Be Excellent To Each Other

My enduring memory of the early 1990's is of Graham Greene. It's not that he was around to write much in the 90's - indeed, he died in 1991 - but that was when I discovered his work.

The first Greene novel I read, possibly everybody's first Greene novel, was Brighton Rock. Written almost 40 years before I was born, this novel struck a real chord with me. Born and raised in Brighton myself, whilst society had moved on somewhat, his descriptions of the locations - from the seafront to the race course - were so familiar, so vivid, to me that even now I can remember the sense of pleasure I had from that first reading.

I read his work voraciously after that; A Gun for Sale, Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American... I lapped them up. I enjoyed his "Entertainments" more than I did his novels. Personally I think Greene was at his best then, rather than when he wrote about Catholic Guilt - although given the undertones of Brighton Rock, I forgive him this.

Possibly his two greatest novels I read last. The Third Man simply blew me away. Not so much an
"Entertainment" as a horror that is entertaining, it describes the inhumanity that man can show to his fellow man in such detail you wonder whether the author had insider knowledge, yet celebrates the ability of man to overcome evil.

But my favourite Greene novel, by far, is Travels with My Aunt. In that I found a wondrous journey from the mundane to the exotic; it taught me to look for adventure, to reject the every day, to look for something different and not be affraid when it arrives.

If you've got this far, please read some Graham Greene!

Fuck! That was the last book I've just read. It shook me to the core!

I shall write more tomorrow when I'm exceedingly drunk and not just using all my brain power to merely press keys.

Young lass Tooley is in my treasured pantheon of 'obviously hot' literary characters in my head.

Anyway, got any C.T?

It is the only one of his that I've read, it was one of the books for our GCSE lit. I enjoyed the book and read it through in a few sittings, as you would with a good book, rather than doing it a small bit at a time like in class, but found having to amateurishly pull it to pieces and write essays on it took away a fair bit of the charm. Plus of course there was a fair amount of wondering how many of the themes were actually meant to be... was it the author's intention, or was a lot of the bumpf printed in the york notes actually read into it by others looking for more depth? Sometimes it feels like having to study a book at school ruins it, but then maybe I'm just too used to reading a book and taking it at 'face-value'.

The film was quite good, too.