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.