Doting

While inLoving, Henry Green explored the baffling exhilarations of romance, and particularly romance below stairs, with a kind of amused detachment, in his final novelDoting, he reflects amore resigned view, that of a long-married man observing love less as passion than as a set of habits. Arthur and Diana Middleton are a middle-aged, upper-middle-class couple in post-Second World-War London who become both painfully and farcically aware of the limitations of their lives together. The main object of their doting may be their only son Peter, but Arthur's weakness for Annabel, a young lady of Peter's generation, brings the family to a crisis. Maybe "crisis" is too strong a word for, as the author wearily concludes with his final line, "The next day they all went on very much the same."

Doting, a novel told almost entirely through dialogue, is among the most elegiac, most bitter-sweet of Henry Green's novels, and like his other wholly distinctive books, a small classic.