The relationship between these two men, inevitably colored by the awkwardness of their shared history and charged by class differences, is at the heart of this novel. But this runs the risk of making Caught sound more systematic and much less funny than it is. First of all, Pye’s lecturing talkiness, and his Cockney coinages, allow Green to explore his almost Shakespearean talent for inventive spoken poetry. And as always in Green, speech is essentially joyful and exuberant, even when people are threatening each other. Here is Pye, warning one of the oldest members of the service, a grizzled hack named Piper, that the official firemen of the London Fire Brigade would have no time for such an amateur: “As for you . . . I ’ad to consider what chance a man like you stood with those boys in the Rescue. They’d castrate you, Piper, like a starved bullock. Or they’d wrap those long legs of yours round your neck and stuff the ’eels in your gob. And then where would your new dentures be?” And here is Pye again, giving one of his interminable lessons to the volunteers, what he calls “practical fire-fighting ’ints”:

“Take a hospital . . . you are called there, you arrive, and this lecture is called practical fire-fighting ’ints, but all this comes into the job, just as much as putting out the fire. Take an institution, even what they call a place of public entertainment. Now what do you do? You’ve got always to recollect you must make as little disturbance as possible, use your loaf, don’t let the patients get any idea there’s something up. Go about it quietly. Don’t rush in a ward shouting where’s the fire? There may be people in there through no fault of their own. They’re to be pitied.”

To be in Green’s fictional world is to enter a verbal universe in which, say, the war is called (by Piper) “this bit of trouble”; a desirable woman is called (by a fireman named Shiner Wright) “a lovely bit of ’omework”; in which Piper is derided (by Shiner) as “that old frayed end of old rope.” Green twists and reanimates ordinary slang in marvelous ways: “But stone me up a bloody gum tree.” “For Christ’s sake piddle off out of it.” Or perhaps my favorite small verbal interaction in the novel: “It’s a bit soon, isn’t it?” “Well, maybe it is a trifle previous.”