Modern literature and education Literary modernism Postmodernism Feminist literature

Writing style and themes
Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers (mystery and suspense books), such as The Ministry of Fear, which he described as entertainments, often with notable philosophic edges; and literary works, such as The Power and the Glory, which he described as novels, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based.
As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between entertainments and novels increasingly problematic. The last book Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958. When Travels with My Aunt was published eleven years later, many reviewers noted that Greene had designated it a novel, even though, as a work decidedly comic in tone, it appeared closer to his last two entertainments, Loser Takes All and Our Man in Havana, than to any of the novels. Greene, they speculated, seemed to have dropped the category of entertainment. This was soon confirmed. In the Collected Edition of Greene's works published in 22 volumes between 1970 and 1982, the distinction between novels and entertainments is no longer maintained. All are novels.
Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories have been adapted for film or television. The Internet Movie Database lists 66 titles between 1934 and 2010 based on Greene material. Some novels were filmed more than once, such as Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2011, The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999, and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002. The 1936 thriller A Gun for Sale was filmed at least five times under different titles. Greene received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for the 1948 Carol Reed film The Fallen Idol, adapted from his own short story The Basement Room. He also wrote several original screenplays. In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote the screenplay for a classic film noir, The Third Man, also directed by Carol Reed, and featuring Orson Welles. In 1983, The Honorary Consul, published ten years earlier, was released as a film under its original title, starring Michael Caine and Richard Gere. Author and screenwriter Michael Korda contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition.
In 2009, The Strand Magazine began to publish in serial form a newly discovered Greene novel titled The Empty Chair. The manuscript was written in longhand when Greene was 22 and newly converted to Catholicism.
Greene's literary style was described by Evelyn Waugh in Commonweal as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry, and of independent life". Commenting on the lean prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review that "nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader's attention". Greene's novels often have religious themes at their centre. In his literary criticism he attacked the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster for having lost the religious sense which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin". Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and divine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin, and doubt. V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil. Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives—their mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. His stories are often set in poor, hot and dusty tropical places such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.
The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective. Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction—in the world, sin is omnipresent to the degree that the vigilant struggle to avoid sinful conduct is doomed to failure, hence not central to holiness. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, as giving sin a mystique. Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents. Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in Crisis Magazine, and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce.
Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings. According to Ernest Mandel in his Delightful Murder: a Social History of the Crime Story: "Greene started out as a conservative agent of the British intelligence services, upholding such reactionary causes as the struggle of the Catholic Church against the Mexican revolution (The Power and the Glory, 1940), and arguing the necessary merciful function of religion in a context of human misery (Brighton Rock, 1938; The Heart of the Matter, 1948). The better he came to know the socio-political realities of the third world where he was operating, and the more directly he came to be confronted by the rising tide of revolution in those countries, the more his doubts regarding the imperialist cause grew, and the more his novels shifted away from any identification with the latter." The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and were replaced by a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching.
In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of American imperialism and sympathised with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met. Years before the Vietnam War, he prophetically attacked the idealistic but arrogant beliefs of The Quiet American, whose certainty in his own virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted on the Vietnamese. In Ways of Escape, reflecting on his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing compared with Cuba's. In Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
— Graham Greene
In 1949, when the New Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene's writing style, he submitted an entry under the name "N. Wilkinson" and won second prize. His entry comprised the first two paragraphs of a novel, apparently set in Italy, The Stranger's Hand: An Entertainment. Greene's friend Mario Soldati, a Piedmontese novelist and film director, believed it had the makings of a suspense film about Yugoslav spies in postwar Venice. Upon Soldati's prompting, Greene continued writing the story as the basis for a film script. Apparently he lost interest in the project, leaving it as a substantial fragment that was published posthumously in The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993) and No Man's Land (2005). A script for The Stranger's Hand was written by Guy Elmes on the basis of Greene's unfinished story, and filmed by Soldati in 1954. In 1965, Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.
Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century novelist, and was praised by John Irving, prior to Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language." Novelist Frederick Buechner called Greene's novel The Power and the Glory a "tremendous influence." By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation", and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism, and of "suspense-filled stories of detection". Acclaimed during his lifetime, he was shortlisted in 1966 for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1967, Greene was among the final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary in 2017. The committee also considered Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with the latter the chosen winner.
Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory and the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter. As an author, he received the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society. In 1986, he was awarded Britain's Order of Merit.
The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted (about 35 miles northwest of London), on dates as close as possible to the anniversary of his birth (2 October). Its purpose is to promote interest in and study of the works of Graham Greene.
He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.
His short story "The Destructors" was featured in the 2001 film Donnie Darko.
Select works
Main article: Graham Greene bibliography

• 
  The Man Within (début—1929)
  
• 
  Stamboul Train (1932) (also published as Orient Express in the U.S.)
  
• 
  It's a Battlefield (1934)
  
• 
  England Made Me (also published as The Shipwrecked) (1935)
  
• 
  A Gun for Sale (1936)
  
• 
  Journey Without Maps (1936)
  
• 
  Brighton Rock (1938)
  
• 
  The Lawless Roads (1939) (also published as Another Mexico in the U.S.)
  
• 
  The Confidential Agent (1939)
  
• 
  The Power and the Glory (1940)
  
• 
  The Ministry of Fear (1943)
  
• 
  The Heart of the Matter (1948)
  
• 
  The Third Man (1949) (novella written as a preliminary to Greene's screenplay for the film The Third Man)
  
• 
  The End of the Affair (1951)
  
• 
  Twenty-One Stories (1954) (short stories)
  
• 
  Loser Takes All (1955)
  
• 
  The Quiet American (1955)
  
• 
  The Potting Shed (1956)
  
• 
  Our Man in Havana (1958)
  
• 
  A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
  
• 
  In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961)
  
• 
  The Comedians (1966)
  
• 
  Travels with My Aunt (1969)
  
• 
  A Sort of Life (1971)
  
• 
  The Honorary Consul (1973)
  
• 
  The Human Factor (1978)
  
• 
  Ways of Escape (1980)
  
• 
  Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980)
  
• 
  Monsignor Quixote (1982)
  
• 
  The Tenth Man (1985)
  
• 
  The Last Word (1990) (short stories)
  

The 1930s did not begin well at all for Greene. After his acclaimed first novel, The Man Within, there followed The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), both of which floundered critically and commercially. The author subsequently forbade either ever to be republished. But then, amid Greene’s despair, Heinemann published Stamboul Train (1932), which sold well, was well received, and thereby (he felt) truly started his career as a novelist. It opens at Ostend amid the collecting of landing cards and the shifting of luggage and ends, after murders, social snobbery, and sexual pathos, in Istanbul with pipes being smoked and a contract in a furtive pocket. The journey is thus bookended by material objects; ones that signal in themselves further transience, and in the act of signaling (of becoming information) cease to be wholly material. The central character who seems most fully aware of this ambiguous status of these markers is Myatt: a merchant in currants. The dried fruit that he repeatedly twists between his fingers, as a parody of rosary beads, acts as shorthand for his clichéd status as a deracinated Jewish businessman—with a link to The Waste Land and the “handful of currants” Mr. Eugenidies has in his pockets. Eliot’s lurking presence matters here as Myatt’s role in the novel is not simply to act as a connective presence through his interactions and circulations but also to show how Greene’s characters are already mediated, already drawn from other works. Here, as in other places in his early 1930s works, Greene’s literary debts are deliberately visible, and so materiality provides intertextuality, which itself then is embedded into the quotidian life of a text. Greene signed up for Modernism, even, or especially, when ostensibly writing a thriller.

Yet Greene objects are not merely piled up as tokens of homage; rather the materiality of his material things so massively accumulated is itself replete with embedded or absorbed meanings, or—indeed—forms of knowing to which characters themselves have only stumbling access. In literary studies a renewed critical interest in materiality is not now a starting point for a Marxist (or even Freudian) critique but rather for an investigation of how the representations in texts can incorporate, work with, and be overwhelmed by the material stuff the texts choose to portray. The most useful of these developments for thinking about the works of Greene are a number of practices derived from phenomenology, ones that have led to a renewed focus on material objects as encountering and encountered by human beings—and on what such an encounter might mean.
Questions then also arise concerning what happens when the useful “object” becomes the unknowable “thing,” a transition key to the theorist Bill Brown: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.” Brown goes on to gift his “things” with forms of subjectivity, created through their absorptive natures, which then renders their being in the world—ways of being that can be both significant and menacing. In literary studies, insights derived from such work has been used—and critiqued—most fruitfully with regard to Victorian literature, with topics ranging from sentimentalized keepsakes to house clearances. Any usefulness for reading Greene, however, must acknowledge a very different world of objects around—as well as within—the text: while the 1930s was an era of mass production, it was one concomitantly filled with theories of commodity fetishism, whether coming from a Chestertonian nostalgia or the strictures of classical Marxism. And the transition of various objects between different states is also, in Greene, inseparably linked with a melancholic legacy of naturalism. So many apparently inert, banal objects keep on dissolving into states of inert “thingness”; but then many are also, paradoxically, shored against entropy and filled with animation—to offer a commentary on various characters’ abjections. A renewed study of Greene’s objects must then not consider just the physicality of debris, things, and objects of the novels but also how they are portrayed and, especially, how they shape the text. In It’s a Battlefield (1934), it is impossible to know which—if any—of the characters are making or thinking the remark, as it is interpolated in the midst of a high-speed car ride: “close the door at night, one shut loneliness in. The toothbrush, the chair, the ewer and the bed were dents in loneliness” (150). A converse object becoming a concave “dent in loneliness” is, indeed, an object subjectified. Such animation of materiality acts as a distinct counterbalance to the objectification of the human subject, through the processes delineated by Mumford.
While Stamboul Train worked with a form of transport whose cultural significance belongs, largely, to the nineteenth-century as a vehicle for exploring questions of subjectivity, another machine—or rather streamlined object—is dominant in most of Greene’s 1930s work: the aircraft. So many planes repeatedly dive through Greene’s early texts that they have already been noted by literary critics and thus have become part of the analysis of the impact of this technology on interwar literature more generally. Such analysis has been extensive, from general cultural histories, through the tracing of “airmindness” in canonical modernists such as Bowen and Woolf, to studies of writers who were devoted to aviation from Francis Stuart to Christopher Caudwell. For Greene aircraft are both pleasurably and ominously present throughout the works of the 1930s, and they swoop between alluring, acute, and problematic states, playing differing roles in the different work with their sleek objecthood—and their ability to render all into amorphous debris through their bombs.
Greene’s The Bear Fell Free (1935) is a highly wrought, in both senses, novella: deeply mannered and near-hysteric. This is another text about loyalty and deception, gathered here into problems of perspective as it plays with the iconography of aircraft and airmen—especially airmen who cling to their totemic toys. A nonlinear stream of consciousness narration weaves together a performative masculinity with guilt, terror, and memories of the First World War. A man goes on a flying expedition, leaving a party in the English countryside behind; fragments of dialogue and phrases build together, but the plane crashes in the Irish Sea, and the alluring lights of New York go unvisited. At the moment of impact into the waves, the mascot and signifier of dandyism—the teddy bear—falls free. The take-off, however, was initially happier, reveling in new perspectives:
Heavy wheel, steel polished struts, lay on the swelling air, pressed it down towards the tents, the landladies, the fathers sleeping under handkerchiefs, the child sick behind the breakwater, the wooden spade rotting behind a rock, the Daily Mail reporter inspecting serial couples; they lay over life, the pool, the rocks, the yellow crawling tide; at the height one should have made some pertinent elder-statesman pronouncement, something about serious and sad about suffering humanity, but all one felt was this growing fear, this conviction that there had been a mistake.
Here the potency of the aircraft can truly be seen: it is not just an object; it is the object with the capacity—through flight—to make everything else into objects. The all-encompassing nature of the vision comes not only from the vantage point but also the indeterminacy of the “one” in the final sentence, reaching out and downward to encompass the reader (as potential victim) as well as the colluding friends of the pilot. Here the adhesively definite articles work in this passage through attaching a reader to the (fallen) world as it is, while the hawk’s or bomber’s eye detachment of “all one felt” both threatens and promises to blow it all up. Moreover Mumford’s positing of the “stranded aviator” as the tutelary figure to understand how one sees oneself seeing finds a distinct resonance here, with the implicit refractions of vision back onto sameness coding an awareness of same-sex desire, one manifested into the arena of flight—it is surely not incidental that Mumford’s aviator wrote: “I must have looked good, carrying the big logs on my back in my underwear.” For Greene’s The Bear Fell Free is also part of a wider lineage where the homoerotics of flying function as a counterpart or counterbalance to a post-First World War death-drive; one typified, in so many bleak ways, by W.H. Auden’s The Orators (1932), which is—with its introspective diary-keeping, letters to wounds, and fantasia of totalizing attacks—probably the greatest, and most fragmental, air-obsessional text.
In the more conventional England Made Me (1935), Greene constructs a narrative that pays homage both to the melancholia of transience and to ephemeral spaces. It is a bleak fairy tale of twins, brother Anthony and sister Kate, and their entanglements with Krogh, Kate’s lover and boss, a seemingly all-powerful Swedish financier. But it is a novel that works through a rewriting of expectations on both the personal and geographical scales, and to do this it relies on the allure of aircraft (and, to be discussed later, the lure of the cinema). For aircraft are a way to be modern, if not overtly modernist. A telling moment comes when a shot duck—a memory from Krogh’s youth—is compared to a broken aeroplane (39), the artificial form of flight having now become the measure against which the natural is measured. In the main, though, the aircraft of this novel are nonmetaphorical and active. As Fred Hall, Krogh’s thuggish enforcer, travels across the Continent, he is sufficiently blasé about air travel to be lulled into a reverie:
He closed his eyes again; he was no longer interested by the flight from Amsterdam; he knew the airports of Europe as well as he had once known stations on the Brighton line—shabby Le Bourget; the great scarlet rectangle of the Tempelhof as one came in from London in the dark, the headlamps lighting up the asphalt way; the white sand blowing up around the shed at Tallin; Riga, where the Berlin to Leningrad plane came down and bright pink mineral waters were sold in a tinroofed shed … (161)
This is Europe remade spatially, with the replacement of national borders by nodes of significance and resonantly confident associations—directly analogous to the new model of fraudulent capitalism that Krogh himself practices. Yet this form of modernity itself unsettles the characters—Hall, while nonchalant about his aerial commutes—“a comfortable dull way of travelling,” compares them unfavorably to the tactile pleasures of the past: “the weekend jaunt, the whisky and splash, the peroxide blonde” (161), which he could encounter in the more grounded Victorian ways of travelling, with “the racing tips from strangers in the Brighton Pullman” (162), and which did not require a vertiginous visual leap. The thing that seems to unsettle Hall the most is the abstraction that is forced upon him, and his viewpoint, by being up in the air. The “great scarlet rectangle” he sees below of the Templehof (Berlin’s airport) is part of a sequence of patterns and shapes that means the view from above does not reveal objects beneath but rather shows a world of abstracted transience and flux. This is part of Greene’s engagement with something that could be termed the “high-sublime,” an idea within the more aerially intoxicated parts of aesthetic Modernism that dates back at least to Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1918). It is a concept filled with fragile connections and observable gnomic shapes, such as those in Virginia Woolf’s mid-1930s essay “Flying over London,” where the near-fractal and cubist patterns noted by an aestheticizing observer allows her to say: “we fell into fleeciness, substance and colour; all the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together.” Toward the end of the essay an attempt is made to fix a point of focus, but the view of the now looks more like an artistic composition than an actual city, and this only acts to destabilize the position of the narrator/observer/pattern-maker.
With Greene the aestheticizing aspect of this destabilization wrought by the aerial view is kept in tension with the linguistic: the shapes that the skywriting planes keep writing—in both England Made Me and The Confidential Agent—begin as puzzling abstractions but eventually resolve into words. Moreover, in the commentary Greene wrote for The Future’s in the Air (1937), a documentary film celebrating the Empire Airmail service, the voiceover dwells on the patterns—“draughtboards of fields”—and shadows on water and land; but it then resolves into a lyrical hymn of exotic, but scribal, interconnections: “Letters to Indian Civil Servants; letter to the government in New Delhi [… ] letters to Chinese scouts, letters to men in rickshaws.” The purpose of the aircraft becomes clear: it can (only) connect a mesh, and one where the purpose—airmail—is always set against the abstraction of what it has to fly over.
But in the 1930s such views from above were, most often, preludes to the destruction of what lay below. Greene’s A Gun For Sale, written the previous year, features a mock air raid, as well as the “drone of planes on a special patrol high above, rendering the microcosm of terror and evasion to specks of light like fireflies” (127). By The Confidential Agent (1939), the fear of what might fall from the sky is totalizing and narrative-shaping. This is a thriller that roams around a specifically late 1930s Britain. Locations range from the mock-Tudor roadhouse where D—the antiheroic emissary of an unnamed country wracked by civil war—is assaulted by enemy agents; then it moves through the signifiers of British urban abjection—a boarding house with threadbare carpets, a run-down language-teaching classroom, and a desolate colliery village—before culminating in a hallucinatory Art Deco Lido. But it is also a text that wants to get beyond simple survey-form spatiality and introduce, through D, another dimension: “his territory was death” (128). For in the 1930s the imaginative layering of war, especially from the perspective of the apparently omnipotent bomber, onto still-peaceful London was a common trope across both high and low culture.
The difference in Greene is that it is D’s gaze alone that fills in the horrors to come. This is due to his own personal history; he has literally brought a way of seeing war everywhere to a place that does not yet know to watch in that way. For he cannot believe that a city “looked so extraordinarily exposed and curiously undamaged” (38); he cannot believe a street isn’t being used as an aiming point for bombers (48). An aircraft, when it does appear, just wants to do some sky-writing—but D cannot believe it is benign. The implausibility of tranquility means his synoptic vision—which seems aerial even when he is only looking out over rooftops—is a very bleak one; it transforms all it encounters into objects ready for destruction. Thus war has already arrived through his very presence. So, poor D himself—menaced, bleak, and tossed on the whims of fate for the first half of the novel—is, perhaps, rendered into a “thing” (very much an object, not a subject) and one who can respond only ineffectually or flee. But D’s gaze is something else, something that has incorporated the bomb-sights of a bomber, a paradoxical and transformative force, and something that is both object and subject in its own right. More disconcertingly, in a novel with no conventional narration, his gaze might well be Greene’s.
Against the centrality of the transformative aircraft and the views it can bring, there come—in many of Greene’s novels—ways of thinking about grounded clutter, about the mass of stuff that could only be lifted from its inert state by being seen as clues—or as tokens of deadly and existential oppression. Brighton Rock (1938) has been the center of much critical and popular focus; indeed, it has had more attention paid to it than the rest of Greene’s 1930s works combined. Beyond the tracking of Pinkie’s warped theology, many studies have also historicized his fears of damnation and charted the reading of this ill-educated “Boy,” one who has an implausibly vast nonrealist cultural hinterland, including Jacobean dramatists and Baudelaire. As a detective story, Brighton Rock both conforms to and yet exceeds generic conventions. Ida Arnold, a blowsy force of sensual happiness and moral order, is obviously a detective par excellence, as she unswervingly tracks down Pinkie for the murder of Hale—indeed she is more adept than the police. But so too, surprisingly, is Rose—the waif-like waitress and Pinkie’s bride. She works out what Pinkie has been up to through piecing together clues—although, unlike Ida, despite the knowledge she gains, she is willing to be deceived.
Rose’s narrative is also built around her chase for signs that Pinkie loves her, from the moment when Ida confronts her—and her reply hovers between the literal and metaphorical:
Rose whispered, “You don’t know a thing.”
“I’ve got my evidence”
“I don’t mean that,” the child said. (130)
For while objects can be evidence they can also be something rather stranger, and while the novel is littered thickly with overdetermined objects, all serving their role in patterns of detection and alibi formation, it is also concerned with what objects cannot do—or what kind of negations and fears—they hold. In Brighton Rock, beyond the titular stick of confectionery, itself a murder weapon in the eyes of some rather more imaginative critics, and the cards Hale, or then Pinkie, leave in various cafes, there are pervasive signs of chaos of an encroaching lack of meaning. Most banally hideous are the wedding gifts given to Rose and Pinkie by the gang: “two little obscene objects [ … ] a tiny doll’s commode in the shape of a radio set [ … ] and a mustard pot shaped like a lavatory seat with the legend, ‘For me and my girl.’ It was like a return of all the horror he had ever felt” (162). The wedding certificate—when they get it from the town hall—is another token of the triteness of (secular) life, issued from, and overwhelmed by, “the great institutional hall from which the corridors led off to deaths and births there was a smell of disinfectant. The walls were tiled like a public lavatory” (184).
Pinkie especially hates the objects that are trapping him: those that implicate him—but also, more interestingly, the presence of objects that appear to define life. Escaping from the hilltop racetrack on the outskirts of Brighton he runs, in much the same way Andrews did at the start of The Man Within, stumbling—“scrambling down the chalk down [ … ] awkwardly, tripping, bleeding down his face” (115), the language mixing a loss of blood and of height. He escapes into the urban—finding shelter in a modern housing estate, schematically running from the country into the city as it is only there he can hide.³⁵ After this escape, Pinkie crouches in an empty garage, but he has only escaped from Nature to be confronted with Stuff, for he notices with malevolence the debris:
Wherever the owner was, he had come a long way to land up here [ … ] the small villa under the racecourse was the best finish he could manage. You couldn’t have any doubt that this was the end, the mortgaged house in the bottom; like the untidy tidemark on the beach, the junk was piled up here and would never go further. [ … ] And the Boy hated him. He was nameless, faceless, but the Boy hated him, the doll, the pram, the broken rocking horse. (116)
The will to extinction in Pinkie is then as concerned with the debris of life and its uncontrollability as it piles up to shape one’s existence. The junk here is not things people live with; they’re things people die because of. And this suspicion leads to a murderousness toward the mundanity of existence, as he pulls the legs off insects, but also a savage rage against ideas of transcendence that art might seem to offer: “He could hear the music—‘The One I Love.’ Wrap it up in cellophane, he thought, put it in silver paper” (117). It is then unsurprising that the melodrama of the novel’s end, the way it reaches with dread to conclusion outside the text, is through an object: the gramophone record, not yet played, which Rose carries home “towards the worst horror of all” (269).
But it is with passports, a document-object, which both make and unmake the owner, that Greene has his bleakest insights into what materiality might bring. For the multiple passports strewn throughout Greene’s early works are not just emblematic of the 1930s’ fascination with border crossing—rather they are ways of thinking about selfhood and how a corporeal self might be inspected as it comes into contact with political power. His fascination continues throughout the decade—from Dr. Czinner’s fraudulent documents in Stamboul Train to the passport in The Confidential Agent. In this novel D is first detained by the Customs Officials at Dover because his face does not resemble the image in his (legitimate) passport. Prompted by the official he looks in the only mirror-like objects available—the reflective glass protecting paintings of quintessentially British subjects, a train, and the monarch. Thus projected onto the imperial surface he is found wanting:
D looked in the only glass there was—the funnel of the engine and King Edward’s beard rather spoilt the view—but he had to confess the detective was not being unreasonable. He did look rather different now. He said “It never occurred to me that I had changed so much.”
Moreover, projected in such a way, D is an example par excellence of being too modern, too mutable, for the apparatus of the British State; he is, when framed in these glass surfaces, what Mumford would term a “neotechnic” man trapped in a “eotechnic,” essentially Victorian, sheen.
Even after this episode the passport, which freezes the visage in a state of knowability and should, therefore, confer legitimacy on the holder, brings endless trouble. For due to the machinations and pressures that surround the characters in Greene, the object becomes more legitimate than the individual, and its very presence suggests layers of deceit—such as when D attempts to make himself know at the Embassy: ‘Oh no,’ the secretary said, “I think this is a genuine passport. But it isn’t yours. You only have to look at the photograph” (98). As James Purdon suggests, the power of the state here is not only over D as an identifiable subject but, more capaciously, over the very identity of D himself.³⁷ For that which should confer identity becomes that which, paradoxically, denies it; the object in his hand makes him into a thing. Indeed, a fear of what happens when people are reduced to things is germane more generally to The Confidential Agent. For at a key early moment the fascist agent L attempts to win D over to the rebel side with this piece of rationalization, drawing an equivalence between the losses they have both suffered:
“I’m not really complaining. These horrible things are bound to happen in war—to the things one loves. My collection and your wife.” (30)
The denaturing of the dead human to being analogous to other “things” (as well as to the acts of violence—the other “things”—which extinguished their life) confronts D with L’s lack of empathy, with the unlikeness of art objects and people: “It was amazing that he hadn’t seen his mistake” (30). But, indeed, L might have been nonanimate himself—D notes that “like an antique he was very well authenticated” (12)—and L’s passport is, obviously, also to be found in good order. The language, and the characters, of the novel are animated by how, in Greene’s own idiom, the slippage between “objects” and “things”—which “Thing Theory” proposes in abstraction—actually intercedes to drive the text onward. Yet in Greene’s work it is not simply the movement between the two states of materiality that matters; it is how such movement, when observed, shapes the characters themselves, their morality and their political allegiance.