Anti-world-building in 1930s London

This article reads Henry Green’s notoriously elusive novel Party Going (1939) as a formal response to emerging media and historical crisis. Set in London’s Victoria Station, immobilized by fog, the novel stages a uniquely unstable representation of space and perspective. Its radical transitions and abrupt shifts in viewpoint echo aspects of filmic montage, particularly the speed and mobility of cinematic narration. Yet rather than reinforcing narrative coherence, à la classical Hollywood continuity editing, Green employs cinematic techniques to produce a montage of discontinuity that actively resists conventional world-building. In doing so, Party Going reflects the social dislocation and uncertainty of Britain on the brink of the Second World War.