ABSTRACT
Having considered the links – and failings – shared by ‘inner’ morality and ‘public’ ethics in the apparently autonomous, ‘mature’ moral agent, Greene considers how the agent came to being. Though his fictive ethical modelling does not extend to consideration of workable parallels in the formation of the ‘traitor’ figure, who remains austere and inscrutable, he considers the peculiarly petit-bourgeois English values shaping the formation of the individual, taking several approaches to the getting of history. Uncannily echoing the later writings of Ballard, the protagonist Rowe revisits his childhood, the world of Trumpington and cucumber sandwiches; not only inadequate in providing a workable moral education, but discrepant:
Arthur Rowe is not simply himself, but the embodiment of an historical paradox – that the creature of innocence, of cucumber sandwiches – the pre-war world, is the creature of present wrongdoing; and though his mother is a source of love and approval, the domestic mythology and her deaf domestic preoccupation inform the paradox. Throughout the book, the mythology of prevailing virtue in children’s literature – The Little Duke in particular – is also crucial to the ‘unpreparedness’ of Arthur in comprehending his own and others’ moral agency.13
