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Graham Greene: Characters
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Synopsis: Based on a novel by Graham Greene, Alec Guinness stars as the title character, a descendent of Don Quixote. After he is appointed monsignor, he sets off with a leftist politician (played by Read More
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Greene's were probably the first literary novels written in English in the twentieth century which had at their centre religious themes (though they had similarities with the French novels of François Mauriac). Catholicism is usually explicitly present. Greene in his literary criticism attacked most modern literature for having lost any religious sense or themes, which resulted, he argued, in dull, superficial characters who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin." Only by recovering a religious element, the consciousness of the drama of the struggle within the human soul carrying infinite consequences of salvation and damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and grace, could the novel recover its drama and power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the fallen world Greene depicts, and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin and doubt. Indeed, V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil.[2]
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After the unsuccessful attempts as a novelist, Greene was about to abandon writing. His first popular success was STAMBOUL TRAIN (1932), a thriller with a topical and political flavour. Greene wrote it deliberately to please his readers and to attract filmmakers. One of its characters, Quin Savory, was said to be a parody of J.B. Priestley - Greene depicted nastily the writer as a sex offender. Priestley had just published a novel, which led some reviewers to compare him with Dickens.
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In later years, the genuine groping for religious truth in Greene's fiction would often be thwarted by his obsession with the darker recesses of his own character. This darker side is invariably transposed onto all his fictional characters, so that even their goodness is warped. Greene saw human nature as "not black and white" but "black and grey," and he referred to his need to write as "a neurosis . . . an irresistible urge to pinch the abscess which grows periodically in order to squeeze out all the pus." Such a tortured outlook may have produced entertaining novels but could not produce any true sense of reality. Greene's novels were Frankenstein monsters that were not so much in need of Freudian analysis as the products of it.
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