From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

A.L. Kennedy on Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

In general I would love Henry Green to have been more appreciated in his life time and it would have been wonderful if – for example – my favourite amongst his fiction, Party Going, were to have been recognised with something like the Folio Prize. (I also think his autobiography, Pack My Bags, is a small miracle.)

Party Going is quite simply beautifully written – its observation of human behaviour, speech and thought is wonderful and pushes beyond the realistic to become even more real, as metaphors, shadings of language and personalities expand to colour each other and their surroundings. Its evocation of a fog-locked pre-war London is crackling with atmosphere, at once deeply real and deeply dreamed, disturbing. A party of the hyper-wealthy is trapped in a railway station hotel as the city closes. No trains leave and discontent amongst the less-fortunate is clearly brewing in the ugly outside world at a level which displays deeper concerns than a simple lack of immediate access to transport. We should know Green’s name as we do Chekhov’s, or Spark’s, or Stevenson’s – he shares their ability to experiment successfully, to push forms beyond their apparent limits, to identify key moments and forces in an age and to show humanity itself with truth.