there was a war on: you could tell that too from the untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses – a flat fireplace half-way up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap dolls’ house, and lots of mirrors and green wall-papers, and from round a corner of the sunny afternoon the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingle beach.
This extract from the opening of Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear sets the mood for the novel perfectly; the imagery of the dolls’ house prepares for the surreal atmosphere of the book, as does the use of mirrors and eerily familiar interiors for the nightmare world of Arthur Rowe. The numbed familiarity of the London Blitz is also brought to the fore; writing in 1943, Greene brilliantly sketches the backdrop of a capital at war – strong enough for a modern reader to taste the sound, smell and fear of the bombings.
The Ministry of Fear is one of Greene’s oddest books, and reads at times like his usual prose has been soaked in Kafka and Conrad. The brilliant opening chapter finds Rowe at a sorry wartime fête, where he correctly guesses the weight of a cake on the advice of a fortune teller. Here’s starts Greene’s own nightmarish take on the wrong man story, with Rowe pursued by dark forces across a London under threat of the air raid. It’s a brilliant tale, illuminated by the panic and uncertainly of 40s London. As usual, Greene can say a lot in few words; whilst the novel is brief it is also dense and layered, proving again that he is not always the easy author we take him to be.
Unfortunately this novel doesn’t live up to its early promise. Perhaps I was more interested in the background of the Blitz rather than the plot, which attempts to unravel the weird set pieces, which include a murder at a séance, an encounter with a seedy bookseller and a spell in a sinister hospital, to explain itself more logically. This somehow takes the fun out of things, but The Ministry of Fear is worth a read for an example of good literature that just doesn’t age.
For some time now I’ve had a mental block when it’s come to Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. No doubt this is due to the image of Ralph Fiennes’ heaving buttocks from the most recent film adaptation, which unfortunately come to mind whenever I think of the novel. But what Mr Fiennes has done is plant the suggestion of seediness in my mind, and Greene’s novel, both his depiction of London during and after the war and Bendrix and his snatched affair with Sarah and all that follows really does read as a seedy business.
Bendrix narrates the novel, a writer by trade who can well articulate his own shortcomings as a human being. He’s aware of his own bitterness and hatred, but Greene also reveals one of the most arrogant voices I’ve read in a long time. He perches himself far above many of the people he encounters, whether it’s the humble private detective or the betrayed husband Henry. All inhabit a late 1940s world of bombsites, dark bars and darker weather; a setting that’s breathtakingly realistic. But this isn’t why I found the book seedy; it was more the people in it, and all but one of the characters I disliked. In fact the only one I was ambivalent towards, the young girl who Bendrix picks up and takes to Sarah’s funeral, is one of the few that has a lucky escape from him. Of those that suffer, particularly Henry, I tended to share the contempt that Bendrix has for them.
Like many of Greene’s other novels, the subject of Catholicism rears its head. Here, Greene treats Belief and God as something that can be caught, an infection, and just as Sarah contracts pneumonia from the dank London streets, Bendrix fears that he, too, will ultimately believe in God but it will be little more than an unwanted infection. Throughout the book there are also odd glimpses of the supernatural; a skin disease apparently healed by Faith, Sarah’s deal with God that she will not see Bendrix after she thinks he has died in an air raid.
For such a brief piece at 160 pages, The End of the Affair is incredibly dense. It drained me as a reader, and Greene continues to prove that less is more, and that the lesser writer would fail in the temptation to drag out the affair even more. But it’s a painful book to read.
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