Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of The Raj Quartet (review)
after Greene had written himself into "an [sic] spiritual blind alley" with The Heart of the Matter; however, his public statements about the McCarren Act and defense of Charlie Chaplin, his observation of the State of Emergency in Malaya, and his reports on the Mau Mau (two significant world events that did not enter his fiction) seem to have been the fodder forcing the change. Adamson shows how Greene "kept clear of questions that required analysis rather than descriptive responses," but four visits to Vietnam, an audience with Ho Chi Minh, and a Vietnamese woman's blood spattered on his shoes turned his antipathies toward American foreign policy, capitalist materialism, and the Church during the mid-1950s. This phase ends with the complex consideration of engagement in The Comedians.