Graham Greene

[Charles]

Any fans of his around?

I'm slowly working my way through his cannon, Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory - I recon I'll read The Quiet American next, my dad's favorite.

There's a lot to be said about this guy. Would you agree with the assertion that he was the greatest author of the 20th century? I hear it a lot.

[spencer_broughton]

Brighton Rock is one of my favourite books. I love his style of writing, and think he has a flair and talent to equal the greats. The characters in that novel are timeless and the story is great too.

[David]

Would you agree with the assertion that he was the greatest author of the 20th century?

Let's see - that would be the same century as Joyce, Kafka, Bellow etc., would it? Waugh, even? (I'm not even going to mention Proust.)

That would be a no then. Nowhere near.

I don't think I've ever heard anybody make that claim.

[Charles]

I have - but yes, it is certainly contestable. I've also heard British author. That would be more defensible. Also it might have to do with the fact he was alive for more of it than any of the other greats you mention, only dieing in '91 he was certainly able to encapsulate it more completely than others, although of course his "great" works were all written in a shorter time frame.

And yes, Brighton Rock is a brilliant novel. Cruelest ending I've ever read.

[David]

Charles,

Best British author - yes, you're on firmer ground there. Still not sure it's right, but it is at least a tenable opinion. I think Forster (for one) is better.

Have you tried Saul Bellow? 1915 - 2005. Seriously good stuff (but undeniably Jewish / American, so less like us than GG was.)
Also, Iris Murdoch can be a bit of a pain, but try something like the Bell.

Cheers

David

[spencer_broughton]

I've been reading 'The Victim' by Saul Bellow recently, and really enjoying it. And last night I read a few short stories by Graham Greene. The Destructers is one of the best short stories I've read i my opinion.

[cameron]

Spence,

The Destrutors - wow that takes me back. I read it at school. It's the one where the gang of kids take apart the old bloke's house from the inside isn't it? Brilliant story indeed.

C

[spencer_broughton]

Yep that's the one. It has the most amusing and abrupt ending of anything I've ever read.

[bobvincent]

Greene veers close to thriller territory in many books. The best I read was "Brighton Rock" with its compelling anti-hero , the awful Pinkie.

[Charles]

Ah yes, the destructors, the most searched for Graham Greene story on google by virtue of Donnie Darko. A great little story though.

I love how so many of his works make great films, "The Fallen Idol" is a great film, though falls short of the brilliance of the original short story "The Basement Room" which is an all time favorite of mine. I read "The Quiet American" - absolute brilliance the whole way though, I thought I would be more bored when he moved on to the world of politics and out of religion, but I loved the interaction between the cynical old world-weary outgoing colonialist, and the upcoming, idealistic young American. Greene was wise enough to practically predict the Vietnam war a decade before it happened. "Innocence was like a dumb leper that had lost its bell, wondering the world, meaning no harm", genius, and without getting into a political debate, I think that line cuts to the heart of the arrogance of the neo-con philosophy in America more cleanly than any discussion involving oil ever could. The recent film with Michael Cain and Brendon Fraiser is excellent too. Must pick up the film of "Brighton Rock" from somewhere.

Saul Bellow? I'll wiki him.

[RonPrice]

It has been about a year since anyone has posted in this thread, but allow me to add the following personal comment on this fine writer. More than four years later I've done a little editing of this post and added more on Greene's novel The Burnt-Out Case in a quite personal context.-Ron Price in Tasmania, Australia
------------------------------------------------
A BURNT-OUT CASE

Part 1:

SBS TV showed the docudrama Lamumba two nights ago, on the evening of 30 July 2010. I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti. Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba.

In late October 1959, just days after I joined the Baha’i Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada.

Part 2:

The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first Prime Minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted two months until he was driven from office in September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country, and together they attempted to prevent the Congo succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seizing power in a CIA sponsored coup.-Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, “Lamumba,” 30 July 2010.

Graham Greene went to Belgian Congo in January 1959, just before the Congo crisis broke out, with a new novel already beginning to form in his head by way of a situation involving a stranger who turned up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. While Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case in 1959 in the months leading up to and after I became a member of the Baha’i Faith. This novel is one of those in the running for the most depressing narratives ever written. The reader only has to endure for a short time the company of the burnt-out character whose name in the novel was Querry. Greene had to live with him and in him--in his head--for eighteen months.

Greene wrote that: “Success as a novelist is often more dangerous than failure; the ripples often break over a wider coast line. The Heart of the Matter(1948) was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers, perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired. This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years between The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair(1951) I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion.

Part 3:

The vision of faith as untroubled sea was lost for ever; faith was more like a tempest in which the lucky were engulfed and lost, and the unfortunate survived to be flung battered and bleeding on the shore. A better man could have found a life's work on the margin of that cruel sea, but my own course of life gave me no confidence in any aid I might proffer. I had no apostolic mission, and the cries for spiritual assistance maddened me because of my impotence. What was the Church for but to aid these sufferers? What was the priesthood for? I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague. It was in those years, I think, that Querry was born, and Father Thomas too. He had often sat in that chair of mine, and he had worn many faces.”

I was never much of a reader of novels,
but in the 1990s I became a teacher of
English lit to matriculants and A Burnt-
Out Case, a book Greene wrote when I
was just getting into life, and a life which
would also make me one of those burnt-out
cases. Greene’s book was on a curriculum
as I was getting near the end of a teaching
career and only beginning to discover his
perpetually grey and disturbing Greenland.1

1 Matthew Price, Sinner Take All: Graham Greene’s Damned Redemption, Book Forum, Oct/Nov 2004.

Ron Price
1/8/'10 to 25/9/'14.
---------------------------------------------
LIFE’S COMMONALITIES

Section 1:

In my poetry, prose and prose-poetry I try to map the developing landscape that is my life-narrative. It is a unique landscape, as the landscape of all individual's is unique. It is a landscape of vision, hope, relevance, tolerance and aspiration. It is a landscape with a distinctive poetic voice, a deceptively insinuating quotient, with a quality of religious feeling that is not over-ethereal and that includes much of the raw material of life, perhaps too much for some.

It is a landscape of human frailty and burnt-out cases of which I am one. Perhaps I am too honest like those confessional poets of a few years ago. There is so much that arouses my imagination, and that I add to this landscape, that everything in my life, on an initial inspection, seems to be there fleshing-out the details of the topography and its several hinterlands.With several million words in my prose-poetry this conclusion is not surprising. But there is much that is left out for there is a great deal in life which I have little interest in. I am no encyclopedic Leonardo da Vinci.

Section 2:

My landscape is distinct, a composite of several climatic, soil and vegetation zones which geography students find on their maps, with repeated high and low pressure zones, isohyets, isobars, the familiar languages of life’s commonalities.-Ron Price with thanks to Matthew Price, “Sinner Take All: Graham Greene’s Damned Redemption,” Bookforum, October/November 2004.

There is complexity and tragedy here,
but also simple truth
and a coat of many colours
as the soul’s quest to know
and the heart’s determination
to express finds in these spaces
answers which are not simple.

There is a dangerous edge of things
I write of here, that narrow boundary
between loyalty and disloyalty,
fidelity and infidelity
and their contradictions
which we wear sometimes
with discomfort as we dress
tidily in the morning for the day.
Such is the paradox we are all made of.

For all my footloose wandering
and cosmopolitanism my landscapes
blur into a tedious sameness of sky,
land, streets and necessary domesticity
without which I could never have lived.

I seem driven by some inner avocation
to be a Baha’i in a secular world
shading into, by degrees, my own variety
of moral anarchism and waywardness.

In this world of confused alarms
and its endless clash of arms
I have become a burnt-out case
so many times, I have learned
to do it better as the years have
multiplied my sins and sorrows
and left me with a consecrated joy.

Ron Price
17/11/'04 to 25/9/'14.