Doting by Henry Green
While in Loving, Henry Green explored the baffling exhilarations of romance, and particularly romance below stairs, with a kind of amused detachment, in his final novel Doting, he reflects amore resigned view, that of a long-married man observing love less as passion than as a set of habits. Arthur and Diana Middleton are a middle-aged, upper-middle-class couple in post-Second World-War London who become both painfully and farcically aware of the limitations of their lives together. The main object of their doting may be their only son Peter, but Arthur's weakness for Annabel, a young lady of Peter's generation, brings the family to a crisis. Maybe "crisis" is too strong a word for, as the author wearily concludes with his final line, "The next day they all went on very much the same." Doting, a novel told almost entirely through dialogue, is among the most elegiac, most bitter-sweet of Henry Green's novels, and like his other wholly distinctive books, a small classic.
Henry Green is the pen-name for Henry Vincent Yorke, the son of a prosperous Midlands industrialist. He was born near Tewkesbury in 1905 and was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he wrote his first novel, Blindness, published in 1926. He entered the family business on the factory-floor, and went on to run the firm while writing eight other novels (all to be reissued as Harvill paperbacks). For Angus Wilson he was one of the few really considerable English novelists of our time, while W.H. Auden considered him to be the finest living English novelist. Henry Green died in 1973.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781860464447 |
| ISBN 10 | 1860464440 |
| Title | Doting |
| Author | Henry Green |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 1998-10-15 |
| Number of pages | 224 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |