But intertwined with this wonderfully odd spoken poetry is the equally odd, if more formal language of Green’s own narration: his novels are often characterized by a steady traffic between the wildly inventive demotic of his characters and the wildly lyrical explorations of his modernist prose. So alongside all the Cockney ’omework and gobs and gum trees, and suchlike, run phrases like this: “the grey water light of dawn”; “the greedy extravagance of fire”; a streetlamp “with its yellow pride of light.” When Roe in London elegiacally remembers the ancestral country home where his son is now living, he recalls “magnolia and rose” and “the strong light which made all the rooms sharp, and which was reflected, beaten in by the still wings of snow on window ledges.” Later in the book, Roe begins an affair with a woman named Hilly, who is working as a driver for the Auxiliary Fire Service. When they go to bed together, “his hands went like two owls in daylight over the hills, moors, and wooded valleys, over the fat white winter of her body.”

Caught is a beguiling combination of such verbal extravagance (to borrow Green’s word), with keen-eyed observation. Though short, the novel yields a dense picture of London in 1940; in this book, and in Pack My Bag, Green was explicit about the urgency of his project, which was to document a world that the author feared might disappear. Pack My Bag looked fondly back to Green’s rural childhood and to his schooling; Caught looks curiously around and forward. For Roe notes that the war has made trivial the very elements of his life he once took for granted. Taking the train west out of London, to see his son and wife in the country, he feels his fellow passengers to be “an odd lot of unpleasant individuals who did not have to go through that which he endured.” Passing through Oxford, he sees members of his own class: “young men of military age, elegantly dressed in last year’s Austrian outfits, skated on each pond. He wondered how they had the time.” His son irritates him; he cannot communicate with his wife.