Yet such a reading might be complicated by Roe’s final argument with his wife. For in fact this closing scene, which somewhat savagely darkens the novel’s tone, reverses the stereotypical gender roles: it is Dy who is clipped, stoical, evasive of emotion, undramatic. And it is Roe who is doing all the talking, as he struggles to tell her what he has witnessed in London. A man and woman confront each other, but what seems more important is that two separate languages and sensibilities, both warped by different kinds of trauma, confront each other. Dy, the novel suggests, has responded to the abduction of her son by withdrawing from expression. For her, trauma has been private, abstracted from history. Her life, as a mother living in privilege in the countryside, has been largely untouched by the war. For Roe, trauma has been both private and public, and ineluctably historical. It has also been bloody and visceral, and his language has been exploded and reshaped by war.

As Roe and Dy walk in the countryside, he tries to fit into words all that he has experienced. He was in London for nine straight weeks of service and has been sent home after being knocked out by a bomb. We learn that the novel’s other protagonists—Shiner, Piper, and Pye—are all dead. Roe tells harrowing stories; he apologizes that “the point about a blitz is this, there’s always something you can’t describe. . . . Ever since it happened I feel I’ve been trying to express all sorts of things.” As he fumbles with the right words, so Green, probably borrowing from Virginia Woolf’s way of writing about the historical trauma of the Great War in To the Lighthouse, provides in parenthesis, and as third-person narration, the words that Roe cannot heave into his mouth; twice, the author prefaces these parenthetical “corrections” with the phrase “It had not been like that at all”: “(He was cold as they churned along in the taxi, which was boiling over from the distance it had been driven towing the heavy pump. Part of the steering wheel shone blood red from the sky. The air caught at his wind passage as though briars and their red roses were being dragged up from his lungs. The acrid air was warm, yet he was cold.)”