Still Greene as ever

A novel on Russia’s brazen attack on Ukraine would have been underway if writer Graham Greene was alive. He would have travelled to the war-torn areas seeking facts and some colour for his book, nicely blending journalism with serious fiction while criticising the US for its power politics.

What a welcome addition it would have been to Greene’s books on wars and politics such as The Ministry of Fear, The Quiet American, The Third Man and others!

India, Turkey, Hungary or Burma may have also been his hunting ground for stories in these times.

"I think a writer ought to be a bit of grit in the state machine," he once said. "That applies to a democratic state machine, a socialist state machine or a communist state machine.”

A staunch advocate of human rights, he sought out the inner narratives of war and politics in several troubled countries, writing about the world we live in.

Someone once said that Greene was a man who wants to know, but never wanted to be known. How can one ever forget such a sensitive writer whose books continue to be widely read even today?

Thirty years after his death, his writings (25 books, short stories, travelogues, plays, screenplays, novellas, children’s literature) remain relevant.

Most of Greene’s novels were set in the familiar playgrounds of third world politics of Latin America, Africa and South Asia. The central theme in all his battles was the fight for the underdog against the bully. He saw writing as enabling the writer to maintain his sanity and justify his own existence in a world inherently tragic and fraught with meaninglessness.

Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, UK. He was still at school when he began travelling along unconventional paths. His experiences included Russian roulette, alcohol, drugs, psychoanalysis, a flirtation with Communism and the British Secret Service. All these, tempered by the Roman Catholicism he adopted after marriage, provided material for some of his books.

Like most novelists, Greene began with journalism but soon gave up his job to freelance and write novels because “novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

Greene’s first novel The Man Within (1929) was a mildly successful one and was made into a film. This pattern repeated throughout his career, for Greene and the movies virtually grew up together. Eight more works before World War II enhanced a growing reputation. In 1940, he published The Power and the Glory.

During World War II, he worked for the foreign office, though he claimed he was an unsuccessful spy. After the war, he got a contract from MGM to write The Tenth Man. Thereafter, he spent his life travelling and writing.

Greene’s career took off with his fourth novel The Stamboul Train, a lively thriller with political overtones. This vein was continued in A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear.

It was Brighton Rock that opened a new phase in his work in which questions of faith are dramatised within the tensions of a still popular novelistic form. The spiritual debate continued to be explored in subsequent novels like The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.

Almost all his novels have a meditative philosophy where faith and human fallibility are constantly tested. His works have a high moral content, whether clear or not on first reading. To his fans, it was always apparent where he stood on universal values. Greene remarked: “The world is not black and white, it is more black and grey.” This bleak worldview found an echo in many of his novels which explore the moral twilight zone.

Greene was a ‘serious’ catholic of sorts himself. Catholicism and Catholics figured largely in his novels.

He joined the Church in 1926 during Pope Pius XI’s reign. Pius XI was an outspoken critic of totalitarianism. He refused to receive Hitler, while Mussolini was relieved to hear of the Pope’s death. It was the Pope’s revolutionary Catholicism that attracted Greene. Since then Greene has been a radical Catholic, a left-wing sympathiser with the underdog and this forms the subject matter of his works such as It’s a Battlefield, England Made Me, The Lawless Roads and The Quiet American.

Indeed, Greene was one of the greatest writers of the last century, winning acclaim worldwide. Still, the Nobel Committee steered clear of him, perhaps frightened by the philosophic implications of his writing. Greene couldn’t care less. What matters is that his books are meaningful and will likely remain evergreen in the annals of Literature.

Imagine the fascinating stories we’d have got of today’s troubled world if only Greene was alive!