Living

Living is a book about life in a factory town & the operations of a factory, from the workers on the floor to the boss in his office. The town is Birmingham & the factory is an iron foundry, like the one that Henry Green worked in for some time in the 1920s after dropping out of Oxford, & the stories—courtships, layoffs, getting dinner on the table, going to the pub, death—are all the ordinary stuff of life. The style, however, is pure Henry Green, at once starkly constrained & wildly streaked with the expedients & eccentricities of everyday speech—cliché & innuendo, clashing metaphors, slips of tongue—which is to say it is like nothing else. 

Epic & antic, Living is a book of exact observation & deep tenderness, the work, in Rosamond Lehmann's words, of an "amorous and...