Article: Poetic licence and the new vice anglaise

John Updike wrote that "his novels made more of a stylistic impact upon me than those of any other writer in English living or dead". He was referring to Henry Green, whose novel Concluding I am currendy reading with the pleasure of a late convert. Updike, as an addictive similist, must have been impressed by Green's elegant connections. Early in the opening pages of Concluding, he writes: "As she watched, a cloud of starlings rose from the nearest of her Woods, they ascended in a spiral up into blue sky; a thousand dots revolving on a wave, the shape of a vast black seashell pointed to the morning ..."

"Her" woods is ironic. The state has taken over a country house, now a girls' school, ...

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