is deployed in the opening paragraphs of
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when Charley, newly returned from several years as a prisoner of war, goes to Redham to visit the grave of the woman whose name “of all names, was Rose”. It was under a French rose that the sniper who shot him in the leg was hidden and roses fill the churchyard, their inter-twinings mimicked by the repetitions of Green’s voluptuous syntax:

climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life above in the green grass, the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright which, as still as this dark afternoon, stared at whosoever looked, or hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.

Critics have pointed out that the manner is reminiscent of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”:
¹¹

… when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose …

To contemporaries it more strongly recalled parts of T.S. Eliot’s recent
Four Quartets
,
¹²
the resemblance lying not only in the imagery but in Green’s counterpointing this literally florid style with the most ordinary characters and utterances. When we finally meet Rose herself, through some letters to Charley which he still regards as “sacred”, her voice is banal: “I didn’t half get a moan from dad yesterday in our letter box.
You know what I am about letter writing.” No novelist has based more of his art on bathos and if such collisions in Green’s novels are partly there for tragi-comic effect, they also contribute to an argument which runs throughout his work: that it is in ordinariness that the true epiphanies occur. Charley’s quest for his falsely idealized Rose ends in the arms of the unexceptionally genuine Nancy, with her cups of tea and her pregnant cat. After all the narrative’s high rhetoric and Charley’s passionate confusion, Nancy’s invitation on the final page – “Come here, silly” – speaks tenderly for common sense and plain kindness.

The conclusion is far from sentimental, but Green lets it go as far as he can in that direction. The novel is a simultaneously ironic and longing flirtation with sentimentality. An example of the interplay can be seen in its attitude to children, who are more than once described amidst all the confusion as representing the only sure meaning life has. Nancy tells Charley that “Having children’s one of the few things anyone can do for herself in this old world …. It’s all there is that people the same as us can do with their own lives.” She is unconsciously echoing not only Rose’s widower James (“After all having children is what we’re here for …. All there is to life, or that’s how it strikes me”) but also Charley’s boss, Mr Mead. Yet Nancy herself is childless, James is a neglectful father who does little to alleviate the unhappiness of his son Ridley, and the narrative is quick to expose Mead’s home life as less perfect than his myth of it. If having children is all that life offers in
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, it is presented as a mixed gift, not least in Nancy’s own relationship with her bigamous father.

In a similar way, the story ends by refusing the consolations which it has seemed to be about to offer. Charley will have “a happy married life” with Nancy, we are assured, but when at last he gets into bed with her he can do nothing but howl. It is, in the book’s final words, “no more or less, really, than she had expected”. At this miserable moment, “really” is both the kind of expression which would have come easily into Nancy’s mind and an assertion of the narrative’s claims on truthfulness.

Every novel is at some level about interpretation, but
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is almost Dostoevskian in the urgency of its central character’s pursuit of meaning. The process involves mistakes and loose ends in the narrative itself which brought criticism even before it was published. Green’s
editor at the Hogarth Press, John Lehmann (who had earlier turned down the Septimanie episode when Green offered it for publication in
Penguin New Writing
)
¹³
asked him to sort out various matters which he and his sister Rosamond found unnecessarily complicated.
¹⁴
Green had written the book quickly after finding himself “blessed or cursed by a frightful surge of power & ideas”
¹⁵
when he completed
Loving
in 1944. He was incensed by Lehmann’s doubts and wouldn’t make any changes. Much of his response was expressed in intuitive terms about compositional texture and balance, artistic claims which in turn offended the jealous Lehmann: “I am an artist myself and absolutely decline to be treated like a slot machine which produces a book when an MS. is shoved into it .… [The] whole point of The Hogarth Press while I have been in control, for better or worse, has been that it has been run by a writer with his own ideas and standards.”
¹⁶

Green won this quarrel and the book was left with its muddles and inconsistencies intact. Is there really a close physical resemblance between Rose and Nancy? How can Dot possibly not realize which man has got into bed with her? For whom did James subscribe to the literary magazine in which the Septimanie episode was published – Rose (as
here
) or James’s sister (
see here
)? If Charley gets “his first good night’s rest for weeks” after reading the story (
see here
), why does the narrative keep commenting on his having slept “very well for once”, both after he has cut up Rose’s letters (
see here
) and when Dot goes to bed with James (
see here
)? Bewilderment and frustration are involved in reading Green at such moments and critics have found various ways of explaining why this seems an essential part of his work’s value. The novelist Terry Southern, for example, suggested that it allows readers a feeling of superior grasp – of seeing “
more
in the situation than the author does” – which makes the fiction belong uniquely to them.
¹⁷
Certainly, as Rod Mengham has argued, the “strong sense of the
giddiness
of interpretation” in
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is related to Charley’s own predicament. But most readers are bound to speculate about the author’s relationship to it, also, and if they are not impatient and have not swallowed the critical dogma which tries to exclude authors from their works, will allow it a special kind of sympathy. The description of Charley’s “usual state of not knowing, lost as he always was” was marked by Mary Keene in her copy and there is a close resemblance between these words and
something Green wrote to Rosamond Lehmann at this time about the state of mind in which he worked: “I really have only the faintest idea of what my books are like, or where I am going.”
¹⁸
Here as elsewhere, Green’s fiction is an oblique form of self-portrait: the artist, in all his worried raptness, gazing at himself in a distorting mirror.

Back
is the perfect title for this self-reflexive, to-ing and fro-ing novel. The word is loaded with different meanings on which the narrative ruminates almost as naggingly as Charley dwells on the name Rose: “he followed a strange girl … back to what may have been her home”; “‘we all of us came back to what we didn’t expect’”; “he knew it was all right at last, was as it had been six years back”; “‘Life has a funny way of getting back at us, sometimes.’” The most important of these repetitions comes in the call of Rose’s mother, Mrs Grant, as she realizes that her husband has died:

“Gerald.” “Gerald.” And much more urgent, “D’you hear me?”.… After which the most frightful sobbing. “Gerald darling, Father, where are you?”; then, in a sort of torn bellow, “Father,” then, finally, “Come back .…”

Both Charley and Nancy are in the house at this moment and it crystallizes something about each of them: the implications of the fact that Gerald is Nancy’s father, as well as Rose’s; and an easing of Charley’s obsession with the past: “He clapped hands down tight over his ears. He concentrated on not ever remembering …. he won free. He mastered it. And, when he took his streaming hands away, everything was dead quiet.” This passage, more than the book’s closing episode, seems to represent a victory for Charley; but such apparent climaxes are never to be trusted in Green’s work. What saves Charley, as the critic John Russell has pointed out,
¹⁹
is not only – as in a conventional romance – the love of a good woman, but his diligence in the routine life of the office and the sympathy of those with whom he works.

Evelyn Waugh was the first to praise the success of
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in delineating this world – which, again, was also Green’s own, in his role as managing director of the family’s engineering firm, Pontifex & Sons.
²⁰
The office anchors the story and provides an environment in which Charley’s cure unsensationally progresses. It also supplies one of
the many moments of bathos. Immediately after the high romance of Septimanie, the next piece of prose which Charley, like the book’s reader, has to deal with is a business letter, full of bureaucratic jargon: “When last autumn at the instance of the Ministry, Section S.E.C.O., we accepted your esteemed order no. 1526/2/5812 for 60 (sixty) size N.V. Rotary Extraction Pumps and 60 (sixty) size O.U. Centrifugal Feed Pumps, we pointed out both to your goodselves and to Mr Turner of S.E.C.O that we could only undertake this contract on the clear understanding that you would be in a position to urge through sufficient quantities of the pump body .…” Even here, what might seem straightforward to interpret – an easy joke at the expense of modern commercial life – has more complex resonances. Like Pontifex & Sons, Charley Summers’s firm incorporates a metal foundry, but the fictional factory “was burned to a cinder in the blitz”, so this essential part of its business has been “made out” to other companies such as the one from which the complaining letter comes. There is a faint but crucial echo, in all this, of the war’s effects on Charley – of a sexuality which has been temporarily quenched, and then misdirected and thwarted. The symbolic link is made explicit after he and Nancy have climbed through a bombsite to the rose garden where they kiss.

[In] the position she held, half in, half out of his arms, and so close that the one eye in his line of vision was in the outer corner of its socket to watch him, he saw it catch the dying sunset light around, and glow, as if she had opened
the eye hole to a furnace
[my italics].

Like the book’s other seeming climaxes, this one is both full of ambiguity – is it romantic or apocalyptic? – and unresolved: “He made another clutch at her, but she broke away completely. He was left, so that his arms hung at his sides, and he could not speak, paralysed …. So they walked home in silence.” Green never lets his readers settle and in this pendulum swing between an emotional furnace and a clumsy silence lies the essence of his strange, sad, unforgettable novel.

August 1997

J.T.

A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had to do carefully because he had a peg leg.

The roadway was asphalted blue.

It was a summer day in England. Rain clouds were amassed back of a church tower which stood on rising ground. As he looked up he noted well those slits, built for defence, in the blood coloured brick. Then he ran his eye with caution over cypresses and between gravestones. He might have been watching for a trap, who had lost his leg in France for not noticing the gun beneath a rose.

For, climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life above in the green grass, the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright which, as still as this dark afternoon, stared at whosoever looked, or hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.

It was a time of war. The young man in pink tweeds had been repatriated from a prisoners’ camp on the other side. Now, at the first opportunity, he was back.

He had known the village this church stood over, but not well. He had learned the walks before he turned soldier, though he had met few of those who lived by. The graveyard he had
never entered. But he came now to visit because someone he loved, a woman, who, above all at night, had been in his feelings when he was behind barbed wire, had been put here while he was away, and her name, of all names, was Rose.

The bus, with its watching passengers, departed. In the silence which followed he began to climb the path leading to those graves, when came a sudden upthrusting cackle of geese in panic, the sound of which brought home to him a stack of faggots he had seen blown high by a grenade, each stick separately stabbing the air in a frieze, and which he had watched fall back, as an opened fan closes. So, while the geese quietened, he felt what he had seen until the silence which followed, when he at once forgot.