Reading Graham Greene
June 4, 2001 | 12:00am
The Comedians
By Graham Greene
Vintage Classics, 287 pages
I’m very grateful to Graham Greene at the moment. If for nothing else, reading the British novelist recently reminded me to pick up my exit/re-entry visa just in time for an upcoming trip to the U.S.
Characters in Graham Greene novels are always leaving countries in a hurry – it’s part of what makes Graham Greene novels suspenseful. They’re usually in over their head, balancing too many lies at once; they need an exit visa, but they’ll settle for any quick way out, legal or otherwise.
That’s the situation for Jones, one of three main characters in The Comedians, Greene’s 1965 novel about Haiti in the time of Papa Doc Duvalier. Jones, like many Graham Greene characters, is a shady but otherwise charming con man. He’s the kind that will carry an Asprey’s cocktail set through every crisis, in every country he visits, but will lie about the precise circumstances under which he came to own it.
Jones, we learn, is trying to peddle arms to Duvalier’s army. He arrives in Haiti on a boat with two other generically-named characters – Brown and Smith. Brown, the narrator, owns a decrepit hotel in Haiti after all the U.S. money has left and Duvalier’s Tontons Macoute goon squad is busy sowing terror. Smith, the third moral view in this occasionally satirical novel, is an American left-wing type trying to sell vegetarianism to the Haitians.
I became a fan of Graham Greene after reading The Heart of the Matter and seeing the film The End of the Affair. In it, you will recall, Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore thrash around a lot in wartime England, never heedful of the consequences of their love affair until too late. That says a lot about leading characters in Graham Greene novels: they’re neither heroes nor anti-heroes. They’re just people of a certain skill who have reached a point of desperation in their lives. Their drifting sends them to foreign locales, such as Haiti, Havana, or West Africa, where they can properly self-destruct.
Greene was one of the great British writers of the 20th century, but he disguised this fact by writing spy novels mostly. Espionage, intrigue, illicit love affairs: these are the ingredients of some 25 novels spread over half a century. There’s a certain formula to his plots that is comforting, plus a dry British wit that locates humor in the most macabre situations. Usually the main characters wrestle with religion or Catholicism for a bit, as the author himself did. I find it helpful, when reading Graham Greene, to imagine Ralph Fiennes as the voice of the narrator. (Older readers may want to try Joseph Cotten from The Third Man, also based on a Greene novel.)
I also enjoy how love affairs pop up in Graham Greene novels, completely without warning: a man and a woman meet, on a train or at a party. A few paragraphs later, they’re gazing at one another recklessly, and the male character confesses: "I’m in love with you, you know." No time for courtship back then. Instead, there’s this torrid urgency in his novels: things move along very quickly, as they must do in a crisis.
As a novelist, Greene also reminds travelers what it’s like to be in a foreign land – especially those who are already there, but have somehow forgotten (like me). He captures the sense of dislocation, of disappearance, of hiding in plain sight felt by strangers in a strange land. "I suppose those of us who spend a large part of our lives in dissembling, whether to a woman, to a partner, even to ourselves, begin to smell each other out," Brown observes in The Comedians. This is the type of insight that comes from years of careful observation and experience; Greene tosses it off as a comic aside.
As a writer who traveled often, Greene’s frank assessments of his foreign locales – their corrupt governments, their flaws and faults – may seem out of date in these politically correct times. Nowadays, we are supposed to look at things in context, instead of judging foreign lands. But consider that whenever travel writers (such as Paul Theroux) point out bureaucratic defects or character flaws in the places they visit, they are defended as "journalists."
For all I know, Greene may have been a parachute novelist who fed off the local color and simply filled in the dots later, in the privacy and comfort of his London writing table. He may not have learned all there was to know about Mexicio, or Liberia, or Sierra Leone in his visits. But that doesn’t take away from the life contained in his novels. In an untrue world, he was never untrue in his art. And he was usually sympathetic in depicting whatever people he encountered along the way.
But my appreciation for The Comedians is actually much more mundane: it was an offhand comment by Jones – pointing out that he lacked an exit permit – which reminded me to get one of my own, and thus saved me from a fate worthy of a Graham Greene character.
Available at Page One bookstore, Power Plant mall in Rockwell Center.
By Graham Greene
Vintage Classics, 287 pages
I’m very grateful to Graham Greene at the moment. If for nothing else, reading the British novelist recently reminded me to pick up my exit/re-entry visa just in time for an upcoming trip to the U.S.
Characters in Graham Greene novels are always leaving countries in a hurry – it’s part of what makes Graham Greene novels suspenseful. They’re usually in over their head, balancing too many lies at once; they need an exit visa, but they’ll settle for any quick way out, legal or otherwise.
That’s the situation for Jones, one of three main characters in The Comedians, Greene’s 1965 novel about Haiti in the time of Papa Doc Duvalier. Jones, like many Graham Greene characters, is a shady but otherwise charming con man. He’s the kind that will carry an Asprey’s cocktail set through every crisis, in every country he visits, but will lie about the precise circumstances under which he came to own it.
Jones, we learn, is trying to peddle arms to Duvalier’s army. He arrives in Haiti on a boat with two other generically-named characters – Brown and Smith. Brown, the narrator, owns a decrepit hotel in Haiti after all the U.S. money has left and Duvalier’s Tontons Macoute goon squad is busy sowing terror. Smith, the third moral view in this occasionally satirical novel, is an American left-wing type trying to sell vegetarianism to the Haitians.
I became a fan of Graham Greene after reading The Heart of the Matter and seeing the film The End of the Affair. In it, you will recall, Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore thrash around a lot in wartime England, never heedful of the consequences of their love affair until too late. That says a lot about leading characters in Graham Greene novels: they’re neither heroes nor anti-heroes. They’re just people of a certain skill who have reached a point of desperation in their lives. Their drifting sends them to foreign locales, such as Haiti, Havana, or West Africa, where they can properly self-destruct.
Greene was one of the great British writers of the 20th century, but he disguised this fact by writing spy novels mostly. Espionage, intrigue, illicit love affairs: these are the ingredients of some 25 novels spread over half a century. There’s a certain formula to his plots that is comforting, plus a dry British wit that locates humor in the most macabre situations. Usually the main characters wrestle with religion or Catholicism for a bit, as the author himself did. I find it helpful, when reading Graham Greene, to imagine Ralph Fiennes as the voice of the narrator. (Older readers may want to try Joseph Cotten from The Third Man, also based on a Greene novel.)
I also enjoy how love affairs pop up in Graham Greene novels, completely without warning: a man and a woman meet, on a train or at a party. A few paragraphs later, they’re gazing at one another recklessly, and the male character confesses: "I’m in love with you, you know." No time for courtship back then. Instead, there’s this torrid urgency in his novels: things move along very quickly, as they must do in a crisis.
As a novelist, Greene also reminds travelers what it’s like to be in a foreign land – especially those who are already there, but have somehow forgotten (like me). He captures the sense of dislocation, of disappearance, of hiding in plain sight felt by strangers in a strange land. "I suppose those of us who spend a large part of our lives in dissembling, whether to a woman, to a partner, even to ourselves, begin to smell each other out," Brown observes in The Comedians. This is the type of insight that comes from years of careful observation and experience; Greene tosses it off as a comic aside.
As a writer who traveled often, Greene’s frank assessments of his foreign locales – their corrupt governments, their flaws and faults – may seem out of date in these politically correct times. Nowadays, we are supposed to look at things in context, instead of judging foreign lands. But consider that whenever travel writers (such as Paul Theroux) point out bureaucratic defects or character flaws in the places they visit, they are defended as "journalists."
For all I know, Greene may have been a parachute novelist who fed off the local color and simply filled in the dots later, in the privacy and comfort of his London writing table. He may not have learned all there was to know about Mexicio, or Liberia, or Sierra Leone in his visits. But that doesn’t take away from the life contained in his novels. In an untrue world, he was never untrue in his art. And he was usually sympathetic in depicting whatever people he encountered along the way.
But my appreciation for The Comedians is actually much more mundane: it was an offhand comment by Jones – pointing out that he lacked an exit permit – which reminded me to get one of my own, and thus saved me from a fate worthy of a Graham Greene character.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
