Conventional Weapons

A chance meeting in Valetta years after the Second World War brings back an unwelcome childhood memory, but the narrator of Jocelyn Brooke's last novel (first published in 1961) cannot forget the man he has met, Geoffrey Greene, and the family he belonged to. It brings back to him the England he knew between the wars, memories of an apathetic middle-class existence, of jobs in insurance companies and bookshops, of grandiose suburban houses and the competing twilight-world of artistic and socialist Fitzrovia. Despite his dislike for the family, he finds his curiosity growing, and he is drawn into the seemingly dull and conventional world of the Greenes, just as he was in his youth. But, now in Malta, twenty years on, what has become of Greene's younger brother, the black sheep of the family, and his unlikely wife? And why is Greene himself so reluctant to return to England? Faber Finds has reissued five of Jocelyn Brooke's very individual novels: "The Military Orchid and Other Novels"; "The Image of the Drawn Sword"; "The Scapegoat"; "The Dog at Clambercrown"; and "Conventional Weapons".