Greene, Graham Books

The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I was a reporter, I had no real opinions about anything 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

So said the main character (and narrator) Fowler about himself in an attempt to thwart his promotion to the position of editor, away from the French war in Indo China, and his mistress Phuong.

And a true assessment of himself it may have been, if things had remained as they were. But once Pyle, the naïve, quiet American with his eye on the selfsame Phuong, and his dangerous political meddling enters the scene, Fowler ceases to be a mere spectator, and enters the real world of action with all that it entails. This, then, is the factual gist of, for me, Graham Greene's greatest novel.

It contains everything one has come to admire in Greene: an absolute economy of words, character developed through action and terse dialogue rather than descriptive language, all set within (what has seemingly become an unavoidable cliché when discussing his novels) an intriguing moral dilemma. So he breaks no new ground here, but rather perfects that which he does well to an exceptional degree.

And as always, nothing is ever simple. Ambiguities attach to everything we do, as Fowler discovers, when he does what he considers to be the expedient, just thing re the quiet American. Public and private morality dovetail in Pyle's fate, which Fowler suddenly can determine in one single act, which he does. So the world-weary Fowler ceases to be a mere reporter, and attains everything what he wanted in one fell swoop. And then, in a breathtaking turn-around the jaded, cynical observer Fowler is brought to this in the last sentence of the novel;

..but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.

which, when I read it for the first time, carried me over the threshold of the Christian Faith, in the joyous realization that such a Someone does exist.

Editorial Review:

While the French Army in Indo-China is grappling with the Vietminh, back in Saigon a young and high-minded American named Pyle begins to channel economic aid to a "Third Force."

Caught between French colonialists and the Vietminh, Fowler, the narrator and seasoned foreign correspondent, observes: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." As young Pyle's policies blunder on into bloodshed, the older man finds it impossible to stand aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and to himself: for Pyle has robbed him of his Vietnamese mistress.

"No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene." (Time)

The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 100 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

How does good spoil, and how can bad be redeemed? In his penetrating novel The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement through a priest and the people he encounters. In the 1930s one Mexican state has outlawed the Church, naming it a source of greed and debauchery. The priests have been rounded up and shot by firing squad--save one, the whisky priest. On the run, and in a blur of alcohol and fear, this outlaw meets a dentist, a banana farmer, and a village woman he knew six years earlier. For a while, he is accompanied by a toothless man--whom he refers to as his Judas and does his best to ditch. Always, an adamant lieutenant is only a few hours behind, determined to liberate his country from the evils of the church.

On the verge of reaching a safer region, the whisky priest is repeatedly held back by his vocation, even though he no longer feels fit to perform his rites: "When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example?"

As his sins and dangers increase, the broken priest comes to confront the nature of piety and love. Still, when he is granted a reprieve, he feels himself sliding into the old arrogance, slipping it on like the black gloves he used to wear. Greene has drawn this man--and all he encounters--vividly and viscerally. He may have said The Power and the Glory was "written to a thesis," but this brilliant theological thriller has far more mysteries--and troubling ideals--than certainties. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland

Our Man in Havana (Penguin Classics)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 64 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a pleasure 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Nice to see this classic in print again. Hitchen's insightful forward adds to the pleasure of reading Greene's wonderful "entertainment" again. If you haven't read it yet, do so now!

An Entertaining Footnote to History 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Graham Greene, a major, well-known 20th century British author, had a very long life, most of the century, and a very long and prolific writing career. He may be best known for "The Third Man," "The End of the Affair," and "The Power and the Glory," but his books were greatly honored, highly-praised by the critics, generally best sellers, and often made into movies. As was "Our Man in Havana," a later work of his, initially published on October 6, 1958, and just re-released. Greene famously divided his books into 'novels,' such as the "Power and the Glory," and 'entertainments,' such as "Our Man in Havana." While working on the book at hand, he wrote to the Indian writer R.K. Narayan, a friend, that he was at work on "a rather hack job, an entertainment called 'Our Man in Havana.' I am getting too old to boil the pot." However, he also wrote to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956 that "Our Man" was potentially a "very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history."

The book is set in Havana, Cuba, during the last days of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and reproduces time and place very accurately on the page. The plot's reasonably gripping, and resonant. Like his later follower, John LeCarre, Greene had first-hand experience of the British Secret Service. On the recommendation of his lifelong friend Kim Philby, who turned out to be England's most notorious postwar spy/traitor, Greene had served in Africa's Sierra Leone during World War II, and this is a spy story. The lead character is Jim Wormold, an English seller of vacuum cleaners based in Havana. (Everyone can take a moment here to remember Alec Guinness as this character in the excellent movie based on the book.) Wormold is poor and desperate: his wife has left him, and he hasn't enough money to pay his hefty bar bills, let alone keep his beautiful teenaged daughter Milly in her preferred lifestyle. So, without realizing what he's doing, or where it will take him and those he loves, he agrees to become a British spy; "Old Blighty's" man in Havana.

This may be an entertaining entertainment, but not to worry: there's plenty more serious Greene here. His instinctive anti-Americanism, left-wing viewpoints; and jaded cynicism as to the spy's life. His remarkable ability to create characters, even those who don't get many pages, such as Captain Segura, a local policeman/torture enthusiast, with a cigarette case made from human skin. Segura strongly resembles Batista's dread 'enforcer' Captain Ventura, and in his dark glasses and unmarked car, he will turn up again, and again, creating terror in various Latin American countries, most notably in Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier's feared "toutons macoute."

Greene traveled widely, as a journalist, and to research his novels. He had great serendipity in his visits: many of them occurred at highly interesting times. "Our Man" was published in October, 1956; on New Years Day 1959 the revolutionary Fidel Castro came down from the mountains. The author set his Vietnamese war novel, "The Quiet American" just before the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu. He set "The Comedians" in the last days of Duvalier's Haiti. He had another stroke of luck: the long American blockade of Cuba has resulted in the country, and the city of Havana, staying much the same as the writer described them nearly fifty years ago.

All in all, think I'd have to go with "a very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history."

Editorial Review:

Graham Greene’s classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction

First published in 1959, Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today. Conceived as one of Graham Greene’s "entertainments," it tells of MI6’s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.

The End of the Affair (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 128 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision between love of self, love of another, and love of God. The affair in question involves Maurice Bendrix, a solipsistic novelist, and a dutifully married woman, Sarah Miles. The lovers meet at a party thrown by Sarah's dreary civil-servant husband, and proceed to liberate each other from boredom and routine unhappiness. Reflecting on the ebullient beginnings of their romance, Bendrix recalls: "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom--we were together in desire." Indeed, the affair goes on unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God, whom she has never particularly cared for. "I love him and I'll do anything if you'll make him alive.... I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive with a chance.... People can love each other without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You."

Bendrix, as evidenced by his ability to tell the story, is not dead, merely unconscious, and so Sarah must keep her promise. She breaks off the relationship without giving a reason, leaving Bendrix mystified and angry. The only explanation he can think of is that she's left him for another man. It isn't until years later, when he hires a private detective to ascertain the truth, that he learns of her impassioned vow. Sarah herself comes to understand her move through a strange rationalization. Writing to God in her journal, she says:

You willed our separation, but he [Bendrix] willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You.

It's as though the pull toward faith were inevitable, if incomprehensible--perhaps as punishment for her sin of adultery. In her final years, Sarah's faith only deepens, even as she remains haunted by the bombing and the power of her own attraction to God. Set against the backdrop of a war-ravaged city, The End of the Affair is equally haunting as it lays forth the question of what constitutes love in troubling, unequivocal terms. --Melanie Rehak

The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 74 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Green's tragic masterpiece 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

It's hard for me to review The Heart of the Matter without mentioning The Power and the Glory, so I won't even try. While many people think The Power and the Glory is Greene's tragic masterpiece, I think the case could be made for this book. In a way, The Heart of the Matter is the reciprocal of The Power and the Glory - instead of leading a fairly villainous protagonist on a path to redemption through death at the hands of the ruling authority, it takes a basically good authority figure, the police commissioner Scobie, down a path to both spiritual damnation and public and private ridicule. I find it ironic that Scobie's one abuse of his power, sleeping with a native, is but one of the many committed by the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, and the final act of each, suicide, is seen as heroic in The Power and the Glory, and quite pitiful in The Heart of the Matter. The is of course easily attributable to Greene's Catholic obsession with redemption - the whiskey priest proclaims his sinful nature and the narrator forgives (and deifies) him, while Scobie (and the narrator) clings to his own essential goodness - thus the sin of pride is what ultimately prevents Scobie from either human or divine forgiveness. This is problematic at best and arrogant at worst for an audience unconcerned with godly redemption. I would fall into the godless swine category, which is why I find Scobie so much more likeable than the whiskey priest, and why I find his ultimate ruin so much more tragic. And if we're rating tragedy, isn't that the most important indicator?

Editorial Review:

With a new introduction by James Wood

Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime west-African state, is distrusted — being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in so doing, he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.

Brighton Rock

Graham Greene

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Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Bleak and disappointing 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

BRIGHTON ROCK is unremittingly bleak. It features the blighted and ignored dregs of English society of the Thirties and, to be sure, their lives were pretty damn bleak. But other than a portrait of the underbelly of society, noteworthy for its time, there is little to commend this novel. The plot is only so-so. Greene's characteristic humor, even if it be dark and ironic, is missing. There is a lot about Catholicism, repentance, and the efficacy of religion in human affairs, but done in a way that I suspect would be interesting only to those who are obsessed with Catholicism. Were it not for the fact that this was Greene's first serious novel, I doubt that it would be kept in print or read much anymore.

Modern Feminity Revealed 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Although Greene's "The Power and the Glory" takes a similar tack in its pursuit of that dread beast, the secular humanist, here the portraiture is done in even finer shades of grey. Furthermore, "Brighton Rock"'s Ida is given more internal monologue, and a larger piece of the action, than the ardent socialist lieutenant of "The Power and the Glory."

Ida is perhaps the purest distillation of what must be referred to as "the modern woman." A distant descendant of Madame Bovary, she is no less dogged in her pursuit of her own good (at least what she perceives that to be), but perhaps without even Emma's vestigial sense of shame. She has absolutely no sexual compunction, but at the same time, believes in her own measure of good and evil. As the novel progresses, and more of her character reveals itself, the portrait of her conscience becomes truly terrifying. It has absolutely no built-in governor. It is like a brain without folds. It is blank Nietzchean will-to-power.

Brighton Rock's chief strength, ultimately, is how prophetic it is. Millions of women in modern-day America (the West in general) are something like Ida. It is harder to say with certainty, perhaps, how many were like this in 1930s and 40s Britain, at the time of its authorship. In either event, credit must go to Greene -- for all of his technical lapses as a prose stylist -- for this spot-on bit of feminine psycholanalysis.

As an aside, the musings on the notion of repentance, and the guilty conscience at the moment of death, are no less profound. There's a phrase which gets thrown around in this book, "between the stirrup and the ground", which sums up Greene's understanding of the relationship between the speed and the thoroughness of repentance.

Editorial Review:

With a new introduction by J.M. Coetzee

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous Ida Arnold, who is determined to avenge a death.

Complete Short Stories (Penguin Classics)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A kaleidoscope of human faiths 5 out of 5 stars.
18 of 20 people found this review helpful.

This edition features all the short stories written by the author. Here is a small selection of those I've enjoyed most.
In "Under The Garden" William Wilditch, after spending a long time abroad, is now visiting the family house, Winton Hall, which he hasn't seen since his childhood and where his brother George lives. After the first night, Wilditch finds it difficult to distinguish between memories and fantasy, fact and dream. He remembers a dream he had as a child when he entered a dark cave on the island in the middle of the pond in the garden. In that cave he met two rogues: Javitt, a sententious old man who had lived there for many years with a mute woman, Mary.
In "A Visit To Morin" a narrator, Dunlop, remembers admiring a French author called Pierre Morin who was controversial in the 1950s because he was accused of Jansenism while others called him an Augustinian. Dunlop spots Morin at a Midnight Mass in a village near Colmar. After introducing himself to the author, he is invited to his house where they have an astonishing conversation during which Morin reveals to Dunlop that long after he ceased to believe in God, he still remains a carrier of belief through his books.
A patient suffering from leprosy in "Dream Of A Strange Land" in Switzerland is driven to a desperate action because he can't get his doctor's help. Indeed the doctor's house has been transformed into a casino to accommodate the Herr General, now too weak to travel to Monte Carlo. Not only does the patient think he went to the wrong house but he thinks he is in the wrong country as well, Germany probably...
In "A Discovery In The Woods" a group of strange children with short and uneven limbs who move like crabs decide that they should enter a new territory in search of blackberries. Thus they leave the confines of their village, Bottom, and they discover an enormous house resembling a giant stranded fish which seems to have been thrown up among the rocks to die.
An "old sterile thing" is the way the American woman in "Beauty" is described. She is desperately calling after her Pekinese dog Beauty in the night. But Beauty left her mistress for a well deserved nocturnal ramble in the dirt of the city.
Madame Volet in "Chagrin In Three Parts" lost her husband to Emmy with whom he fell in love. Her friend Madame Dejoie tries to console her by suggesting that satisfaction can be achieved if only one can discover in oneself "the capacity for love" for another woman!
Henry Cooper in "The Overnight Bag" travels on a BEA flight from Nice to London carrying in his BOAC overnight bag what he claims to be his wife's "dead baby".
In "Mortmain" Philip Carter's new marriage to Julia is jeopardised by a series of notes hidden in their apartment by his former wife Josephine.
Mary Watson in "Cheap In August" is taking a holiday in Jamaica where she meets an unhappy and lonely American, Henry Hickslaughter. Because Mary really went on holiday to look for an adventure she can't help feeling that her attachment to the old man is cheap in the same way as everything is cheap in Jamaica in August.
A young woman author appraised by her publisher for her "power of observation" turns out to have no power of observation whatsoever in "The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen".
In "Awful When You Think Of It" a man on a train has an imaginary dialogue with a fellow passenger's baby and he tries to picture what kind of adult that baby will become.
"Doctor Crombie" portrays a school doctor living at the beginning of the 20th century who is convinced that there is a correlation between sexual intercourse and cancer: "Almost one hundred percent of those who die of cancer have practised sex" he claims!
In "Two Gentle People" Marie-Claire Duval and Henry Graves meet in the Parc Monceau in Paris, then have dinner together only to realise that the hour came too late in both their lives...
A wonderful collection of short stories by one of the greatest British authors of the 20th century.

Editorial Review:

Affairs, obsessions, ardors, fantasy, myth, legend and dream, fear, pity, and violence—this magnificent collection of stories illuminates all corners of the human experience.

Previously published in two volumes—Collected Short Stories and The Last Word and Other Stories—these forty-nine stories reveal Graham Greene in a range of contrasting moods, sometimes cynical and witty, sometimes searching and philosophical. Each one confirms V. S. Pritchett’s statement that Greene is “a master of storytelling.”

The Quiet American (Viking Critical Library)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Prophecy Hidden As A Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

One of the most amazing things that jumped out at me about Graham Greene's novel, "The Quiet American," was the copyright date. 1955. How many years BEFORE America found itself mired in the nightmare of the Vietnam War?
Why didn't anyone in power or policy see the warning in this novel?

I'm still reading through all the extra material but I feel confident enough about the book itself and what I have read that I can definitely give this book five stars (the novel is over a third of this book).

Alden Pyle, Greene's "quiet American," clearly represents America in this cruel world. He's young, strong, sure of his beliefs and willing to act on his own convictions--but in this world of deceit and corruption, he doesn't have a chance. And quite a few people have said the same thing about America in Vietnam.

Beyond the deeper meaning of the setting and story (more powerful since it was written BEFORE the USA got stuck in Nam), the characters really make for some fiction. Pyle, the clear-eyed Yank looking to do good in Indo-China, runs into the narrator Fowler, an opium-smoking old Brit journalist who's seen too much and forgot how to care about anything--except the Vietnamese woman who comes between them.

At the end of the 1970s, "Apocalypse Now" got a lot of kudos for its dark humor ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning!") but Greene had written along those lines in the 1950s: Fowler rides along on a bomb run and, after a village is blown to bits, the pilot points out the beautiful sunset on a nearby river.

Up to this point, my favorite Greene novel had been "The End of the Affair," but now it's "The Quiet American." I also want to see the Michael Caine movie they made a couple years back.

The Comedians (Penguin Classics)

Graham Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is a late review and I won't go over what has already been said about this novel. Papa Doc's reign of terror is now historical fact. But if one reads this tight political thriller and one of Greene's best, you can see history repeating itself in the not too recent Hussein reign of terror or go back on a grander scale to Hitler. It goes on and on and THE COMEDIANS deliberately gives the main characters a "no name" status--common with no first names. They are people who hide themselves behind comedic masks and at times tell funny stories while the terror of the Touton Mocteuc consumes everything around them.



We are fortunate there is a paperback edition of this classic still available in print. It is a must read to learn the valuable lessons of the past. When the book was written, it was immediate and hard hitting. The author has visited Haiti twice and before finishing it, Papa Doc heard of the book and refused him entrance into the country, so the book ends on a boat leaving the country which was probably not the author's original ending due to his inability to enter Haiti again.



A very important book for all. A must read. As I stated, I am not giving plot summary or details that have been written about previously in 20 some reviews, just an overview of the book and the impact it still maintains after 40 years.

Editorial Review:

One of Graham Greene's most chilling and prophetic novels, The Comedians is set in a Haiti ruled by Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Just as The Quiet American offered a preview of the coming horrors of American involvement in Vietnam, this novel presages the chaos in Haiti. Classic Graham Greene.

Journey Without Maps (Penguin Classics)

Graham Greene

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

In the heart of darkness, a ray of light 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Graham Greene is a famous 20th C novelist ("The Orient Express") who also wrote a few travel accounts. This is his first, when he was 31 years old and left Europe for the first time in his life to experience the uncivilized "dark heart of Africa" by traveling through the back country of Liberia in 1935. It was a 4-week, 350-mile walk, mostly through an unchanging tunnel forest path, ending each day in a primitive village. He had about a dozen black porters who would carry him in a sling, although he walked much of the way.

It's written with a very "old school" perspective, with one foot in the 19th (or 18th) century of romantic colonial imperialism, and one foot in the pre-war 1930s perspective of deterioration, rot and things falling apart. Heavy whiskey drinking, descriptions of the festering diseases of the natives, and plethora of bothersome insects, the run down European outposts and a motley cast of white rejects fill many descriptive pages.

It reminds me a lot of Samuel Johnson's "Journals of the Western Isles" (1770s) when Johnson, who had never left England in his life, decided to go to Scotland to see what uncivilized people were like. Just as Johnson brought Boswell who would go on to write his own version of the trip, Greene brought his female cousin Barbara Greene (who remains unnamed in the book and largely unmentioned), who went on to write her own version of the trip in the 1970s called "Too Late to Turn Back", which mostly contradicts Grahams version.

I can't say I totally enjoyed this book, I found Greene's attitude irritating - but therein lies its value, as a snapshot of prewar European zeitgeist. It is reminiscent of "Kabloona" (1940), another prewar travel account to an uncivilized place (Arctic Eskimos) by a young European aristocrat, who also is deeply inward looking and finds a new perspective and appreciation for the "cave man" people he meets. It's very much a transition period between prewar and post-war attitudes and the fluctuation's back and forth, the sense of things falling apart, but also new-found perspective, make it a challenging but interesting work.

Editorial Review:

His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. BACKCOVER: “One of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century.”
—Norman Sherry

“Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads reveal Greene’s ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom within the self and in the humanly created world.”
—The Times Higher Education Supplement