"A thrilling collection of voices."
Category: The first Graham Greene novel I read was the suspenseful “The Third Man”. (Greene worked as a spy for his government and drew on this experience for his thrillers.)The second book of his that I read was the comic spy masterpiece “Our Man In Havana”. These books were terrific reads, but there was a depth in the shadows that I wanted more of. I sought out other Greene novels and basically, got knocked flat. The next three novels of his that I read devastated me.
I later learned that Greene wrote novels that he intended to be popular. He called these novels his “entertainments” and he wrote a good number of them. Greene used his facility for description and dialogue and structural plotting to create some of the best novels of this sort ever written. His political sensibility, that is, his concern for the poor and oppressed, can be experienced in these popular novels, but it is tempered by his need to move the plot to a satisfying conclusion.
It was in reading his serious novels “Brighton Rock” (1938), “The Power and The Glory” (1940), “The Heart of The Matter”(1948), and “The End Of The Affair” (1951) that I experienced spiritual, and often physically violent, nighttime descents into city and jungle canyons I wasn’t exactly ready to take. Journeys I could never have prepared for.
(Penguin Classics has reissued “The Power…” and “The Heart…” in trade size paperbacks. I’ve seen them for sale in airport bookstores. God bless Penguin.)
These intense novels are great literature and I will tell you that reading them most certainly has a cost. I can’t imagine anyone walking away from these books with their souls unscratched.
Greene describes a realistic exterior and interior darkness that is so perfectly presented, so genuine, that it can be difficult to finish the book and get on with your life. When I re-read “The Power…” last week it kept working on me for days, as it had the first time I read it, little explosions of revelation kept going off in my head. There were times when I stopped walking and stood still as I remembered a passage.
I feel a sense of recognition when I read Greene that can, and often does, become a kind of fear. In the jail house scene in “The Power…” the “whiskey priest” sits in a cell listening to his fellow prisoners and the buzzing mosquitoes in the night. What he hears is not pretty. Greene shows us that this living world is a place between two eternities. There is a grief here that seems to me to be particularly Catholic. It is a mourning that can seep into a reader’s life and make it difficult to carry on, as a Greene character might have said.
Greene uses the bones of a plot to create situations where the characters reveal themselves to be awkward fools and their lives can seem embarrassing and sad. But in the end, as we come to know these people, the result is a tender empathy for the ragged human drama we share. And sometimes, as in “The Power…” there is an odd and unexpected rising of hope. Graham Greene has a sensibility in his great novels that is ambitious in the best meaning of the word. He is having it out with God using his hard-won skills and his gracious art, and you know, whether or not you believe there is a God, that Greene has the consciousness and the creativity to take Him on. If a Son of God wrote books, he’d write like this.
