Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge (review)
Judith Adamson closes Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge with the claim that Greene's writing "has probably made more Western readers sympathetic to the Left than that of any other novelist, while at the same time becoming legendary in the Soviet Union for defending individual rights." While this statement would more appropriately close a reader-response study, it is not inappropriate as a conclusion to this significant attempt to map and analyze Greene's politics during his sixty-year-long career. Adamson structures her discussion around basic questions: What is (are) Greene's political attitude(s) over the years? How have his politics changed in shading and quality? How are his political and religious opinions intertwined? What impact have these views had on his fiction? These important questions have too seldom been asked despite the obvious political nature and ideological bent of his novels, but Adamson immediately foregrounds them by focusing on "the commitments Greene has made as he roamed the world," on "the development of his political ideas," and especially on "how a novelist who set out in the thirties to record public issues dispassionately became in the process an important political conscience." Adamson delineates three stages. The first, Greene's attempt to be "an acute observer" and detached reporter, lasted from the 1920s until the early 1950s. The second, firmly announced in The Quiet American, demanded involvement, commitment, and action and found much of interest in "the accomplishments of communist governments." The final stage, seen in his close relationship with Omar Torrijos, involved public commitment to social democracy while extolling doubt. Adamson convincingly traces how the collapse of liberalism in the 1920s seemed to Greene to leave the world in such a state of crisis that an individual could not hope to make sense of the condition and could only record the numerous wrongs. In this almost paralyzed confusion, Greene maintained that faith gave the individual dignity and status in the face of an organized, hostile society. His conservative religious viewpoint culminates in The Power and the Glory, offering the timeless Church against the timebound State and granting the former a tenuous triumph over the dictatorial ambitions that often usurp socialism. Adamson concludes that "his ability to expose injustice was not supported in his early fiction by a clear understanding of the political and social forces involved" and points to Greene's distancing himself from the Spanish Civil War at the very time his generation was becoming engaged in it.