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502 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
being written almost entirely in dialogue form. Party Going (1939), in
which a group of rich young people are delayed at a railway station
by fog, has been read as a highly symbolic examination of the decline
of the class system. His style has been described as combining the
upper class with the demotic, which is an accurate reflection of his
concerns. In many ways Green’s novels mark the transition between
the novel of upper- and middle-class concerns and the working-class
novels of the 1950s.
THE MID-CENTURY NOVEL
Samuel Beckett is better known for his contribution to modern drama,
but novels such as Murphy (1938), Watt (1953), and his trilogy –
Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), and The Unnamable (1958) – are
examples of fiction reduced to a minimum of action, in limited
settings, and often focused on a single consciousness. In terms of
technical invention and experimentation Beckett is very much an
heir to the Modernists, and to James Joyce in particular.
Beckett wrote most of his works first in French, then rendered
them into English, aiming thereby to reach a purer simplicity of style,
a distance from Irish or English traditions. Malone Dies, the second
volume of Beckett’s trilogy, famously opens with an interior monologue:
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all . . .
and the trilogy ends, 240 pages later,
. . . it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never
know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go
on, I’ll go on.
(The Unnamable)
L.P. Hartley’s trilogy of Eustace and Hilda – The Shrimp and the
Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, and Eustace and Hilda (1944–47) – is
similar in aim to Forrest Reid’s writing (see page 442) but less rich in
its range. The Go-Between (1953) is the work of Hartley’s which most
clearly catches the sense of loss and regret which the novelists of the