The Third Man - Graham Greene

Graham Greene famously didn't write The Third Man as a novel, he wrote it as a movie treatment.  Inevitably, he was called upon to publish it in book form - to novelise his own treatment after it had been developed with the director, Carol Reed.  This is the result - and I must say it works rather well.  I once read its near namesake, The Tenth Man, which Greene wrote in his dotage, and that was a very different experience (it put me off Greene for at least thirty years).

Some memorable lines in the movie were claimed by others (Orson Welles, for example, and 'cuckoo clocks').  Greene simply doesn't go there.  Another change is that the female lead, wonderfully played by Alida Valli, is of no real significance in the novel.  I don't remember in the film anything about Martens being mistaken for a different writer by the British Council representatives in Vienna.  And Greene sticks to his original choice of Rollo for Martens' first name - which Joseph Cotten apparently considered too camp, preferring Holly instead.

Greene, who loves to write in the first person, has to put himself through hoops to do so here.  In the end he choose the Trevor Howard character, the British agent, who is just about able to 'discover' a lot of information through various interviews with other characters.  The main virtue, though, is that Greene keeps it short.  It is a novella rather than a novel, and all the better for it.

To pad it out to a publishable volume, Penguin include the original of that other classic Greene movie, The Fallen Idol, which was a short story called 'The Basement Room', written in 1935.  I cannot watch the 1948 film nowadays (also directed by Carol Reed).  It's a problem I developed with Ralph Richardson, who plays the servant Baines, during my PhD research.  It dawned on me, listening to many archive recordings of his radio work in the British Library, that he was permanently drunk.  Once you've spotted that, you can't do anything other than watch for the signs.

The short story, however, is brilliant.  Greene gets wholly inside the mind of the young boy Phil, left in the care of the household servants while his parents are on holiday.  Baines tries to show him a good, manly time and ends up scarring the boy's entire life.
 

The Sun Chemist - Lionel Davidson

How on earth do you make a thriller out of writing footnotes for the letters of Israel's first president? Lionel Davidson shows how. Igor Druyanov, a historian of Russian descent, is commissioned to prepare a couple of installments of the massive multi-volume Letters of Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952). The years in question were Weizmann's wilderness years - like Churchill, these were the Twenties and Thirties - when he was ousted from the Zionist movement and had to revert to his original profession as a research chemist.

The key to the tension here is that the book dates from 1976 and begins a couple of years earlier, in 1974. This is when OPEC jacked up oil prices, creating a crisis in the West and making the polite, ever-smiling Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani a hate figure. At rhe time it seemed as if the greedy, ungrateful Arabs were threatening the developed world with a new stone age. Indeed, the West has spent the last fifty years developing alternative power sources to avoid a repeat, whilst the Arab world has taken a more moderate line in exploiting what is, after all, their only real resource, and a finite one at that.

But Davidson's book is firmly anchored in 1974-6 and the Israel of that time, a year or so after the first Arab-Israeli war. Davidson might have been born in Hull but at this time he was living in Israel. In the story, it emerges from Igor's research that Weizmann and his research associates might have hit upon a way of synthesizing combustible fuel from root vegetables. It isn't quite so simple, and Davidson spares us none of the science, but that is essentially it: an infinite supply of fuel to a power-hungry world; a windfall beyond price to a state just establishing itself in the deserts of Palestine and the end of time to their near neighbours in the Gulf.

It's a great book and an astonishing feat of writing from Davidson. He was never a scientist, always a journalist but, by God, he does his research. Every part of the book, from the history that drives Druyanov, to the world of international science and petrochemicals, is utterly convincing. Davidson, to be fair, was a peripatetic journalist and, as I say above, lived in Israel - but I've never read anything, fact or fiction, that brings that raw state so alive. Davidson, in my view, is even better than Ambler, better than Greene, and so unusual in his choice of subjects. He deserves to be better remembered than he is. As for this book, is there a thriller in print today that is more topical?

The Quiet American - Graham Greene

It's faintly disturbing to come across a book written in the year I was born, about then contemporary events, that seems so up to date today, sixty-three years later.

Graham Greene, as usual, knew what he was talking about. He had reported on the early stages of the Vietnam conflict and had encountered the early stages of US involvement. That is the setting here. Thomas Fowler is an ageing (in the 1950s he would have been downright elderly) reporter for a major London newspaper. He has been happily covering the conflict from Saigon for several years. It suits him because his high Anglican wife back in England won't divorce him and out East he can live with his twenty year-old girlfriend Phoung and his opium pipe. Unluckily he meets the rawest of new boys, young WASP Alden Pyle, who claims to be working for medical aid but who is clearly a 'diplomat' as they used to be called, or spy as we call them now. He supports America's policy of a third way in Vietnam (basically replace French domination with American). Pyle is a devotee of the US thinker York Harding. Harding is fictional but reflects a trend of the time. Fowler elucidates: Harding was a foreign correspondent rather than a frontline reporter; his work is all opinion with no factual underpinning. The irony is, Fowler's secure life is now threatened because his paper wants him back in London as their foreign correspondent.


Fowler and Pyle become unlikely friends. Thus Pyle encounters Phoung and falls in love. Unlike Fowler he is single and plans to take Phoung home with him. Fowler cannot do that if he returns to London and his wife still won't divorce him. So he doesn't stand in the way when Pyle takes Phoung from him. But then Pyle is found dead in the river. Inevitably Inspector Vigot suspects Fowler. Vigot and Fowler are old friends, which makes things awkward.


It could easily be a murder-mystery but it's not, albeit the story does rely on an unexpected twist in the tale. Instead it is a novel of clashing attitudes and beliefs - a strong philosophical basis brought to life by the deft characterisation of the handful of main characters. The other stroke of genius is the time structure. We start with the discovery of Pyle's body, then recover the events that preceded it. A lesser hand would have either gone back to the beginning and continued in the past or alternated, but Greene was at the peak of his powers in 1955. He flips back and forth between present and recent past - the investigation unfolds for the reader at the same time as s/he discovers the relationships between the characters and their motives. It really is brilliantly done.


For me, the only drawback was the purely journalistic stuff, the local colour. The problem here arises because in 1955 Greene could have no idea of the horrors that full American involvement would bring in the Sixties. In 1955 Vietnam was largely unknown to the English-speaking world and was very backwards under its French masters. Therefore Greene had to explain it and show how primitive it was in parts. However for those of us born in 1955 we all know about Vietnam (or we think we do - how many of us truly know that the US took over a pre-existing war and turned a war for freedom into civil war?), thus the 'native' sections were very dull for me. On the other hand, it is unmistakably, inarguably anti-American, which makes it irresistible in the time of Trump.

The Comedians - Graham Greene

To be honest, the relevance of the title was lost of me. I get the general idea that Brown, Smith and Jones are to an extent the classical Greek masks, and the irony that they find themselves adrift in the dark tragedy of Papa Doc's Haiti, but other than that... It doesn't matter, though; what signifies is their 'civilised' Western-ness contrasted with the wild exoticism of the Caribbean voodoo and the complete otherness of the Tontons Macoute.


This is the first time I have tried Greene at his peak. I have read the earlier stuff - Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock - and I have read the late rubbish (Monsignor Quixote), but nothing from the fifties and sixties when the Nobel Prize seemed to await. Now, having read The Comedians, I agree with those who thought he should have the ultimate Literary Prize. Brown the Monaco-born adventurer, Jones the con-man and Smith the vegetarian former candidate for the US presidency, may be generic in their names, but in their souls they are all heroes in their fashion. Smith, with his redoubtable wife, is the epitome of honour and decency; Brown would like to be a villain but cannot prevent himself from standing up for the oppressed; and Jones, who really is a villain, ends up dying a freedom fighter's death.


The supporting characters are equally fascinating. We have Brown's lover, Martha, dissatisfied wife of a South American ambassador and mother of the appalling Angel; the monosyllabic mortician Rodriguez and the pathetic Baxter with his comic monologue about his wartime escapades as an air raid warden; Captain Concasseur of the Tontons; the quiet communist Dr Magiot; and perhaps the most omnipresent, Dr Philipot, the ex-Minister who we first encounter as a corpse in the empty pool of Brown's hotel but whose death and the consequences thereof drive everything that follows.


Papa Doc does not appear - already, in 1966, he was an invisible presence confined to the presidential palace. Had he appeared, I believe the novel would have suffered. The point is that the rule of fear relies on him not being seen. That way, nobody knows what he thinks or wants. No plans can be made. All plots to unseat him are doomed to fail for the simple reason that they have to propose something whereas Papa Doc is embodiment of nothing. That, if you like, is the comedy in which our comedians play their parts, a grim farce or the blackest of satires.

Ginger, You're Barmy - David Lodge

This is a reissue of Lodge's 1962 novel based on his own National Service. The point, as in fiction by many other reluctant recruits, is that National Service was pointless and boring. Problem is, pointless and boring doesn't make for winning fiction.  Lodge gets round this by cleverly compressing the action into the beginning and end of his avatar Jonathan's two-year stint. Everything between, he implies, is the boring stuff we don't need to bother with.

He freely admits to borrowing the device from Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Indeed, his 1982 afterword is, for once, useful and informative.  By 'for once' I don't mean to slight Lodge but to scorn the practice of publishers who tend to think that they have to add something extra to reissued novels for the benefit, presumably, of the hard of thinking. Anyway, in this instance it does add value.

Rather than make himself the rebellious character - another typical problem of the sub-genre - Lodge's Jonathan is the pragmatic one who gets on with it and makes the best of a bad job.  The rebel here is the ginger Irishman, Mike Brady, who is simply one of nature's nonconformists.  Brady goes completely off the rails when the bullying victim that always exists in any bunch of confined young men, dies.  He attacks the bully and pays the price.  He thus leaves the novel about two-thirds of the way through.  Big problem, we might assume, leaving us with the boring plodder Jonathan Browne.  Even as a fledgling author, however, Lodge had the skills to stave off disaster.  We already know that he is courting Brady's girlfriend - another benefit of the flashback structure - so our interest now centres on how this came to be.  Is he really making his narrator a bit of a shit?  No he isn't, and the courtship is touchingly handled.  Then, towards the end, Brady naturally resurfaces, now a member of a quite different army.

Ginger is, of course, a proper English comic novel.  Which is not say it is funny or - as the guff on the cover seems to suggest, farcical - but simply that it views its world and those who inhabit with good humour and general positivity.  There are smiles rather than laughs.  Lodge is too good at characterisation to waste time on jokes.  The book is lean - two hundred or so pages - yet there is considerable depth and disquisition. Interestingly, it is Lodge's only first-person narration (at least it was in 1982).  He seems to suggest this is a weakness but I consider it a great blessing.  The beauty of a narrator is that you have no choice but to enter his or her world because it's the only one on offer.  You don't have to like him but you can't be allowed to loathe him.  Mike Brady, without Jonathan's explanation of his shortcomings, might be insufferable.  As it is, we share Jonathan's fascination with him.

I have read of lot of Lodge over the years.  On the whole I prefer his early work.  I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Stamboul Train - Graham Greene

Predating Brighton Rock by six years, Stamboul Train (1932) is an early Greene 'entertainment'.  It predates Murder on the Orient Express by two years but comes four years after Christie's Murder on the Blue Train.  Thus neither author can be said to have emulated the other, though they may have influenced each other to some extent.  In any event, murders on trains had been a staple sub-genre of crime fiction since William Huskisson MP was run down and killed on the opening day of the Manchester-Liverpool Railway in 1830.

Greene's fictional world is very different from that of Mrs Christie.  The journalist Mabel Warren is an overt, no-bones-about-it lesbian, whilst her lover Janet Pardoe is a self-indulgent fortune hunter.  Our heroine, Coral Musker, is a showgirl but not naturally a goodtime girl or easy lay, though Mr Myatt, the wealthy supplier of superior currants encounters no great difficulty in that regard.  The beauty of Greene, even early Greene, is that his characters are densely layered, each capable of good and bad, heroism and cowardice.  Most conflicted is Dr Czinner, the exiled revolutionary, who has hidden for years in an English prep school but is now heading home to face whatever fate awaits.  Least conflicted is the casual murderer Grunlich, who we first encounter in Vienna, halfway through the book and serves as the polar opposite of Czinner but who, even so, is not without courage, as he demonstrates in the wonderfully-evocative Subotica.

Greene's smartest trick is to get his characters off the train every now and then, notably in Subotica but with various other excursions along the way.  By doing so, he raises his novel above genre and frees it from convention.  All train crime novels are essentially locked-room murders, which necessitates every character lying about his or her involvement.  The murder in Stamboul Train doesn't take place aboard the train and is peripheral to the main suspense.

The book, ahead of its time in terms of lesbianism and casual sex, is sadly very much of its time in its treatment of the Jewish Mr Myatt.  He dresses as a caricature Jew - fur coat and shiny suit - and is so Jewish that apparently everyone recognises his race at first glance.  Everyone despises him, even Coral to begin with, purely because he is a Jew.  More unpleasantly, he seems to despise himself because he is a Jew.

We must make allowances for attitudes of the past but it has to be said the Myatt problem did limit my enjoyment.  Everything else, though, was great fun and I especially warmed to the amoral Grunlich, who brings an extra dimension to the novel at the halfway point.  And I love Paul Hogarth's cover art on this classic Penguin.