RUSSIAN ROULETTE THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRAHAM GREENE
RICHARD GREENE Little Brown, 591pp, £25
According to his Balliol contemporary, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene was ‘completely cynical, really only liking sex and money and his own particular form of publicity’. Sour grapes? Not entirely. Greene haunted brothels, enjoyed blue films, had several mistresses, befriended traitors and dictators, and perfected the art of backing into the limelight. But he was also a compulsive writer – he described writing as ‘a form of therapy’ – who, in addition to 24 novels, wrote numerous plays and screenplays, hundreds of essays and reviews, and thousands of letters.
Having edited a collection of Greene’s letters, Richard Greene, no relation, has now produced what Ian Thomson in the Evening Standard called ‘a long-needed antidote to “dirty linen” biographers who have sought to expose the darker shade of Greene and in consequence lost sight of the books’. In the Spectator, Nicholas Shakespeare concurred: ‘Taking the high view that his subject is “one of the most important figures in modern literature” and that previous biographers “lost sight of what mattered” in focusing on “the minutiae of his sexual life”, he gives us a nicely written and well-judged cradle-to-grave portrait that needed to be conventional and unshowy, and is all the better for it.’
But a cautionary note was struck
by John Walsh in the Sunday Times: ‘Less successful is Greene’s treatment of the knotty religious cruxes that hover over his subject’s key novels… The trouble isn’t Richard Greene’s grasp of metaphysics; it’s that, to 21st century readers, discussions of damnation and God’s mercy sound redundant.’