Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is a curious book. On the surface it is a recollection of the beginning and end of an adulterous affair, an all consuming passion that rocks back and forth between desire and hate. This is set against characters’ wrestling with the existence of God, making the story a rather religious treatise in some ways. The narrator, Maurice Bendrix, takes the reader through his affair with a married woman named Sarah Wiles. Meeting at a dinner with Sarah’s husband […]

“Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job.” This is an early Graham Greene novel, and is probably most correctly labeled one of his “entertainments”. But like all the rest of the entertainments, there’s too much skill, talent, irony, and brain working here to find that an adequate label. Other entertainments like Our Man in Havana, are actually among my favorite of his books despite the incisiveness of The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, or The Heart of the […]

I originally bought Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock because I had it confused with The Winslow Boy, which are bizarre novels to mix up, I know. So I went into Brighton Rock with no expectations or knowledge about the plot. The main character—called the Boy or Pinkie—is a teenager defined by his nihilism and sociopathy, and is contrasted by several side characters: Ida who is open-hearted and decadant, and Rose, who falls in love with Pinkie. The Boy is the head of a small, violent gang. […]