I’ve been reading again, for the first time in many years, Graham Greene’s novels, and in particular Brighton Rock, one of his earliest and still one of his finest, a new film of which is soon to be released.
Greene was enormously prolific – 27 novels, three collections of short stories, and four of essays. He also wrote plays, some of which were very successful, and four volumes of autobiography. As if that was not enough, he was a lifelong traveller, whose need to be on the move matched or exceeded that of his nearest rival, Bruce Chatwin. He wrote brilliantly about Mexico, Africa, Vietnam, Central and South America - his experiences feeding into such novels as The Quiet American, The Heart of the Matter, and The Comedians.
For whatever reason, Greene divided his novels into two categories. First, there were those like A Burnt-Out Case and The Human Factor, in which he was dealing with subjects like moral and spiritual breakdown, or conflicting loyalties, things he knew about from the inside. Not only did Greene suffer profoundly from depression throughout his life, he had been a friend of the notorious Cambridge spy Kim Philby, writing an introduction to the memoirs Philby published after he had fled to Moscow just before he was going to be arrested.
Then there are those like Travels with my Aunt, Stamboul Train, Our Man in Havana, and Monsignor Quixote he called “entertainments”, a confusing description because many of them dealt with similar things to those of the more serious novels, the difference, I suppose, being they did so in a more whimsical, light-hearted fashion.
Certainly Our Man in Havana allowed him to explore the nature of treachery – a constant theme in his writings - while his late novel, Monsignor Quixote, a depiction of a saintly Spanish priest, voiced some of his most firmly-held beliefs about the Catholic Church, to which he had converted early in his career, and his deeply held, if very individually formulated socialism, which combined with a barely-concealed loathing of the United States.
Sometimes writers create worlds uniquely their own. Greene was one of those, and critics even gave it a name. “Greene-land” is as much a discernable “atmosphere” as a particular place. Its inhabitants are mostly flawed men and women, attempting to exist in a welter of moral ambiguity, where conflicting loyalties, the ever-present threat of betrayal, along with the treachery that goes with it, and the near-impossibility of doing the right thing for the right reason, define the boundaries and provide the elements of the always compelling tales he tells.
Although Catholicism occupies the foreground in some of the books, The Heart of the Matter, for example, or The End of the Affair, his more impressive novels – for me at least - are those where it is more implicit or even disappears altogether, and where the struggle between loyalties - sexual, religious, and political - is played out against the inevitable uncertainties of life.
Right at the start he shows this with Brighton Rock, a terrifying study of how an ordinary person – a small-time crook – can damn himself through his own, freely-chosen, actions. In a fine essay on Henry James, a pivotal influence on Greene, discussing the characters in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of a Dove, Greene writes that “the world of Henry James’s imagination is a world of treachery and deceit”, and that “the novels are only saved from the deepest cynicism” by the fact that the characters who embody these qualities “are capable of damnation”.
An odd-sounding thing to say. But Greene quotes TS Eliot on the French poet Baudelaire: “It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said about most of those who do wrong, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.” Brighton Rock, which is an exciting thriller that can be ranked alongside the very best, is also a profound and disturbing study of free will and the consequences of moral choice.
The novelist Joseph Conrad, another major influence on Greene, declared “Art ... may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe.” Greene would surely agree, but he would want to clarify that, just as Conrad did in novels like Heart of Darkness, to do so you must also do the same thing for the invisible universe of conscience and action. His genius in doing so is what makes him a great novelist.
Barnaby ffrench
