ABSTRACT
Graham Greene's travel books are perhaps the best example of what Hynes calls "a dual plane work with a strong realistic surface, which is yet a parable" (Hynes, 228). Greene's first travel book, Journey without Maps (1936), chronicles an exhausting fourweek trek deep into the uncharted Liberian forest. This "plane" is fairly typical of most travel books of his time, following the managainst-nature pattern. For Greene, however, this trip provides an opportunity for another, more personal journey in which the journey itself is transformed into a metaphor for psychological introspection. It is this other plane that marks Greene's travel books as the real beginning of heightened subjectivity in the genre. On perhaps even another level, Greene's personal sources of madness mirror the peculiar modern temperament of Europe between the wars. The images of modern man as alone, fearful, and alienated correspond to Greene the traveler. While Waugh's travel books comment on the social and political folly of all human beings, Greene's travel books reflect the personal anxiety of a fearful, haunted man, running blindly for cover in a world without faith. Greene's books are always about something else. They are clearly dual, perhaps even triple-layered, and as much about their author and the places he visits as they are about the ideas central to the 1920s and 1930s.
