Spineless Reviews

And then you fry

The Beach, by Alex Garland

£6.99, Penguin (1997)

There is no such place as off the beaten track. On a fruitless search for the virgin island, Richard has come to this conclusion. But in a chance meeting the soon-to-be suicide “Daffy” Duck hints at the perennial rumour of the unspoilt, idyllic paradise. Unlike most hapless backpackers Duck leaves Richard a map. A bond is forged between Richard and two French companions, who all sneak away to the government-protected island and The Beach, but not before Richard passes the map onto two American tourists, Zeph and Sammy, smarter than they look.

Our three heroes are accepted by The Beach’s community, and find themselves in a resort ringed by sharks and drug dealers: apparently safe in their eden, but with flaming swords turning every which way at the borders. But division and danger inevitably seep in, precipitated by the disastrous attempts of Zeph and Sammy to infiltrate this paradise.

Garland plays games with lost innocence that make the scandal surrounding the film ironic and fitting: DiCaprio is implicit in the very despoiling that his alter ego has been trying to escape, and ultimately is taken over by and becomes accomplice to. At the same time unattainables and unspeakables hover in the air like demons on the shoulders of the wannabe prelapsarians, and the climax of the novel is Conradian: dark and inescapable, pleasurable tourism with its back turned.

The novel has its faults, not least the author’s love of short chapters. Each has its own narrative arc, collapsing the book into a collection of short stories, hung off the same thread. The climax is not felt until the last few pages, therefore, and nor do Richard’s gaming and war-film obsessions really manifest themselves except as plot devices that put a twist to the rest of the book each time they appear. In addition the bending of Richard’s character is never dealt with convincingly—the last great leap he makes into “Vietnam” is confusing and inexplicably inexplicable.

Nonetheless the book is a chilling account of the quest to regain innocence, and the unstoppability of the outside world’s influx: poisoning, destroying, but ultimately humanizing with a euthanasia that frees the inhabitants of The Beach.

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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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The blind receive their sight; the lame walk

I, Claudius, by Robert Graves

£12.99 (with Claudius the God), Penguin (1988)

The archetypal fool could, were he morally capable of it, get away with murder. Nobody would suspect the court jester. Yet his morals are often more finely tuned—if more flexible in his personal behaviour—than those of the murderers that surround him. So it is with Claudius, the lame, stammering child of the Julio-Claudian family, derided throughout his youth but destined to be emperor. A fictional autobiography has the potential to be a playground for its authors wildest flights of fancy. Who knows what the narrator really thought, or really did outside of what historical accounts are availble? It’s all too easy to spin the most fantastic tale that history will allow (typically detecting the events of homicide(s)), such as Ackroyd did with Hawksmoor and Tully with The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë. Graves, on the other hand, accomplishes the far more difficult task of presenting the story with its boring warts and all: of making the dull grind almost as exciting as the juicy exploits of the Roman royal family.

That Graves often disagrees with the opinions of his sources is a tremendous asset to the novel. Historically he relies heavily (as does the rest of the world) on Suetonius, Tacitus and Cassius Dio. These, the only histories extant, are in no way contemporaneous with the events but rather toe the Flavian line with carefully crafted rhetoric. The quandary of the Flavians was to deify Augustus—and hence establish the source of imperial power—while claiming that with each successive generation his progeny had become more decadent and corrupt; compared, at any rate, to the Flavians.

Only when Graves escapes this clearly biased narrative does the story deepen, thicken, flower: pick your metaphor, but Graves’ independence of thought is what makes I, Claudius so enjoyable. Livia’s evil is sheer joy for the reader, and the complex character of Tiberius—presented simultaneously as pedestrian leader, Livia’s moll, bad-tempered penny-pincher and generally well-meaning buffoon, the ill effects of whose reign did not stretch beyond the few hundred senators into the general populace like his beneficience did—is constructed with such clarity and easy resolution of its internal paradoxes. Even Caligula, pace Lives of the Cæsars starts promisingly, and his degeneration is as believable as it is spectacular.

As asides, it’s interesting to consider the moral agency of the main players, and the rôle and responsibilities of the historian in the light of I, Claudius. The former is evident in the suspiciously repeated pattern of the female characters in the novel—Livia, Urgulanilla, Julia, Agrippina—carrying out a long-running Manichean battle, their weapons and shields consisting of the males, who mete out punishments and provide alibis: even the emperors. The latter seems to mirror an internal wrangle of Graves’, revealed both in Claudius’ opinions of Livy and Pollio, and in Claudius’ own desire to be like the less journalistic Pollio: a careful recorder of the facts. It reveals much, about Graves’ opinions of Livy and his followers, and perhaps even about his own doubts over the dramatisation he has attempted in this novel.

But he needn’t worry: the revelation of Claudius’ inner self is the book’s coup de théatre and a service to history, history as a desire to construct a meaningful narrative and understand that narrative. Perhaps it’s overly complimentary, but scarcely so for an autobiography. More importantly this book reaches beyond the typical explanation for Claudius’ fate and its circumstantial simplicity. It reveals to us the hidden seed of Claudius’ suitability as an emperor. For 1900 years everyone saw him as being in the right place at the right time. Graves suggests to us that he might also have been the right man for the job.

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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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People who don’t need people

1982 Janine, by Alasdair Gray

£7.99, Canongate (2003)

For a man so utterly alone, Jock MacLeish is hardly lonely. So he’s eschewed all meaningful relationships. So he’s now haunted by his own insomniac self, in a hotel room in Peebles (or is it Selkirk: what day is it?). But he still keeps himself company, with the women who populate his relentlessly pornographic, if sometimes barely sexual, fantasies. In one night, with one bottle of scotch, one of pills, and a surprise appearance from God, Jock will take his imaginary women and his own dark self to pieces. He’ll examine each piece in turn, and cast everything he hates into the fire that’s brewing in his single malt. It’s not clear if there’ll be anything left by morning.

Alasdair Gray writes richly and deeply, reveals rarely and tantalisingly, and is utterly unafraid of experimenting with typography, dialect, narrative… any aspect of the novel is fair game. He captures the grim selfishness of Thatcherite Britain and the sexual power politics of a middle-aged misogynistic misanthrope perfectly. Jock is an intellectual and idealist, but when he capitulates he makes his fortune. Of course, he loses everything in the process—Denny, Alan, Helen, his parents, his self-respect (although he’d deny it if you asked)—but he compensates by steeping his soul in the powerful opium of his girls: Janine, Superb and all the others who relentlessly parade, undress, are kidnapped, resist, parade, undress.

But those girls: they’re not just a defect in Jock, they’re the problem with this novel. A large chunk of it is ostensibly made of these short stories which, intentionally, aren’t believable and never reach a climax (although, true to Gray’s typical warts-and-all methodology, Jock reaches one or two). These fantasies are part scalpels that dissect Jock, part phantasms of his boozed state that force the reader to share in his confusion; but they’re so annoying and invasive, an interruption rather than a revelation. Only in these does Gray ever hammer a point home too hard: hate Jock, Gray tells us; hate him and pity him. But we don’t need any more convincing. Gray’s prose in itself carries conviction, and he needn’t try as hard as he does in 1982 Janine.

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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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Claudius the man

Claudius the God, by Robert Graves

£12.99 (with Claudius the God), Penguin (1988)

Having rescued Claudius’ character so wholeheartedly in the prequel I, Claudius, Robert Graves continues to fabricate the autobiography of his unlikely protagonist. Claudius is a sort of off-white sheep of the otherwise black-as-night Julio-Claudians, afflicted with plenty of unfortunate hereditary problems but free (more or less) of the psychotic nature that blossomed into flowers of mistrust, paranoia and megalomania among his relatives. But why should Graves pursue Claudius’ character any further? In doing so, after all, he’s created a chronologically lopsided diptych, as this volume spans around a quarter of the time covered by the first. It all looks a bit like overreaching. Is there any need?

Well, whereas the first book redefines Claudius as a quiet savant worthy of his scheming genes—less the fool, more playing the fool—the sequel goes some way to rescuing him as a human being. The test of all his kinsmen’s characters was, ultimately, how each fared as emperor; so Claudius must also undergo this baptism of fire. History demands it, and Graves tells it. And he pulls off the trick of making the sequel, however weaker in synopsis, largely as enjoyable, as layered and as strong as I, Claudius.

In his lengthier battle descriptions the tone of Graves’ primary sources does sometimes sneak in, an ethos of actually caring whether or not the elephants were on this hill rather than that one, or the chariots were going down the left or right flank. But it’s all told through Claudius’ rich, sympathetic, occasionally cantankerous narration and this helps paper over any minor cracks. He even handles Claudius’ sudden change of leadership, after betrayal by Messalina comes to light, exceptionally well given its historical incomprehensibility. That, like every other known fact about the man, is enlarged and enriched by this insightful, startling uprooting of dry history in order to replant in the fertile, inner soil of the individual life.

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Every doyen tells a story

English Short Stories (1900 to the present), by Giles Gordon (ed.)

OOP, Everyman (1988)

While the established media seem to vaguely, erratically support what they consider to be a renaissance in the short story, as a mode of expression it lumbers heedlessly on, giving a passing nod but no more to the bright young things that grace publications largely unsuitable to its format: by which I mean the Guardian magazine rather than Take a Break. But what of its history? Where has it been, this queer, marginal way of writing, alternately considered either the last resort of those who love novels, but couldn’t write a whole one, or the apotheosis of minimalism, pared down, honed and sharpened to a deadly point?

This collection might go some way to answering that. Some two dozen authors, from Conrad and Kipling through to Ballard and McEwan, are each represented by a story each of variable length and, surprisingly, quality. Saki’s chilling Sredni Vashtar takes some beating, although Ballard’s The Intensive Care Unit comes close, with its icy conviction and utter believability. Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, McEwan’s Solid Geometry and Wells’ The Truth About Pyecraft are all solid, enjoyable yarns. Conrad, on the other hand, provides dramatic tension that goes nowhere and just tangles itself up in knots; Woolf’s Lappin and Lapinova is trite, doubly-embedded faux-naivety that pales in comparison with the strongest work on display here.

If there’s any trend to be gleaned from these stories, it’s an obscure one. Certainly the best writers don’t always write the best short stories. One might go further and say that the most dramatic writers, those with either the greatest clarity or whose words have the tightest turning circle, produce shorts which mature the seemliest; but this scarcely begins to do justice to either Kipling or Wodehouse’s styles. If nothing else, the collection shows that it’s simply not enough to assemble what philistines would sneer at as a list of established “classics” and hope they will carry the day: such reading lists would eventually make philistines of us all.

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Slow, slow, slow-slow slow

From the Diary of a Snail, by Günter Grass

£7.99, Minerva (1997)

When Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt by his contemporaries, began teaching Jews and collecting snails during the prelude to the second World War, he probably didn’t intend to become a champion for the underdogs. Doubt would never have made such a definite political statement, children; Doubt moves slowly, like his snails. He works hard, not with the ethic of the Protestant nor the gloom of the martyr to the economy, but with the manner of one shoring up sandbags against time. He sees the plaintive, whirling dervishes of here-and-now revolution, frowns and slows down: not just to watch, but to check his own speed.

Grass aligned himself—probably still does—with Doubt in his partly fictional account of his own campaign trail during the 1969 election. The word “trail” develops many meanings as, in Grass’ memoir, the snails that Doubt collects become the symbol of Social Democratic policy, and slowness the responsibility and duty of the intellectual in politics. Grass and Doubt follow their separate, dogged routes some thirty years apart, meeting on, say, a windswept beach so that Grass can air his grievances: not with the world, but with his own over-eagerness. Doubt is always there at Grass’ right hand, holding him back with history’s lesson, that to rush headlong is to eventually perish.

In this translated work, much of Grass’ original project is evident. Narratives are rich and intertwine in a complicated montage that echoes Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Presumably it has been just as difficult to translate, as a lot of the effect is lost. Some of Grass’ semi-spontaneous poetry is absolutely appalling in the English, ranging from mawkish to sesquipedalian with no redeeming qualities in between. The fact that Grass is on one level writing to answer the questions of his own sons and daughters is hammered home each and every time he calls the reader “children” (which is probably Grass’ own error). But his grasp of atmosphere and storytelling survives Grass’ occasional patronising and Ralph Manheim’s pedestrian translation. By detecting in advance whether the next section has odd line lengths it’s easy to anticipate most of the dross and skip over to the next cleverly-crafted chunk of prose.

At a time when German politics is moving once again back towards the right-wing CDU and tubthumping—tired of the slow, careful movements of the pragmatic socialist Schnecken that have formed previous coalitions—Grass’ novel-cum-memoir is an illuminating read: not so much of the current political climate, which has of course changed dramatically since then, but of the collective German psyche in the 20th Century. After leaping at one political movement and being stung to their psychic core, it somehow takes all of the German people’s collective restraint not to leap at another. Ultimately, Grass asks us again and again the question: why must we always learn from the hare, the big cats, the hunters and the gods of myth and legend… but never from the snail?

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The Red and the Bleak

Comrade Don Camillo, by Giovanni Guareschi

OOP, Penguin (1976)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, August 4, 2006, and on the ReadReverb website)

The atmosphere of the Cold War now seems as alien to us as that of prohibition America, or the grime and crime of Victorian London, and it’s easy to forget what strange, misshapen battle-lines were drawn in those years. The Roman Catholic Church and the Communists found themselves on opposite sides of the putative Front for a number of reasons—the former’s investment in established orders; the latter’s tacit hostility to any religion proportional to the extent to which it might be “organized”—despite professing respective interests in the soul and freedom of the common man. But it’s in this subtle, fearful era that we find Don Camillo, Italian priest, secreting himself and a copy of the Gospels into Russia as part of a junket arranged by international branches of the Communist party.

Guareschi’s series of stories about Don Camillo all have a knockabout atmosphere to them: Father Brown, retold as farce. The priest causes havoc on the trip, using Communist pedantry to split the little group of Italian Reds, starting fights and revealing (to themselves, not to the authorities) the deeply-buried religion of both oppressed natives and disillusioned politico-tourists. And, as usual, Camillo has a rather everyday hotline to God and Jesus in his head, and this familiarity extends to parish-magazine cartoons at the start of each chapter, parables of the ensuing stories. But of all the books in the series, this alone has a core of iron to it: sometimes the silliness drifts away like smoke to reveal a rather withering satire of aspects of Communist Russia that we now all know to have been true. One wonders why, of all the books, it’s the last one that has condensed so surprisingly in this way.

Only on reaching Guareschi’s postscript is this change of tone explained. In keeping with the times in which he wrote, the author considered himself under siege—politically, culturally and journalistically—from the Communists, and seems to have moved a pace or two in the direction of the hard right-wing, as a reaction to his own perceived oppression. It’s as though the series has lost its admixture of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote that, thus far, has prevented it becoming a political tract. And although the stories are as fun and as intricate in their comedy as any of the earlier ones, spotting this swerve to the right serves as a timely reminder that, however clearly Don Camillo the man serves his God—and despite the moralizing against Communism, the priest remains a decent, kind, sympathetic figure—it’s important to remember that the Don Camillo books are in the service of their author, at the very least.

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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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