Loving by Henry Green

I read this book years ago and was far too young or too ignorant to understand anything. It is an extremely strange novel, but at least this time around I can say that I understood more of it than previously (though this isn't saying much). Because I recently watched Downton Abbey, I couldn't get it out of my head while reading this, since it has an upstairs-downstairs dynamic (only it's a modernist masterpiece, quite unlike Downton Abbey). The novel is mostly in dialogue, and is subtly funny and tragic. The character who would probably have been at the centre of a conventional novel, a panty boy whose hopeless love for a housemaid causes him to prematurely enlist and probably die, hovers on the margins of the story, and no one pays much attention to him. Everyone in the novel is sex-mad and paranoid, and most of the book is taken up by people inventing hidden allusions in things that others say, such as Mrs. Tennan't daughter-in-law, who is carrying on an affair while her husband is at the front, and is constantly trying to ascertain who knows and who doesn't. Most of the characters are rather pathetic (like the 'heroic' pantry boy Albert) or unsavoury (such as the new butler Raunce in his pursuit of the housemaid Edith). There is a feeling that the constant flow of conversation is just endless miscommunication, thought almost the entire book is in dialogue, everyone seems to be in their own private world, making allusions that are explicable only to themselves. O'Conor, the Irish gamekeeper (I think that's his job) can't be understood by anyone except one of housemaids, who becomes his lover. It's a very intense and interesting book, but not a personal favourite.