There, for me, is where the fascination of Party Going lies. The critic VS Pritchett wrote that Green’s special subject is “the injury done to certain English minds by the main, conventional emphases of English life”. Meanwhile, she and Max struggle with their feelings, at once flirting with, and then avoiding, intimacy. In another brilliant scene that’s cinematic in its intensity, Amabel takes a bath in the hotel. “It’s terrifying,” says one of the girls, in a line that could have come from Waugh, “I didn’t know there were so many people in the world.”Ī shadowy old woman, Miss Fellowes, retrieves a dead pigeon from the street, and washes it in a strange and disturbing act of piety. Outside, in the metropolitan gloom, people come and go like spectres. So the party – quintessentially shallow, vapid and spoilt – holes up in the station hotel to wait for the fog to lift, a brilliant fictional premise. England is cut off, and the railway paralysed their train has been delayed. A group of bright young things – Max, Amabel, Angela, Julia, Evelyn and Claire – are on their way to a house party in France, by train. Party Going offers the last word on that “low, dishonest decade”, the 1930s. I came to read it, as a respite from my first job in the book world, sitting against the radiator, on the floor of the Hogarth Press library in William IV Street, in the West End. It’s the polar opposite of Living, but quite as dazzling in the poetry of its prose, a masterpiece of literary impressionism. Party Going, published on the brink of the second world war, reflects that experience.

Loving living party going