In the time of Greenbloom

Fielding was the pen name for Alan Gabriel Barnsley. Greenbloom is a unique coming-of-age novel because of John Blaydon’s special and horrible experiences at thirteen. He almost loses Victoria Blount to drowning the night of their first meeting when she suggests they go swimming in a lake. Blaydon saves her, only to lose her to a murderer later that same year after they have explored a cave together. Blaydon succumbs to an affectless depression from which he is partly aroused when he meets Horab Greenbloom. Greenbloom, who has lost a leg, is a rich friend of Blaydon’s older brother and is in a constant search for personal pleasure and a satisfactory philosophy—first his passion is Wittgenstein; later it is Sartre. Greenbloom is show more able to see some things about Blaydon’s suffering no one else can and tells him “you are fortunate…because you have known what it was you have always wanted without having taken any direct part in its destruction.”
Blaydon struggles in various schools and with a crammer to prepare for medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin. Fielding is at his best depicting the torture the young feel when adults are being unfair to them; he captures the powerlessness that comes from lack of authority and inability to articulate the way one is being wronged. As he awaits the result of his latest exam—the equivalent of A-levels—Blaydon is ready to commit suicide when he runs into Greenbloom again, and Greenbloom tells him that while he might have done away with himself shortly after Victoria’s murder, now he has a reason for living just because he is so unhappy. “You have suffered…by a supreme attachment that detachment which it is the object of all developed men to achieve,” says Greenbloom, who predicts that Blaydon will become a writer. By another lake Blaydon meets an Irish girl who reminds him of Victoria, and he begins to see the possibility of a future. show less