Graham Greene

Graham Greene is an immensely popular as well as powerful and idiosyncratic writer. His leading characters are murderers, spies, fugitives and outsiders and his most typical plot is that of the hunter and the hunted. In this book, originally published in 1983, John Spurling sets about tracking down the author behind the protagonists. Beginning with an analysis of the patterns of Greene’s mind as revealed in the 40 or so works of fiction, drama, criticism, travel and autobiography he has published, the author goes on to explore the way the patterns are modified from the political thrillers of the 1930s through the ’Catholic’ novels of the 1940s and 1950s to the post-war comedies and ’Third World’ novels. Greene is the odd man out of a generation of remarkable writers born around the turn of the 20th Century who lived through the destruction of the 19th century world order. John Spurling’s highly original study tells us why.

John Spurling was born in Kenya in 1936 and educated in England at Marlborough College and St John’s College, Oxford. His many plays have been performed on TV, radio and stage, including at the National Theatre. Among his novels are The Ten Thousand Things, which was highly acclaimed and won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, A Book of Liszts and A Mirror for Monkeys. He has published two volumes of re-imagined Greek myths, Arcadian Nights and Arcadian Days. His critique of Beckett’s plays, Beckett the Playwright, written in collaboration with John Fletcher, has also been reissued by Routledge. John Spurling has reviewed for a range of newspapers, magazines and BBC radio and he was for twelve years the art critic of The New Statesman.