Henry Green’s debut novel, published in 1926 when he was 21 years old and a student at Oxford, is a remarkably mature work. One may not suspect this at first superficial glance of the plot summary - a young man is blinded in an accident and adjusts to life without sight, pretty obvious symbolism opportunity there! - and the titles of the novel’s three parts: Caterpillar, Chrysalis, Butterfly. I’d suspect a pretty simplistic book just knowing those three factors (first novel, plot, reductive outline). But in fact it’s not a simple text at all, and while not exactly Green’s mature style it provides some hints of it.

Primarily I’m thinking here of Green’s avowed intent to take the author out of the picture and just present the reader with what can be seen and heard directly, and to make his or her own meaning from it, which reached an apogee with a couple of nearly all-dialogue novels. Green hasn’t got there yet of course at this point, but dialogue like this, using spoken language between characters instead of authorial narration to suggest something about a character’s state of mind, bears a resemblance:

“I was to lead a public life of the greatest possible brilliance. It is different now.”
“How wonderful that would be.”
“You know what I mean? One planned everything out on a broad scale, remembering little scraps of flattery that someone or other had been so good as to throw one and building on that. One was so hungry for flattery. The funny thing is that when one goes blind life goes on just the same, only half of it is lopped off.”
“Yes?”
“One would think that life would stop, wouldn’t you? But it always goes on, goes on, and that is rather irritating.”

This novel’s central character, John, also shares Green’s attitude in respects of the reader forming meaning. The fictional John is, like the real Green, at the very start of his writing career and sees his his role not as dictating meaning directly but allowing the reader to form it:

He would write about these things, for life was only beginning again, and there were many things to say. Besides, one couldn’t for ever be sitting in a chair like this, and be for the rest of one’s life someone to be sorry for. And perhaps the way he saw everything was the right way, though there could be no right way but one’s own. Art was what created in the looker-on, and he would have to try and create in others.

What Green would get rid of in later novels was lots of descriptive prose, which approach may have its interest and virtues, but when Green is capable or writing prose like this about a waning day before age 21, one can’t help imagining it as a loss:

The air began to get rid of the heaviness, and so became fresher as the dew soaked the grass. A blackbird thought aloud of bed, and was followed by another and then another. The sun was flooding the sky in waves of colour while he grew redder and redder in the west, the trees were a red gold too where he caught them. The sky was enjoying herself after the boredom of being blue all day. She was putting on and rejecting yellow for gold, gold for red, then red for deeper reds, while the blue that lay overhead was green. A cloud of starlings flew by to roost with a quick rush of wings, and sleepy rooks cawed. Far away a man whistled on his way home.

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How is it possible for a 20 year old to write so brilliantly?
Looking forward to more of his work. ( )

The story is of a 17 year old boy named John who is blinded in an accident on the way home from boarding school.

Set in the English countryside of the 1920's, the book starts out before the accident, and then proceeds to after the accident.

I find the concept of going blind terrifying, and it made me think about how one would cope with such an event. I can't imagine how hard it would be to go through for both the person and their family members/people close to them, and suspect it would be easy to seem insensitive.

That said, I was surprised and put off to find all the characters coming across as selfish and basically unlikeable.

Yet all in all the book was quite readable.
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Green's first novel is not as good as what came after but still has much to recommend it. In the dialogue there are flashes of the quicksilver genius on display in books like Loving, Nothing, and Doting; many of the poetic descriptive passages are lovely although a few bubble over into purple prosiness. Green's treatment / evocation of blindness seems very astute for someone so young, and I liked the way he introduced Joan as a potential happy ending, only to buck the conventional narrative expectation (although I found the characters of Joan and her alcoholic ex-priest father hard to believe and rather melodramatic).

Overall Blindness feels patchy and somewhat incoherent. It reads rather as though it was cobbled together from fragments - especially the adolescent diary entries that form the first section. I'm glad I read this but I'm also glad it was the seventh, and not the first of his novels that I read. ( )

The authors you love, I’ve found, do not come about due to wide or deep reading of their oeuvre, but from a single piece of work, usually in the first half dozen or so by that author you’ve read. It blows you away… and it colours all your other encounters with that author’s works. With Lowry, it was his novella ‘Through the Panama’, with Durrell it was The Alexandria Quartet, with Blixen it was her story ‘Tempest’… and with Green it was the first novel by him I read, Loving. A pitch-perfect control of voice, a refusal to tell the story using normal narrative techniques, and an excellent eye for detail… what’s not to love? Blindness is Green’s first novel, and concerns a public schoolboy whose bright future is snatched from him in an accident which blinds him (a kid throws a stone at a passing train, smashing a window through which the protagonist is looking). The story is told firstly through letters, then through semi-stream-of-consciousness narratives by the young man and his mother and the young woman (of an unsuitable family) whose company he enjoys… It’s very much a story of privilege and deprivation – the main character is the scion of a wealthy family, with a country seat boasting a large staff (members of which which the mother complains about repeatedly); but the young woman is the daughter of an alcoholic vicar fallen on hard times and, if anything, reads more like a DH Lawrence character (on his good days, that is) than a fit companion for the blind boy. Green had a reputation as “a writer’s writer”, which is generally taken to mean he was much admired but sold few copies. It’s true that there’s a dazzling level of technique on display in Blindness, a facility with prose no writer can fail to admire. And it’s Green’s writing prowess I certainly admire, rather than his choice of subjects or the stories he chooses to tell. But there’s a profound pleasure to be found in reading prose that is just put together so well, and that’s why I treasure Green’s writing. ( )