Graham Greene biography reveals a life lived perilously on the brink

RUSSIAN ROULETTE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRAHAM GREENE Richard Greene

Little, Brown, £25

PERHAPS there was a real gun. Perhaps it even contained one loaded chamber. Some versions of the story suggest the bullet might have been a blank, but that matters little at close range: “I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one.”

Everyone knows a few things about Graham Greene: the sex, the depression, the troubled and often ambiguous Catholicism, the Russian roulette. The last is now usually taken as a matter of fact, the behaviour of a deeply depressed student who was drinking too much.

But there is internal evidence that points another way, a poem of the time that considers “our timorous advances to death, by/pulling the trigger of a revolver, which we already/know to be empty”.

Perhaps it is best to think of the Russian roulette as a metaphor for a life lived constantly on the brink. When he survived intense fire during the Six Day War in Israel, Greene wrote: “I really thought I’d had my last game of Russian roulette.” He constantly exposed himself to danger. He came under fire in Vietnam, and as the Vietminh gathered to overcome the French, found himself between the lines. He did something similar, more deliberately, where, as a known enemy of the state because of his novel The Comedians, he stepped over the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, right under Papa Doc’s guns.

He visited the heart of darkness more than once, barely surviving a jungle trip in Liberia and later visiting leproseries in the Congo, background to A Burnt-Out Case. On the first trip, he took along his cousin Barbara, a nurse, who brought him back to skeletal life, so perhaps the death-urge was matched by a profound desire to live, but at extremes. He constantly put himself where history was happening, in the moment, even if he was sometimes “out by one”.

Richard Greene (no relation) – is no sensationalist, either. In sharp contrast to Greene’s earlier biographer Norman Sherry, who walked every step in Greene’s shoes and nearly died as a result, he isn’t interested in the “sex, books and depression” litanies of previous lives. He takes it as read that the entire body of work is, as Greene himself said in 1980, “a form of therapy”. In the same interview, Greene wondered “how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human situation”.

In a sense Greene’s work was an attempt to capture precisely the lives of those who did not paint or compose, or know some form of transcendence in the form of established religion or spirituality. His own Catholicism is sufficiently well-trodden territory to need no further investigation. What Richard Greene does, instead, is to link Greene more solidly to the historical events he participated in. In other words, he attempts to reverse the priority of

“life and times”.

This is where problems set in. There are moments – many – when the biographer digresses to point out the after-histories of the many trouble-spots Greene knew. Sometimes, the point is briefly apposite. Greene eventually published a novel, The Human Factor, about his friend and fellow intelligence agent Kim Philby, who he continued to admire and defend. In the course of their exchanges he suggested the logic of Soviet and post-Soviet history was that the KGB or its successor would eventually take over the country. Greene