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.Brighton Rock

by: Graham Greene

November 01, 2007
Some books are just made to be studied in the classroom, where pupils and teachers treat them as a giant puzzle to be solved. Brighton Rock is one of them. The first half of the book shows a good turn of plot but then the book dissolves into thematic development and precious little else. Thus we're created to countless personal morality and catholic references that batter the reader about the head. Theme and plot should work together, with one strengthening the other. What we get with this book is odious intellectualising that clutters up the page.

There are other issues for a contemporary audience. The pre-war Brighton is summarised very effectively, but it's a very alien world to 21st century people -- as alien to us as any world ... Read More:
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.Our Man in Havana (Vintage Classics)

by: Graham Greene

November 02, 2006
I read this book when I was 16 and it was the funniest thing I had ever read. I remember being impressed at the range of Greene. Was this the same person who had written Brighton Rock?!

Having just read this book again, it's just as funny. It ranks up there with Three Men in a Boat. Strange how so much of it has stuck in my memory after all these years - little images, especially relating to Beatrice: the smell of her hair, her hands on the wheel of the car.

Wormold making his drawings of 'installations in the mountains' based on the insides of the vacumn cleaners he sells, and Hawthorne cringingly recognising them for what they are is just brilliant. Lots of other very funny moments abound. The dinner near the end is another ... Read More:
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.The Quiet American

by: Graham Greene

November 01, 2007
Despite the death and destruction depicted in this book, like the character of the title, this was a "quiet book". It was good to read about Vietnam before the Americans went in and I'm sure many have no idea of the French involvement in that country's history. Another enjoyable group read.
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.The End of the Affair (Vintage Classics)

by: Graham Greene

October 07, 2004
This is a book about darkness and light, but mostly darkness.

It is about jealousy, vengeance, bitterness, loathing - I could go on. A deeply passionate and angry man, the narrator falls in love with a married woman who then inexplicably leaves him one day after a close shave with a bomb in war-torn London.

Then follows his quest to uncover why she left. I don't want to spoil what comes next by telling any more, but it is such a moving book. I was moved to tears by the beauty of it when I first read it, aged 15, and it still has the same effect, some (quite a few) years later.


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.The Power and the Glory (Vintage Classics)(2005)

by: Graham Greene

March 01, 2001
(4.5 stars) Graham Greene's most elaborate and personal examination of the good life--and the role of the Catholic church in teaching what the good life is--revolves around an unnamed "whiskey priest" in Mexico in the 1930s. Religious persecution is rife as secular rulers, wanting to bring about social change, blame the church for the country's ills. When the novel opens, the church, its priests, and all its symbols have been banned for the past eight years from a state near Veracruz. Priests have been expelled, murdered, or forced to renounce their callings. The whiskey priest, however, has stayed, bringing whatever solace he can to the poor who need him, while at the same time finding solace himself in the bottle.

Constantly on the move, the priest suffers ... Read More:
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.The Heart of the Matter

by: Graham Greene

October 07, 2004
This is a magnificent book. It starts quite ordinarily enough and takes its time to get going but the wait is worth it. The first third of the novel is solid character building; and what characters they are. Green has a real talent for creating amazing personalities who you want to know more and more about. The central figure of Scobie is of course treated in great detail but the other people in the book jump out vividly too. From the ineffective priest Father Rank to my favourite the disgusting scheming Yusef, right through to more minor characters such as Harris and his terribly shabby hotel room in which he hunts cockroaches; not one is badly drawn.

This book is regarded as one of Greene Catholic novels and while there is a great deal of Catholic symbolism and debate about the nature ... Read More:
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.Travels with My Aunt (Vintage Classics)

by: Graham Greene

November 02, 2006
Henry Pulling is a recently retired bank manager. He was offered an arrangement after many years of devoted service when his bank was taken over by another. He is looking forward to spending more time with the dahlias that are his pride and joy, and also rubbing shoulders with his former customers in Southwood, an unremarkable London suburb that seems to be populated entirely by retired officers from the armed forces. He mentions Omo quite a lot and is vaguely embarrassed by the fact that he shares initials with a well known brand of sauce. And then he meets his long lost aunt, Agatha Bertram.

Henry's mother has just died. His father died forty years before. He never really knew the father and his relationship with his mother was perennially tense. After the funeral, Agatha takes him on one ... Read More:
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.The Human Factor (Vintage classics)

by: Graham Greene

September 02, 1999
Greene's writing is always correct, deft and engrossing without the flash of pomp or needless audacity. Nor is it terse or markedly clipped. Simply put, Greene novels are effortlessly compelling and calmly faultless.

The Human Factor is a novel more about the fatiguing and tiresome business of constant occupational mistrust as about the excitement and intrigue of agents and double-agents. The novel's principal characters are heads of divisions stuck in their ways, blinded by their own routine compartmentalising (to the detriment of compassion, of that `human factor'), and their lesser agents- lonely men who find solace too frequently in a quadruple J & B.

Though I've enjoyed other Graham Greene novels more than this one (The End of the Affair and To the Heart of the Matter I consider ... Read More:
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.Stamboul Train (Vintage Classic)

by: Graham Greene

October 07, 2004
Stamboul Train was the novel that made Graham Greene's name. Published in 1932, it catalogues a train journey that, a few years later, would have been impossible, a journey across Europe that was about to be changed for ever. The novel is set in a time when the Orient Express travelled from Western Europe to Constantinople across several borders, each of which that presented its own different challenge. Seventy-five years ago the continent was neither bifurcated by ideology coupled with allegiance of necessity, nor united by a desire for greater capitalist integration. It was also not a stable place, with the short-lived tensions of the Treaty of Versailles less than fifteen years old. To reflect this, Graham Greene presents Stamboul Train as a journey, almost a travelogue, with the setting of each part offering an ... Read More:
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.The Fallen Idol: AND "The Third Man" (Vintage classics)

by: Graham Greene

November 01, 2001
The Third Man, written originally as the outline for the screenplay of Carol Reed's famous 1949 film of the same name, is set in occupied Vienna just after World War II. The sectors established by the conquering British, Americans, French, and Russians contribute to an atmosphere of tension and mystery, and an almost palpable aura of menace as residents and visitors alike must deal with four different governments, four sets of officials, and four collections of laws as they move throughout the city.

Rollo Martins, an author of cowboy novels, arrives in Vienna to visit an old school friend, Harry Lime, only to find that he has arrived on the day of Lime's funeral. Investigating Lime's death, Martins learns that a neighbor saw the traffic accident that killed Lime and observed three men carrying Lime's body from ... Read More:
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