Published in 1939, as Britain was entering a period of great austerity due to the declaration of war against Germany, Party Going might at first seem like a wholly tone-deaf novel for its time, largely because it deals with a group of wealthy young people, whose lives revolve around parties, fun and frivolity, and their trip to the South of France for a weekend house party.
The party is hosted by socialite Max Adey, a rich young playboy, but it is not at his party that the main action of the book takes place; Max's guests learn that their train journey has been delayed due to heavy fog, and so they decide to stay at a large railway hotel next to the station. The group quickly become bored; one of them declares that they do not like the hotel because "there is nothing to do", but this very quickly emerges as one of the themes of the novel; the partygoers have largely empty, hollow lives, and frequently feel like they have nothing to do. Their main entertainment is watching two young women battle it out for the affections of their host.
Green's inspiration for the novel was what W.H. Auden termed "the low, dishonest decade" of the 1930s, but the heavy symbolism woven around the characters, and the satirical leaning of the narrative has also drawn comparison with the writing of T.S. Eliot. However, Green also stands out as a novelist in his own right, because of their expansive imagery and such realistic depictions of people and places that they are more like verbal photographs than fictional novels.
Henry Green, although one of The Guardian's 100 Most Influential British Authors of the Twentieth Century, is less known than many of his peers. Green is the nome de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke, who published nine novels in total during his writing career which spanned twenty six years. He attended Oxford University where he became a member of the literary set that included Evelyn Waugh. His works became out of print after his death but there was somewhat of a Henry Green revival in 1990 when a collection of previously unpublished works was released as a collection named Surviving, edited by his grandson Matthew Yorke, himself a British novelist.
