Dave's Book Blog: "Party Going" by Henry Green

Monday, 20 April 2026

"Party Going" by Henry Green

Another cryptic but rewarding novel from Henry Green. A group of socialites arrive at a London terminal to take the boat train to the continent for three weeks partying. But fog has set in an all services are suspended. They take refuge in the railway hotel while their servants waiting with the luggage in the station are swamped by office workers heading home. The hotel literally puts the shutters up to protect the toffs from the plebs. One of the poshos has a weird aunt (with a dead pigeon wrapped in brown paper) who is ill ... or drunk. Will she survive? Will the party-goers catch a train?

Who cares about the plot? This is written in Green's inimitable style, complete with eclectic phrasing, moments of lyricism, and some of the most original metaphors and similes I have ever encountered, for example: “To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown thick together or thousands of tailors’ dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor.” Who else moves from bamboo to artichokes to tailors' dummies and not just any old dummies but warm ones?

Selected quotes:

“It was a stretch of water she was going by and lights still curved overhead as drivers sounded horns and birds, deceived by darkness, woken by these lights, stirred in their sleep, mesmerized in darkness.”
“It was as though two old men were swapping jokes, they did not listen to each other they were so anxious to explain.”
“Although all those windows had been shut there was a continual dull roar came through them from outside, and this noise sat upon those within like clouds upon a mountain so they were obscured and levelled and, as though they had been airmen, in danger of running fatally into earth. Clouds also, if they are banked up, will so occupy the sky as to dwarf what is beneath and this low roar, which was only conversation in that multitude without, lay over them in such a pall, like night coming on and there is no light when one must see, that these people here will obscured by it and would dimmed into anxious Roman numerals.”
“She still swayed him like water moves a trailing weed.”
“And as does, in moonlight in cold deep-shadowed other day, push him out of his burrow and kick the old buck to death so when they saw him down, these girls and Amabel, coming out as she now did, all set upon him he was so absurd.”
“Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women's long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers' glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.”