ABSTRACT

It is hard to think of Graham Greene as an old man; but then, equally, it has never been easy to think of him as a young man. For more than half a century

he has presented much the same literary persona, though with a certain shift

from the mephistophelian melodramatist of the early books to the genial and

sometimes sinister joker of the recent ones. The public congratulations lately

bestowed on Greene for his eightieth birthday are richly deserved; in adding to

them I feel a certain awe in writing about an author who published his first

novel in 1929, the year in which I was born. The life has been long and the

oeuvre is correspondingly large and varied. Greene is known primarily as a

novelist, but he has also written short stories, plays and film scripts; literary

and film criticism; biography and travel books. In an age of specialisation he splendidly embodies the ideal of the all-round man of letters. And his appeal is

correspondingly broad. He has always been popular with the general reading

public; at the same time he is taken seriously by academic critics and has been

made the subject of many articles and several books. He is also noteworthy and

unusual among twentieth-century British novelists in having a global

reputation; a product, at least in part, of the internationalism of his themes and

In his final chapter he reflects on the significance of Greene's exceptionally

long writing career:

Sharrock's study is welcome for a number of reasons, not least its comprehensiveness. It concludes with Monsignor Quixote, published in 1982, in which Greene takes a serene, Prospero-like backward glance at the themes and situations of his life's work. From this vantage point it is evident that Greene the novelist has had not one career but several, and that earlier studies

of Greene suffered from not being able to tell the whole story. Roger Sharrock considers, first, the fiction of the 1930s, when Greene attempted to make a distinction between his 'novels' and his 'entertainments'; as he later

acknowledged, it was basically factitious, and it has been abandoned in the

Collected Edition of his books. In this early phase Greene drew heavily on the

popular forms of the romance and the thriller. After the costume drama of The

Man Within he concentrated on contemporary settings for his recurring theme

of the betrayed and hunted man. He showed a striking capacity for the rendering of dismal urban landscapes, whether in close-ups of significant detail

or in ranging shots, which was essentially cinematic. Sharrock touches on this quality, which is discussed at greater length in a study by a Polish scholar,

Imagination (Dissertations Universitatis Varsoviensis, 1983). The world of

these novels came to be dubbed 'Greeneland', a critical cliche which the

novelist understandably finds irritating, but which is difficult to avoid.