Greene famously divided his works into “entertainments” and “serious fiction.” The “entertainments,” such as This Gun for Hire (1936) and The Ministry of Fear (1943), were thrillers designed to indulge smart readers, whereas the “serious” novels did not tidily resolve themselves. Often, it’s not easy to tell Greene’s two types of novels apart—they uniformly possess weight, deep texture, emotion, absurdist comedy, and compelling characters. In fact, the only thing that really distinguishes his “entertainments” from his “serious” novels is the extent to which the characters suffer. And in the serious novels, they suffer a lot.
When Castle, after years of subterfuge designed to protect the wife he loves, is exiled to Russia without her, it is hard not to feel his pain and uselessness; but when Raven—the disfigured hit man of This Gun for Hire—dies, it’s hard to feel anything but relief. Only the “good” suffer in a Greene novel; that’s because, in Greene’s universe, the “bad” never feel remorse, guilt, or the capacity to love. His most unregenerate characters are innocent of self-reflection, like Alden Pyle in Greene’s prescient novel about American “do-gooders” in 1950s Vietnam, The Quiet American. A CIA op trying to save a nation of people from making their own decisions, Pyle is innocent, handsome, and wants to do well. Yet, like many devout Americans who proudly do unto others what they don’t want done unto them, Pyle causes terrible human damage. “Innocence,” the narrator, Fowler, observes of Pyle, “is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.” As the 2002 film adaptation made perfectly clear, this deadly combination of American innocence and evil looks a lot like Brendan Fraser.
No other writer moved so effortlessly between films and fiction. Greene wrote novels with a movie camera’s eye—showing his readers what his characters see, in the sequence in which they see it. (The opening of This Gun for Hire is a textbook example of perfect cinematic technique; nobody ever used the semicolon better to bite off each second of a character’s sensory experience.) At the same time, he wrote films with a novelist’s sense of human complexity, which is probably why he dismissed Alfred Hitchcock as a “clown.”
Holly Martin’s problem in The Third Man is that he genuinely loves his boyhood friend Harry Lime, even though he suspects that there may be depths to Harry that he shouldn’t love at all. Harry “was a wonderful planner,” Rollo explains in the novel, but “I was always the one who got caught.” This complexity of personal affection for evil people would never have interested Hitchcock, just as Greene never succumbed to using a meaningless MacGuffin to set his stories rolling. Instead, The Third Man is driven by the real human tragedy of war profiteers in Berlin selling fake antibiotics to sick people (including children). Greene’s films are all tilting Carol Reed camera angles and swerves of light and conjunctions of street and alleyway where people appear and reappear as someone they might actually be; or their conspiracies emerge through the fog and smoke of bombed cities, as in Fritz Lang’s visually fraught version of The Ministry of Fear. For Greene (even though he loved popular fiction and film), the heart of a story wasn’t a clever technical contraption. It always concerned perilous attitudes of perception.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3qzdymu
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