Green’s novels want to turn themselves into plays; speech displaces and occupies the narration; his books are full of wordy characters who declaim and dilate. At the end of the war, in 1945, he published what would become his best-known novel, Loving, written almost entirely in dialogue. Set in an Anglo-Irish castle, it revolves around the machinations, and joyful play, of the house’s Cockney servants. (The aristocratic owners barely get a look in.) Downstairs in the grand house, new words and images are jubilantly coined. Edith, a housemaid, complains about having to take the owner’s grandchildren for a walk: “Well I’ve got to take those little draggers out this afternoon.” Charley Raunce, the butler, is one of Green’s great declaimers, a garrulous and brilliantly bossy dispenser of advice: “You know Bert I sometimes marvel women can go sour like that. When you think of them young, soft and tender, it doesn’t ’ardly seem possible now the way they turn so that you would never hold a crab apple up to them they’re so acid.”

This, then, is the sensibility of the writer who joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in 1938. This novel, Caught, published in 1943, was closely based on his experiences during the Blitz of 1940. In one way, you can see Caught as a clash between two different classes and temperaments: Richard Roe, an aristocrat, a rather Green-like owner of a fine country house, and a new recruit in the Auxiliary Fire Service; and Mr. Pye, a working-class Londoner and career fire officer, brought in to prepare the volunteers for the dangerous work ahead. Roe is reticent, contained, apparently apolitical, a privileged, if mildly tense, observer of events. Mr. Pye, like Charley Raunce in Loving, is “new to authority,” and at once anxious and aggressive in wielding it, a jokey monologist in love with his own loquacity. Where Roe is complacently apolitical, Pye can be edgily militant, keen to denounce “the ruling class, so-called,” and to make pointed comparisons between his social situation and Roe’s.

Between the two men there is another awkwardness, of a more catastrophic nature. Before Roe joined the service, his young son, Christopher, was abducted after getting lost in a London department store. The abductor was Pye’s mentally disturbed sister, who is now confined to a psychiatric hospital. It was a strange, curiously opaque incident (like much in Green’s work); the police eventually discovered the child in the woman’s room, sitting comfortably by a fire. The boy may never have been in danger of serious harm, though Roe cannot be sure. Roe’s wife, Dy, who finds it difficult to talk about the misadventure, is looking after Christopher in the country while her husband is serving in London.