On the face of it, the 1930s was a beautiful, glamorous decade; the golden age of Coco Chanel, Jessica Mitford, high society; it was the decade of art deco style, Cole Porter music and Ernest Hemingway novels. The glitterati and the literati began to mix for the first time and party going usually involved both a great deal of alcohol, particularly champagne, and a considerable amount of cocaine (the latter even referenced casually in the Cole Porter classic I Get A Kick Out Of You.) These golden, gilded lilies of society are the characters about whom Henry Green is writing in this novel. Read casually, it is the story of a group of friends who are heavily partying easily bored, and dedicated to having as much fun as possible, but when studied more closely, the narrative shows that far from being golden, these characters are empty, lonely and have no real life to speak of except for the one that they have created in their own minds.
None of the friendships shown in the novel seem particularly deep or meaningful; rather, they are social, the bringing together of people who all need to be somewhere with someone, but who have nowhere to go without each other. Parties do not punctuate their everyday lives; their everyday lives do not really exist, as their lives consist of an endless succession of parties punctuated by the journey to and from the event itself.
The author also shows the characters, and those in real life whom they are representing, to be astonishingly shallow, and tone deaf, given that Britain is entering a time of austerity and has been at a time of fear and worry for a while as the inevitability of war with Germany gets ever closer. Amid concern of another pointless, ugly war, lack of basic supplies for the nation and general hardship for all, their main concern seems to be the inconvenience of a party that does not happen in the way that it was supposed to. Another way in which their lack of depth is shown is in their tendency to be bored a lot. As many an elementary school teacher has told her students, "Only boring people are bored" and this underscores the lives' of the characters quite profoundly. They are easily bored because they are essentially boring people, but this is disguised by the glitter and the glamor of the age.
Green does not like the kind of characters he is writing about. Like T.S. Eliot, he sees the "golden age" as anything but, and satirizes the upper class's and the literati's behavior in the novel. Whilst golden to themselves, they are relatively pointless to Green, a feeling that he manages to portray very well in his writing.
