Spineless Reviews

Heart and soul

Two men, united by their author and his common purpose. On the one hand we have the affable priest, newly promoted and taking a sabbatical in Fascist Spain with his Communist friend, ex-mayor of tiny El Toboso. On the other we have deputy commissioner of police Henry Scobie, slandered and spied upon in his West African backwater. With charming naivety the eponymous Quixote (yes: relation) bungles and falters his way through Greene’s gentle attempts to understand the man; inevitability is Scobie’s only companion, as his character is plunged, lonely and alone among unwitting would-be friends, through the sharp knives of the other book. Both characters reveal their universality under Greene’s loving but unpitying gaze.

That both of these novels are immensely strong in their own rights—almost to the point of flawlessness—need not concern us here. I can’t talk about Greene objectively enough to do justice to an in-depth critique of each. Instead a comparison of the two is edifying. For the casual reader it should be remarked that Monsignor Quixote is loveable with a serious centre for chewing on, erudite conversation blending with foolhardy exploits based around analogy with the priest’s great (fictional, or not?) ancestor, whereas The Heart of the Matter does not compromise in its dragging of Scobie from one flawed decision to the next. Comedy versus tragedy, in extremis.

Greene has in some sense written the same novel twice, struggling not to write the perfect novel but to obtain a perfect grasp on these human beings. Both represent enormous structures and deal with the burden of these responsibilities (the Church: moral, ineptly embodied but with a core of iron; the State: legal, well represented but with a core of rot). Both travel insofar as Scobie barrels through situations as quickly as Quixote’s car rattles downhill, and these journeys, metaphorically or literally, provide threads onto which thrilling experiences and counterpoints are pegged. Both have well-disguised ciphers as companions, elucidating their internal states and contrasting—along an axis independent from the Quixote–Scobie projection—with the protagonists.

Graham Greene doesn’t merely dissect the human condition: he strips it, mechanically and unstoppably. Every emotion is snipped from these men: peeled off, studied, indicated and catalogued. And yet for all his scathing enquiry and well-meaning detachedness Greene is still able to love his characters in the fullest way: to itemize their faults like a laundry list while enveloping each and every one in an understanding that heals both Scobie and Quixote, sending them on their way with their souls bruised but intact.

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Piano forte

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

£6.99, Vintage (2004)

Fowler is a correspondent in Saigon, occasionally making trips into the heart of the Indo-Chinese war. But insofar a coherent country called Greeneland might ever be said to exist, he’s in it. Whether in the city or in the middle of other people’s fighting, he finds himself on the fault line between the personal and political, as Pyle, arousing suspicions as a visiting American without clear portfolio, arouses passions too in Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress Phuong. As Fowler grapples, lonely and godless, with a conscience that cannot tell one wrong from another, innocent people start to die as terrorists plant makeshift bombs throughout the city: Fowler knows who may really have caused their deaths.

Greene is able to squeeze moral good from his villains by a subtle twisting of typical Manicheanisms. Here he flips over the (once topical) dichotomy set up by the self-proclaimed heroes, America. Communism, for all its faults, shares those faults with so-called democracies; meanwhile its almost theological observances sneak in a note of ascetic virtue. Both ideologies prop up evil acts, as Greene shows, but at least Communism means it. It’s an interesting take on the politics, the product of a hyperrealism that can only be bred out of war and the logical extreme of cultural tourism: you feel he’d never get away with The Quiet Vietnamese.

More personally, even if he were to win back Phuong, Fowler would have to make his decisions alone, without consultation or prayer. This is life without spiritual community, life for the atheist who, unlike his estranged and undivorceable wife, cannot confess, cannot confide. He must instead deaden his existential pain with a poppy-pipe and the love of Phuong, more a muffling, resolute tolerance than affection.

In the course of the novel Greene drags Fowler, as he has done to so many of his other protagonists, through intrusive social closeness and abject spiritual loneliness. The distance between Fowler and his actions, bridged by thin threads of reason and humanism, is sometimes too great to be plausible. The matter-of-factness of the climax, itself practically a denouement, leaves one dazed and full of unanswered, unanswerable questions. Nonetheless its tense thrillerisms pull The Quiet American back from the brink of a reflexive reductio ad absurdum. They wrap it up, disguise it, deliver it with little fuss into the hands of the reader, who receives it and takes it to his heart, a quiet book about a quiet man, each as innocuous and explosive as a home-made bomb.

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Wish you weren’t here

Collected Short Stories, by Graham Greene

£8.99, Penguin (1986)

The vast expanse of fabled Greeneland, where it’s traditionally believed Graham Greene takes us in his best work: does it really exist insofar as fictional worlds can? Has it a coherence and identity that establishes it as a subtle retelling of our own reality, a shift in perspective comparable to noir or Pynchon and Dick’s vast holism of conspiracy and shifting truths?

This collection of short stories goes some way to answering that question. Sadly, that answer is: yes and no; or rather, Greeneland stories are easy to spot, and the others are in a world of their own. A complex, uncommonsensical morality pervades all the suspect stories, a paralysis that leaves the characters unable to connect or to perceive the reality of people’s actions, blinded by the fog of their well-meaning. There is frequently a lonely, harassed protagonist (A Chance for Mr Lever, Jubilee) who is put upon by circumstance (Dream of a Strange Land, May We Borrow Your Husband?, Doctor Crombie). Morality, duty and compassion come into conflict and often open warfare (almost all the above, plus The Basement Room, Mortmain and Men at Work). All the ingredients of Greeneland are present in detectable if occasionally meagre concentrations.

But what’s most interesting is Greene’s sideline in entirely un-Greeneish fiction. Two equally sinister (but a little similar) stories about the undead take Greeneland dread and horror and apply it to an entirely different genre. A Drive in the Country transplants Brighton Rock methodology into Ken Loach’s territory. Comedies and satires like Awful When You Think Of It, A Shocking Accident and Beauty hit the reader with some force, although the usual sense of suspicion and dread pervade even these. It’s a joy to discover the science-fiction tale of A Discovery in the Woods, powerful and resonant with all the fears of the past century, a coda to Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz.

Irritatingly, many stories have minor flaws which often go unnoticed on the first reading. Cheap in August seems primarily to have been given its title so that it might have a snappy ending, entirely out of keeping with the rest of the story. A Chance For Mr Lever ends clumsily and blockily, its use of karma and the irony of unknown events not really carrying the conviction of the writer, let alone convincing the reader. And the na gCopaleen-esque Under the Garden unravels all too quickly. These niggles aside, the 37 stories in this one volume represent a rare treat. Each one is a page-turner, regardless of Greene’s occasional, apparent lapses of writerly judgment. This is Greeneland and Greeneland’s precursors, true: but this is also a postcard sent by Greeneland on holiday and, true to form, away is no more secure a place than home.

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Often chased, frequently bought

A Gun for Sale, by Graham Greene

£6.99, Vintage (2005)

The shadowy heads of the military-industrial complex stage a murder to provoke war but, unable to resist the irony (and hoping it will solve the problem) they pay the hired killer in counterfeit notes. They underestimated Raven, though: the bitter, deadly outcast with a harelip and pockets full of worthless money is not one to forget a slight. When his path crosses that of a well-meaning chorus girl, Raven sees a way out of his situation and into the offices of the powerful. But whose side is she on? If she’s really Raven’s friend, then who else’s is she too?

In the hands of Jack Higgins or another equally pedestrian potboiler-monger, A Gun For Sale would quickly descend into the morass of clichés that constitute every similar spy thriller. Worse, Higgins’ tendency would be to dramatize the evil inherent in so many characters in this novel. But Greene has a light touch, and though the story is itself rather slight it can nonetheless float free of the weights that others might place on it.

Always searching for a point in Greene’s writing—even a volume this slim must have more content than meets the eye—one can quickly find his usual ethical nudging, gentler here than in his later magna opera out of necessity of form as much as anything else. It’s astonishing that, even in what seems at first glance to be hack work, Greene can still embed such a strongly, quietly Catholic message. Evil is dirty and miserable, and violence has no glamour in Greeneland, where everything exists in shades of dismal grey—except the fundamentals of morality, which are starkly black and white—and where losing faith can lead to damnation as quickly as putting a bullet in a man.

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Matters maketh man

A Sort of Life, by Graham Greene

£6.99, Vintage (1993)

As an author, Graham Greene shows a definite tough love towards his characters. The starkness of many of their novelized lives is belied by some divinity shaping their ends, or at least affording them a degree of salvation or condemnation. In this way Greeneland is similar in structure to the rigid, pitiless universe of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Once we accept that Greene’s early conversion to Roman Catholicism has informed these moral sensibilities—in ways that your average born-again would scarcely conscience—it follows that we will ask: what else in his life found its way into his work?

Greene’s autobiography ought to provide the ideal environment in which to interrogate him. There’s refreshingly little evidence that A Sort of Life constitutes a land-grab by Greene, an attempt to stake out territory that biographers might otherwise camp on to reveal the nastier features thereof. The tone is gentle and neutral: he claims in the preface to have written the book in good faith, both to his readers and to his younger self, and this faith shines from the book far more than the religious sort. While one can always argue for subconscious layers of misdirection, there is a warts-and-all honesty evident in these ramblings about his early life.

Dull yet interesting, is probably the neatest summary of his first twenty-odd years presented here. His cloistered, upper-middle-class upbringing is claustrophobic and privileged; he is surrounded by the extended Greene family and attends the school his father owned and headmastered. Unintentionally funny childhood games and a marked precocity on the part of young Graham strengthen the usual stereotypes of his class; there’s also implied, passive but unceasing encouragement from his parents, effortlessly brought to bear on their child. Greene’s formative years are clearly micromanaged to an extent, the size of which he barely acknowledges.

Therein lies the major flaw in A Sort of Life. While Greene is scrupulously honest about his mundane conversion, his fears of destitution following early, devastating failure, and his own gradual gendering—when he remembers, almost as an afterthought, to mention it—he is simply rattling the details off with the minimum of analysis or reflection. One is simultaneously encouraged by the glut of information and irritated by the lack of preparation and consideration of it.

If this were fiction, Greene would have written it as a grey, ambiguous story with hints of deep principles at work. As it is, this factual splurge is better thought of as rough notes, that a professional biographer would be able to take up as a promising starting point, not a finished book. His time in juvenile therapy, the brief mentioning of sexual frissons, his isolation and nervousness, the discovery of faith through his wish to marry… all of these stories have depth, and beg questions as much as they provide answers, but here the questions are not even considered. There exists the possibility of a discussion of Graham Greene’s sort of life that illuminates both the man and his work, but Greene himself was never the man to write it.

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