The Life of Graham Greene volume II 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry (1994)

It’s lucky I have a masochistic trend and a feeling for squalor. (p.114)
I do seem to muck up everyone I love. (p.406)

The three volumes of Professor Norman Sherry’s epic life of Graham Greene were published in 1989, 1994, and 2004. This volume, number two, covers the period 1939 to 1955, which saw the publication of the three novels which constitute Greene’s claim to greatness: The Power and The Glory (1940), The Heart of The Matter (1948), The End of The Affair (1951).

Sherry spent 28 years on his biography, travelling to all the places Greene visited, interviewing everyone who’d ever known him, and the man himself. Critics have mentioned Sherry’s occasional odd phrasing or uneven attitude towards his subject, but any faults pale into insignificance beside the scale of the achievement and thoroughness of his detective work. This volume is a fascinating and detailed insight into Graham Greene, a wretched, miserable man who had the gift of making everyone close to him wretched and miserable while becoming widely revered by the world of letters for producing a stream of novels about wretched, miserable men.

Greene’s character

Suicidal Surely Greene was the most suicidally depressed of all significant British authors. A shy, sensitive boy, he was bullied at school and made a series of suicide attempts before his parents sent him to a psychoanalyst. But thoughts of suicide stayed with him all his life and much of his behaviour can be interpreted as (to quote the title of his autobiography) ‘ways of escape’ from an existence he routinely found unbearable. (I am struck by the fact the one way of escape Greene didn’t consider was physical exercise: walking, hiking, cycling, swimming, jogging, tennis or team sports? Nope, not a glimpse, not a mention. Drinking, feeling sorry for himself and writing about misery were his main occupations. And sex with prostitutes and adultery.)

Part Five of the biography, covering his travels to the Far East during the period of the Malaya Emergency and the Vietnam Insurgency, is titled The Death Seeker. Again and again he hopes his plane will crash or he will be kidnapped, shot or blown up by the rebels in the countries he visited. Libby Getz is quoted as saying Greene’s deepest wish was to be ‘crucified on an anthill in a third world country.’ (p.385)

Longed for death to come here with an ambush, on this coloured evening. (p.386)

Selfish He was a monster of selfishness and egotism whose biography can be reduced to a fairly simple, and familiar, formula. 1. He was profoundly depressive and suicidal since adolescence. 2. He could only escape these moods by writing, drinking or being ‘in love’ – in a small way, going with prostitutes, in a bigger way, having love affairs. Thus: He was unfaithful to his wife Vivien, with Dorothy Glover, for some 8 years; then he dumped her when he ‘fell in love with’ the married American woman, Catherine Walston. These tangled relationships, and the permanent sense of self-pitying guilt he felt about them, gave Greene the material for Heart of The Matter and End of The Affair.

Now, millions of people have had affairs, got divorced, got on with their lives (for example most of the classic American male novelists). They have a tough-minded practical approach. But not Greene. On page 288 Sherry says Greene confessed, while discussing his affairs, to his own moral cowardice. This is the key to the man and the works. He was psychologically sensitive and weak enough to fully imagine the pain and hurt he was causing his loved ones by betraying them; but he lacked the character, the morality, the backbone, simply not to do it: not to have affairs; not to hurt the ones he loved. The trap in which Scobie and to some extent Bendrix find themselves isn’t a sophisticated moral and theological predicament – as it is blown up to be in the books. It is a trap entirely of their own making and caused entirely by their own feebleness.

A few priests and Catholic friends modestly suggested he not have affairs but stay true to his marriage vows, faithful to his wife and religion. On page 278 he goes to confession with an unfamilair priest. The priest listens to the whole sorry saga and suggests he return to his wife, give up his adultery, and stop seeing his lover. Quite rational practical advice. It is entertaining to read how outraged Greene was. ‘You’ve never heard anything so fantastic,’ he writes to Catherine about the experience, and he storms out of the confessional, saying, ‘Father, I have to find another confessor’. Ie one who will acquiesce in his immorality, unfaithfulness and sinning. That is the picture of Roman Catholicism that emerges from this book: you can pick and choose the rules you want to obey, and shop around for a priest who will indulge your sins, all the time feeling smugly superior to those ignorant atheists who know nothing of the majesty of your suffering.

There’s no doubt Greene was miserable as sin a lot of the time; but also that he kind of reveled and glories in this specialness this gave him.

When his long-suffering wife confronts him with his adultery and reminds him of his marriage vows and a father’s responsibility to his children, Greene resorts to emotional blackmail and threatens to kill himself (p.286). It beggars belief that his fans hold up this selfish, hypocritical weakling as a moral or spiritual guide to the times.

Love of destruction When War came and Greene was in London during the Blitz, he revelled in it. He wasn’t the only man to see war as a potential solution to his intractable personal problems, not least the dilemma of choosing between wife or mistress. The Wikipedia article on the Blitz states: ‘Starting on 7 September 1940, London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 57 consecutive nights. More than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed.’ Though horrified on a human level at the suffering he witnessed, on an imaginative level, Greene loved it.

Greene appeared to relish destruction and death: indeed, he seemed to believe that the world deserved it. (p.52)

This is one version of the ‘trahison des clercs‘: wanting to see the whole world punished for what, in the end, were his own very personal misery (suicidal depression), intellectual confusion (twisted Catholicism) and squalid deception (affair with Dorothy Glover). Malcolm Muggeridge knew Greene well throughout this period ‘and I remember the longing he had for a bomb to fall on him.’ (p.53) an attitude repeated in the fiction.

Death never mattered at those times – in the early years I even used to pray for it. (The End of The Affair, p.70)

Just possibly plenty of other Londoners didn’t relish the Blitz, being blown to pieces, killed and maimed and seeing their City destroyed. But wherever he went, the world and all the people in it were, for Greene, just an incidental backdrop and bit part players in the melodrama of his personal anguish.

Writing machine

Greene was a writing machine. Fear of returning to the absolute poverty he and his wife had experienced in the early 1930s drove him on to accept all the work he was offered, and he was continually pitching ideas for articles, reviews, series, features, short stories, pamphlets and so on, to his agent, newspapers, magazines and publishers. His output is formidable.

From life

Everything was grist to the mill. He recycled huge amounts of his own life into (often thinly-veiled) fiction. His big foreign trips to West Africa (1935) and Mexico (1938) were turned into travel books, but also formed the bases of the big novels, The Heart of The Matter and The Power and The Glory. His wartime experiences of the Blitz were recycled into The Ministry of Fear; his passionate affair with Catherine Walston provides the basis for The End of The Affair. His post-War visits to Vietnam provided the atmosphere and many of the characters of The Quiet American.

Libel worries In the latter book he admits in the Dedication giving a lead character (a call girl) the same name as one of his hosts, Phuong. Presumably she didn’t mind. However, copying real people directly into his fiction caused problems more than once:

• Journey Without Maps was withdrawn soon after publication because the publishers, Heinemann, feared a libel case.
• Greene was forced by his publishers to pay the costs of reprinting pages in his breakthrough novel, Stamboul Train, because JB Priestly thought the satirical figure of a contemporary Northern popular novelist was based on him.
• The Power and the Glory had to be tweaked because the dentist figure, Mr Trench, who, rather incongruously, appears at the opening and end of the novel, was rather too obviously based on a dentist who Greene met in Mexico, one Mr Carter.
• The End of The Affair is based on his own all-consuming affair with Catherine Walston, and while he manages to change her name to Sarah in the novel, Catherine’s husband’s name was Harry and the fictional Sarah’s husband’s name is Henry. Some of Henry Walston’s friends encouraged him to sue, not only about the name but the resemblance of aspects of his private life to the ficitonal Henry.

On the other hand, non-white people could be used at will. Scobie’s ‘boy’ in Heart of the Matter is named Ali, the name of Greene’s ‘boy’ in Freetown. He was unlikely to sue.

Spy

Greene’s uncle, Sir Graham Greene, was one of the founders of Naval Intelligence in the First War. His sister, Elizabeth, worked as secretary to the head of SIS in the Middle East, Cuthbert Bowley. She later married the head of SIS Cairo section, later in charge of Turkey. Working for the intelligence services was in the family.

• Throughout 1941 he is canvassed by the Secret Information Service (SIS), precursor to MI6 and eventually recruited. October & November training at Oriel College, Oxford. December 1941 sails for West Africa. 3 January 1942 docked at Freetown, Sierra Leone. 13 January flies to Lagos. 8 March transfers back to Freetown. He is agent 59200, attached to Freetown CID. During his training Greene was managed by Kim Philby.
• From Freetown he hired and paid agents to spy on the neighbouring colonies run by Vichy France, searching ships coming through Freetown for industrial diamonds vital for the German war effort, trying to identify and, if possible, ‘turn’ German agents in Sierra Leone.
• By March 1943 he was back in Britain having argued with his immediate boss, been offered another position but resigned. He reported to SIS headquarters in St Albans where for a year he ran espionage operations in Portugal, a nest of intrigue, under the direction of Kim Philby. They regularly had lunch at the local pub in St James’s.
• June 1944 resigns SIS and goes to work at the Politicial Intelligence Department, developing a propaganda pamphlet to be dropped on Vichy France. Greene later doubted it was ever dropped.

Sherry’s account of Greene’s spying career is absolutely fascinating and includes excerpts from contemporary training manuals and memos which explain the trade.

Though Greene’s formal and recorded work for SIS ceases there, towards the end of this volume spying returns in several forms.

1. Greene makes two extensive visits to Vietnam in the early 1950s, travelling widely, including to the frontline, speaking to a number of the key players. Ostensibly he was being paid a tidy sum by Life magazine but Sherry speculates that he may have been passing information back to the ‘old firm’. The French authorities certainly thought so.
2. On a side note it is interesting to learn that the British film producer Alexander Korda, who produced The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, was an MI6 spy. He was asked to leave Britain at the start of the War (for which he was heavily criticised in the Press) and set up film production offices in New York and Los Angeles to provide cover for British agents working in still-neutral America. He received a knighthood for his services.
3. Greene became strikingly anti-American during these years: his light-hearted membeship of the Communist Party came back to haunt him in adult life when, under McCarthyism, the American authorities became very difficult about issuing him a visa and he experienced hassle at customs and was expelled from Puerto Rico. It is well-known that this anti-Americanism suffuses The Quiet American, which is an indictment of the naivete of US policy in Vietnam. Sherry speculates that Greene’s anti-American stance may have been an elaborate ‘cover’ which gave him closer access to anti-American movements aroud the world – information which could be fed back to ‘the old firm’.
4. Lastly, there is Greene’s notorious loyalty to his friend Kim Philby, the charismatic and effective spymaster who nearly made it to head of MI6, and was revealed as a KGB double agent in 1963 when he fled to Moscow. He wrote articles defending Philby’s ‘loyalty’ to an idea, and wrote an introduction to Philby’s self-justifying autobiography, My Silent War. This caused a storm of criticism to fall on his head. Sherry makes the interesting speculation that this, also, was a ‘cover’; that Greene very clearly positioned himself as almost Philby’s only friend in the West- and thus kept a lifeline open to him if he had wanted, in any way, to feed information back to ‘the old firm’. Sounds unlikely. But once you’ve read enough true-life stories about espionage – about agents, double agents and triple agents – you realise stranger things have in fact happened.

To the extent that he established contact with Philby after his defection, Greene was helping his country’s intelligence services, and, in a larger sense, was patriotically defending its security. (p.496)

Films

Greene was spectacularly successful in getting his fictions turned into movies, generally very good ones. Sherry’s book contains fascinating insights into the amounts involved, the negotiations, and the process of turning novels into screenplays.

• In May 1942 the Hollywood movie version of A Gun For Hire was released as This Gun For Hire, directed by Frank Tuttle and starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd.
• In December 1942 his short story The Lieutenant Died Last is converted into an impressive film, Went The Day Well, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and produced by Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios.
• Towards the end of 1942 he completed The Ministry of Fear in Sierra Leone (published in 1943) and his agents sold it to Parmount Studios for £3,250, leading to the movie version, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds, released in October 1944.
• In June 1947 producer Alexander Korda and director Carol Reed contacted Greene about filming his short story, The Basement Room. Greene adapted his own story into a screenplay which was then shot the next year and the film released in September 1948 under the title The Fallen Idol.
• Korda wanted to capture the strange atmosphere of post-War Vienna on film. He asked Greene if he had anything and Greene produced the famous sentence about having been present at a funeral and then months later seeing the buried man walk by him in the Strand. From this seed was born The Third Man, released to much acclaim in August 1949.
• Greene did some work on the Hollywood version of his novel The End of The Affair, released in 1955, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson, Peter Cushing and John Mills.

Key events

• 1940 – The Power and The Glory is published just as the War enters a new and more serious phase, thus ensuring bad sales.
• 1940 – Greene packs his wife Vivien and children off to the country and promptly takes a mistresss, Dorothy Glover, a short, stocky, unprepossessing woman of strong character. As the War progresses Greene keeps putting Vivien off, cancelling visits to her and the kids. But it takes years and years of painful correspondence, arguments and tears before they confront the situation and arrange a separation in 1948. Despite Greene’s repeated threats to commit suicide, Vivien refuses to divorce him.
• 1940-41 – Greene serves as an air raid warden during the Blitz, seeing terrible things and running great personal risks. The experience cements his relationship with Dorothy, who is with him throughout the dangerous times.
• Works at the Ministry of Information from April to September 1940. Farcical bureaucracy, satirised in the short story, Men At Work.
• By Spring 1941 he is running the arts section of The Spectator single-handed.
• 1941 October & November SIS training at Oriel College, Oxford. December sails for West Africa.
• March 1943 – June 1944 works for SIS in St Albans, then St James’s, London.
• July 1944 leaves government service to work for publishers Eyre and Spottiswoode.
• June-October 1945 weekly Book review slot for the Evening Standard.
• 1947 and 48 collaborates with Carol Reed on the Fallen Idol and The Third Man.
• October 1948 resigns as director of Eyre & Spottiswoode.
• 1948 – climax of his emotional life as he separates from his wife, splits from his lover of eight years, Dorothy, and commits to his American lover, Catherine Walston, who, however, torments him by her absences and by continuing to take other lovers, while all the time living with her husband (who himself has affairs). As you can tell from her behaviour she is, of course, a devout Roman Catholic.
• 1948 – September: Publication of The Heart of The Matter, which becomes a bestseller and makes him world-famous.
• 1949 – the movie The Third Man reinforces Greene’s celebrity. Now he is photographed and mobbed wherever he goes, has to give readings and signings and is bombarded with requests for interviews.
• 1950-51 – travels to Malaya to observe the Emergency, then on to Vietnam to observe the communist insurgency against the French. All the time he is fleeing the unhappiness of his relationship with Catherine Walston who refuses to leave her husband to marry him. In Vietnam he smokes his first pipe of opium.
• 1952 – back to Vietnam and witnesses real military action and the decay of the military-political situation.
• 1952-3 – Greene writes and is heavily involved in the production of his first play, The Living Room – young Rose offers herself to Michael, her mother’s executor, they have a brief affair, but he can’t commit to her as his Catholic wife refuses a divorce. Sound familiar? The anguished Rose kills herself. The play was a success, but critics were getting used to Greene’s Catholic schtick. One wrote: the real protagonist was ‘the conscience of Mr Greene tying itself in knots and taking heavy punishment in the process’. Another described the play as: ‘An orgy of sin, suffering and tragedy in the true Graham Greene manner.’
• Nobel Prize: the play was premiered in Stockholm in 1952 and was violently criticised by Artur Lindkvist, who hated Greene and hated Catholicism. Unfortunately for Greene, Lindkvist was chair of the body which decides Nobel Prizes and he went on record as saying Greene would get the Nobel Prize for literature over his dead body. And he never did.
• Autumn 1953 – tours Kenya to observe the Mau Mau insurgency (all the while hoping to be killed).
• August 1954 – first trip to Haiti, later to be the setting of his novel The Comedians.
• October 1954 – the French officially withdraw their forces from Vietnam. Greene continues writing The Quiet American which is published December 1955, and whose anti-Americanism provokes a storm of anti-Greene criticism in the American press.

Main publications during this period

• 1940 The Power and The Glory
• 1943 The Ministry of Fear
• 1948 The Heart of The Matter
• 1951 The End of The Affair
• 1953 The Living Room (play)
• 1955 The Quiet American

Related links

• The Life of Graham Greene volume II on Amazon
• Observer review of volume III
• Guardian review of volume III

Greene’s books

• The Man Within (1929) One of the worst books I’ve ever read, a wretchedly immature farrago set in a vaguely described 18th century about a cowardly smuggler who betrays his fellows to the Excise men then flees to the cottage of a pure and innocent young woman who he falls in love with before his pathetic inaction leads to her death. Drivel.
• The Name of Action (1930) (repudiated by author, never republished)
• Rumour at Nightfall (1931) (repudiated by author, never republished)
• Stamboul Train (1932) A motley cast of characters find out each others’ secrets and exploit each other on the famous Orient Express rattling across Europe, climaxing in the execution of one of the passengers, a political exile, in an obscure rail junction, and all wound up with a cynical business deal in Istanbul.
• It’s a Battlefield (1934) London: a working class man awaits his death sentence for murder while a cast of seedy characters, including a lecherous HG Wells figure, betray each other and agonise about their pointless lives.
• England Made Me (1935) Stockholm: financier and industrialist Krogh hires a pretty Englishwoman Kate Farrant to be his PA/lover. She gets him to employ her shiftless brother Anthony who, after only a few days, starts spilling secrets to the seedy journalist Minty, and so is bumped off by Krogh’s henchman, Hall.
• A Gun for Sale (1936) England: After assassinating a European politician and sparking mobilisation for war, hitman Raven pursues the lecherous middle man who paid him with hot money to a Midlands town, where he gets embroiled with copper’s girl, Anne, before killing the middle man and the wicked arms merchant who was behind the whole deal, and being shot dead himself.
• Brighton Rock (1938) After Kite is murdered, 17 year-old Pinkie Brown takes over leadership of one of Brighton’s gangs, a razor-happy psychopath who is also an unthinking Catholic tormented by frustrated sexuality. He marries a 16 year-old waitress (who he secretly despises) to stop her squealing on the gang, before being harried to a grisly death.
• The Confidential Agent (1939) D. the agent for a foreign power embroiled in a civil war, tries and fails to secure a contract for British coal to be sent to his side. He flees the police and unfounded accusations of murder, has an excursion to a Midlands mining district where he fails to persuade the miners to go on strike out of solidarity for his (presumably communist) side, is caught by the police, put on trial, then helped to escape across country to a waiting ship, accompanied by the woman half his age who has fallen in love with him.
• The Lawless Roads (1939) Greene travels round Mexico and hates it, hates its people and its culture, the poverty, the food, the violence and despair, just about managing to admire the idealised Catholicism which is largely a product of his own insistent mind, and a few heroic priests-on-the-run from the revolutionary authorities.
• The Power and the Glory (1940) Mexico: An unnamed whisky priest, the only survivor of the revolutionary communists’ pogrom against the Catholic hierarchy, blunders from village to village feeling very sorry for himself and jeopardising lots of innocent peasants while bringing them hardly any help until he is caught and shot.
• The Ministry of Fear (1943) Hallucinatory psychological fantasia masquerading as an absurdist thriller set in London during the Blitz when a man still reeling from mercy-killing his terminally ill wife gets caught up with a wildly improbable Nazi spy ring.
• The Heart of The Matter (1948) Through a series of unfortunate events, Henry Scobie, the ageing colonial Assistant Commissioner of Police in Freetown, Sierra Leone, finds himself torn between love of his wife and of his mistress, spied on by colleagues and slowly corrupted by a local Syrian merchant, until life becomes intolerable and – as a devout Catholic – he knowingly damns himself for eternity by committing suicide. Whether you agree with its Catholic premises or not, this feels like a genuinely ‘great’ novel for the completeness of its conception and the thoroughness of its execution.
• The Third Man (1949) The novella which formed the basis for the screenplay of the famous film starring Orson Welles. Given its purely preparatory nature, this is a gripping and wonderfully-written tale, strong on atmosphere and intrigue and mercifully light on Greene’s Catholic preachiness.
• The End of The Affair (1951) Snobbish writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with Sarah, the wife of his neighbour on Clapham Common, the dull civil servant, Henry Miles. After a V1 bomb lands on the house where they are illicitly meeting, half burying Bendrix, Sarah breaks off the affair and refuses to see him. Only after setting a detective on her, does Bendrix discover Sarah thought he had been killed in the bombing and prayed to God, promising to end their affair and be ‘good’ if only he was allowed to live – only to see him stumbling in through the wrecked doorway, from which point she feels duty bound to God to keep her word. She sickens and dies of pneumonia like many a 19th century heroine, but not before the evidence begins to mount up that she was, in fact, a genuine saint. Preposterous for most of its length, it becomes genuinely spooky at the end.
• Twenty-One Stories (1954) Generally very short stories, uneven in quality and mostly focused on wringing as much despair about the human condition as possible using thin characters who come to implausibly violent endings – except for three short funny tales.
• The Unquiet American (1955) Set in Vietnam as the French are losing their grip on the country, jaded English foreign correspondent, Thomas Fowler, reacts very badly to fresh-faced, all-American agent Alden Pyle, who both steals his Vietnamese girlfriend and is naively helping a rebel general and his private army in the vain hope they can form a non-communist post-colonial government. So Fowler arranges for Pyle to be assassinated. The adultery and anti-Americanism are tiresome, but the descriptions of his visits to the front line are gripping.
• Loser Takes All (1955) Charming comic novella recounting the mishaps of accountant Bertram who is encouraged to get married at a swanky hotel in Monte Carlo by his wealthy boss who then doesn’t arrive to pick up the bill, as he’d promised to – forcing Bertram to dabble in gambling at the famous Casino and becoming so obsessed with winning that he almost loses his wife before the marriage has even begun.
• Our Man In Havana (1958) Comedy about an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, living in Havana, who is improbably recruited for British intelligence and, when he starts to be paid, feels compelled to manufacture ‘information’ from made-up ‘agents’. All very farcical until the local security services and then ‘the other side’ start taking an interest, bugging his phone, burgling his flat and then trying to bump him off.
• A Burnt-Out Case (1960) Tragedy. Famous architect Querry travels to the depths of the Congo, running away from his European fame and mistress, and begins to find peace working with the local priests and leprosy doctor, when the unhappy young wife of a local factory owner accuses him of seducing her and fathering her child, prompting her husband to shoot Querry dead.
• The Comedians (1966) Tragedy. Brown returns to run his hotel in Port-au-Prince, in a Haiti writhing under the brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier, and to resume his affair with the ambassador’s wife, Martha. A minister commits suicide in the hotel pool; Brown is beaten up by the Tontons Macoute; he tries to help a sweet old American couple convert the country to vegetarianism. In the final, absurd sequence he persuades the obvious con-man ‘major’ Jones to join the pathetic ‘resistance’ (12 men with three rusty guns), motivated solely by the jealous (and false) conviction that Jones is having an affair with his mistress. They are caught, escape, and Brown is forced to flee to the neighbouring Dominican Republic where the kindly Americans get him a job as assistant to the funeral director he had first met on the ferry to Haiti.
• Travels With My Aunt (1969) Comedy. Unmarried, middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry Pullman meets his aunt Augusta at the funeral of his mother, and is rapidly drawn into her unconventional world, accompanying her on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on a fateful trip to south America, caught up in her colourful stories of foreign adventures and exotic lovers till he finds himself right in the middle of an uncomfortably dangerous situation.
• The Honorary Consul (1973) Tragedy. Dr Eduardo Plarr accidentally assists in the kidnapping of his friend, the alcoholic, bumbling ‘honorary consul’ to a remote city on the border of Argentina, Charley Fortnum, with whose ex-prostitute wife he happens to be having an affair. When he is asked to go and treat Fortnum, who’s been injured, Plarr finds himself also taken prisoner by the rebels and dragged into lengthy Greeneish discussions about love and religion and sin and redemption etc, while they wait for the authorities to either pay the ransom the rebels have demanded or storm their hideout. It doesn’t end well.
• The Human Factor (1978) Maurice Castle lives a quiet, suburban life with his African wife, Sarah, commuting daily to his dull office job in a branch of British Security except that, we learn half way through the book, he is a double agent passing secrets to the Russians. Official checks on a leak from his sector lead to the improbable ‘liquidation’ of an entirely innocent colleague which prompts Castle to make a panic-stricken plea to his Soviet controllers to be spirited out of the country. And so he is, arriving safely in Moscow. But to the permanent separation with the only person he holds dear in the world and who he was, all along, working on behalf of – his beloved Sarah. Bleak and heart-breaking.
• Monsignor Quixote (1982) Father Quixote is unwillingly promoted monsignor and kicked out of his cosy parish, taking to the roads of Spain with communist ex-mayor friend, Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas, in an old jalopy they jokingly nickname Rocinante, to experience numerous adventures loosely based on his fictional forebear, Don Quixote, all the while debating Greene’s great Victorian theme, the possibility of a doubting – an almost despairing – Catholic faith.
• The Captain and The Enemy (1988) 12-year-old Victor Baxter is taken out of his boarding school by a ‘friend’ of his father’s, the so-called Captain, who carries him off to London to live with his girlfriend, Liza. Many years later Victor, a grown man, comes across his youthful account of life in this strange household when Liza dies in a road accident, and he sets off on an adult pilgrimage to find the Captain in Central America, a quest which – when he tells him of Liza’s death – prompts the old man to one last – futile and uncharacteristic – suicidal gesture.

Posted by Simon on December 7, 2014

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