Michael Dirda, Washington Post’s perspicacious literary critic, sets his sights on a new collection of correspondence by Graham Greene, the great Catholic novelist. He writes:
His men and women are murderers, traitors, unhappy adulterous lovers, sinners of every stripe–and he doesn’t glamorize their seediness, their misery, or their desperation. Evelyn Waugh bluntly called them “charmless.” Nearly all of them dwell in a shadowy fictive world of hunter and hunted, where love itself leads mainly to anguish and loss. Nonetheless, even Greene’s “entertainments,” such as This Gun for Hire and The Third Man, are more than just tautly written thrillers of revenge or pursuit: In the distance one can usually make out the baying of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him, down the arches of the years; / I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind …
After the death of Henry James, according to Greene, “the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act.” Consequently, Greene’s own work–especially the major books of what one might call his middle period: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair–sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair.
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