Party Going is a 1939 novel by British writer Henry Green

Henry Green

Henry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke , an English author best remembered for the novel Loving, which was featured by Time in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.- Biography :Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family...

 (real name Henry Vincent Yorke).

It tells the story of a group of wealthy people travelling by train to a house party. Due to fog, however, the train is much delayed and the group takes rooms in the adjacent large railway hotel. All the action of the story takes place in the hotel.

Realism or Symbolism?

Frank Kermode

Frank Kermode

Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 ....

, in his essay The Genesis of Secrecy, maintained that behind the realistic plot of this novel there is a complex web of mythical images, the most important being the figure of the classical Greek god Hermes

Hermes

Hermes is the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and a guide to the Underworld. Hermes was born on Mount Kyllini in Arcadia. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and...

, which is strongly tied to one of the characters. This led Kermode to consider Party Going as a Modernist novel, strongly influenced by the ideas of T.S. Eliot.