Concluding (1948)

Abstract

Concluding is probably the most unresolved of Green’s novels. It stresses the complexity of contradictory human impulses and conflicts. Edward Stokes finds that ‘in Concluding… Green has developed even further the poetic methods which enable him to present, at the same time, several different aspects or levels of reality — the contemporary and the timeless, the specific and the universal’.¹ The incorporation of many aspects of reality in the record of a day in the life of old Mr Rock reflects Green’s recognition of man’s entrapment in a fragmentary universe. The world of Concluding is one in which no fundamental questions are answered. We do not know whether Rock will lose his cottage; his fears of becoming homeless will continue. The disappearance of the two schoolgirls Mary and Merode remains a mystery; Merode is found in the forest, but explains nothing; Mary never reappears. Nor do we know who haunts the woods in the middle of the night, yelling Mary’s name and playing tricks on both the Principals and on Rock. As Rock concludes at the end of the novel, ‘We shall never know the truth’ (p.253).