Graham Greene's New Novel

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31071, 28 May 1966, Page 4

Graham Greene's New Novel

IRcttewed ft.A C l The Comedians. Graham Greene. The Bodley Head. It has been alleged that Graham Greene in his new novel is merely the virtuoso indulging a great talent; that he is to be suspected of parodying his own effects in a book like “The Power and the Glory.” Certainly “The Comedians” seems constructed with a heavy deliberation resulting in the manufacture of ironies, many of them appearing to bear back upon his own earlier practice. But it is far from certain that Greene is “playing a game.” The story is related in the first person. This has been the pose rather of the journalist than of the literary artist in Greene and its adoption here may too easily lure his readers into wrong assumptions. In the serious novels he has thrust his tormented heroes abroad into a context of physical horror and moral degeneracy. The world into which these heroes were released was the expression of Geene’s own vision of the real world, a place where pure

evil walks abroad in a thousand guises but where pure good walked only once. But in “The Comedians” it Is the narrator himself who sees or makes his wortd, and if that world is very like the world commonly fashioned by the author we may be justified in concluding that Brown the narrator is a mask of Greene the author. (Of course Greene himself prefatorially denies this, being careful, however, to disavow the particularity not the generality of the identification.) Others have spoken of “the Greene unpleasant land,” and in this novel the heroine rebukes Brown for the “dark Brown world you five in.” It is at least a possibility that “The Comedians” represents a serious shift in Greene’s philosophical position and that it is this seriousness that

avows itself in a first-personal ■ Greene has hitherto assumed that human existence not only is capable of but de-

I mands a tragic interpretation. We catch the note in a reflec- | tion of Brown's as his ship ap- ; proaches Haiti where the novel is set: “There was plenty for all of us to weep for where we were going.” But in fact as the title implies, life turns out to be no longer capable of tragedy. As Brown explains: “When I was a boy I had faith in the Christian God. Life under His shadow was a very serious affair: I saw Him incarnated in every tragedy. . . . Now that I approached the end of life it was only my sense of humour that enabled me sometimes to believe in Him.” i

If this is a game it is decidedly a risky one. For if we j take Brown to be unreliable in his metaphysical assessment of the case, how must we evaluate all his other testimony? The physical realism, the political reporting, the scrutiny of character, all these are necessarily the responsibility of the narrating “I”, and they seem to be endorsed hopeless state itself, all these are expressive of a spiritual indifference amounting to nonentity. Indifference is the last of the evils that walk the earth. Commitment even to violence is better: “I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.” But the committed, even the comedian hero Jones, are all dead by the end of the book. So the narrator escapes from Haiti to become a funeral director: “It’s a valuable social service ... No business recessions.” meant to serve as more than a j brilliantly documented locale

[is implicit. Greene is writing I of “the wild world we live in i now (I do not mean my poor i insignificant little Haiti)." The characters’ names (Brown, Jones, Smith), the faceless police with their impenetrable dark glasses, the nationless, fatherless narrator, the lawless, roadless, by the author whose personal handwriting is on every page, most remarkably in the fashioning of those characteristic similes which gleam like iewels (or like brass?) in all his books.

That the police-state of Haiti, corrupt and dying, is If “The Comedians” is a jest then it is a bitter one holding up to mockery not merely the squalor of its chosen society but the very seriousness itself of the author’s earlier attitudes Even the mental torments of Brown are trivial and base less. The love-affair when it is on is crudely mechanical and when it is off, unimportant. It was another comic illusion: “Life was a comedy not the tragedy for which I had been prepared.” So speaks the narrator who has been “prepared” for life in a Jesuit college. There is a very tenuous story-line in the novel. The scenes though startlingly realised are often disconnected from the plot. The characters clear in themselves, are in no necessary relationship one to another. The whole conduct of the novel seems tentative rather than affirmative. Yet this very precariousness maybe read as a subtle and faithful exposition of a serious state of mind.