Concluding by Henry GreenNew Directions, 2017 (Originally Hogarth Press, 1948)

I don’t know what to say about Concluding other than that I agree with the quote from Deborah Eisenberg on the cover of the edition I read: “Uncanny, gorgeous, enigmatic.”

Concluding takes place over the course of a single day at an all-girls boarding school for future state servants, somewhere in England, in a vague and vaguely dystopian future. Two of the school’s students have gone missing, and the question of what exactly happened to them is an element of the book, but maybe not the central one. The book more closely focuses on one Mr Rock, a retired scientist of some sort who lives in a cottage on the school grounds with his granddaughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth, who’s 35 years old, is dating one of the school’s male teachers and recovering from a nervous breakdown. Rock is (rightly) worried that the school’s principals, Edge and Baker (well, mostly Edge) are scheming to get him out of the cottage, and the question of what’s going to happen to Rock is kind of the central question, but it isn’t exactly, either.

The characters of Concluding go through the book talking to each other and mishearing or misunderstanding each other, and those misunderstandings and lapses in communication or connection are maybe the central thing about this book. But what I like most about Concluding is the way it captures the rhythms of a day, the way it shows various characters doing all the ordinary (or slightly out of the ordinary) daily things: having breakfast and talking about the weather, taking an afternoon nap, getting ready for tea, getting ready for the school’s annual Founder’s Day dance. I like the descriptive passages, too, especially the ones about light and shadow, the way light divides or transforms a space, or about motion: starlings swirling through the sky at dawn and dusk, or this, from just before the dance starts: “what had been formless became a group, by music, merged to a line of white in pairs, white faces, to the flowers and lighted ballroom, each pair of lips open to the spiralling dance” (179).


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