Customer Reviews

Greene: Collected Short Stories: 21 Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Clas)

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Graham Greene just doesn't get the recognition he deserves as a short story writer. As a novelist, his reputation has been well-established, fortunately. This collection, which incorporates "Twenty-One Stories", "A Sense of Reality", and "May We Borrow Your Husband" is a fine sampler of Greene's abilities in the shorter genre. Many of the elements that feature so prominently in his novels also figure in these stories: the spontaneity of violence; ruthless polictics; looming secrets; greed; and the complex situations that life drops on you.

Here are some brief looks at my favorite stories:

"The Destructors" is Greene's examination of horrific, calculated vandalism in the extreme, made even more horrifying by the coolness with which it is carried out.

An event in a man's past comes back to haunt him in "The Blue Film". Strangely, the haunting specter doesn't frighten him so much as saddens him.

"The End of the Party" is a harrowing tale of identical twins playing hide and seek at a party. The ending paragraph left goosebumps on my skin for days.

Other stories, such as "A Shocking Accident" and "May We Borrow Your Husband" are superb examples of this great story teller's talents.

For those who have never read Graham Greene, "Collected Short Stories" ought to be your starting point.

The plots of these stories are real enough to keep them believable, but they are not quite a product of normal life, which makes them interesting. These stories along with most of his other works put the reader in a place that has been called Greeneland. Like Greenland it is a real place on earth but it is different from any other and few people have experienced it. These stories come from the mind of a man who traveled the world and accurately observed its inhabitants in the mid part of this century. Greene also experienced much of what he saw and his stories are not written from a disinterested point of view. His style is very often brilliant (The Blue Movie),his topics are current, and his themes are universal.

Although I can't recall all the details regarding this book I keep a strong sensation of pleasure when I think of it. Stories are transparent, deep and at times funny. My favorite one is "May we borrow your husband?". Here the author skillfully describes a grotesque situation in wich an homosexual couple attemps by all means to have an encounter with the flamboyant husband of a just married couple. He starts telling the story as a distant witness and as time goes by he gets unwillingly involved in the whole mise en scene. Greene has a mastery to blend irony with deep feelings and awkward situations. The result is wonderful!

Reading these thirty-seven short stories -- the first written in 1929, the last published in 1967 - I was surprised at how differently Greene comes across as a writer in his short stories than in the two novels of his which I have read, "The Quiet American" (1955) and "The Tenth Man" (1985). "The Tenth Man" left me cold and "The Quiet American" somewhat irritable, but the Greene who emerges in the short stories is far more psychologically complex -- and a better storyteller. In fact, in his themes and tone he reminds me greatly of Henry James, whom I love. Greene's "The Blue Film," "A Chance for Mr. Lever," and "Two Gentle People" are thematically similar to James' "The Jolly Corner" in their protagonists' wistful longing for "the life that might have been." "A Little Place Off the Edgware Road" reminded me of James' "The Beast in the Jungle," both stories being psychological tales of obsession in which a man's fear becomes an all-consuming monomania. It is very difficult to write convincingly from a child's perspective without boring adult readers, but Greene and James are two writers who can pull it off. Greene's "The Basement Room" and "The End of the Party" are reminiscent of James' "The Turn of the Screw" and "What Maisie Knew," not only in their spooky tone but in their ability to convey the intense anxiety of childhood and to depict the way in which children, without being able to understand everything that is going on, can be extraordinarily sensitive to nuances of speech and manner. "A Shocking Accident" is another story by Greene that reveals the sensitivity of children in a believable way.

Reading the "Collected Short Stories" piqued my interest in Greene's life because the overall impression one is left with after reading these stories written over the course of thirty-eight years is that Greene suffered from severe depression and anxiety, even as a child. Indeed, while researching his life online I discovered that he attempted suicide several times. Wikipedia says that he suffered from bipolar disorder. Later in life, he told his wife, "Regrettably, the disease is also my material for writing," and this comes across clearly in the stories. There is humor to be found - "The Root of All Evil" is particularly amusing, and "Special Duties" and "When Greek Meets Greek" have funny and clever twists - but the overall tone is dark. "The Innocent" describes the changes wrought by the years in our capacity to experience true emotion unmarred by cynicism. "Jubilee" is is a sad, clever, and poignant commentary upon aging and what happens when we are stripped of the self-delusions that keep us afloat. "A Discovery in the Woods" and "The Destructors" are unsettling reminders that violence and cruelty are qualities which we seem to admire and to associate with leadership. In his stories about male-female relationships, disillusionment predominates. Greene often writes from the point of view of the middle-aged male observer who is removed from the action because he is no longer sought out for romance. (It is interesting to me that even as a young author, Greene wrote from this vantage point.) "A Drive in the Country," a very interesting story, is about the closest Greene comes to optimism. It has a characteristically grim storyline -- suicide -- but ultimately sides with life while hailing the unspectacular virtues of loyalty, security, predictability, and consistency.

Some of the stories I enjoyed without really understanding them -- for example, the mysterious "A Day Saved" "The Over-night Bag." One tale left me feeling frustrated: "Dream of a Strange Land" could have been so good, but the ending was a cop-out. The last third of the book is devoted to stories taken from Greene's collection of short stories entitled: "`May We Borrow Your Husband' and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life." While I liked "May We Borrow Your Husband," I didn't care for this part of the book. I give Greene credit for attempting to convey the female perspective in "Cheap in August" and "Chagrin in Three Parts," but I don't think he's very successful at it. I did like "Mortmain" about a spurned lover who insidiously injects herself into her former boyfriend's current relationship, and the aforementioned "Two Gentle People," a story about meeting the right person too late.

My favorite stories were the ones about children -- "The End of the Party," "The Basement Room," and the weirdly wonderful "Under the Garden," about a boy who gains access to a mysterious underground realm -- which is surprising because I usually hate reading novels or stories told from a child's point of view. There is also some really wonderful storytelling in "The Root of All Evil," "The Hint of an Explantion," "Special Duties," "When Greek Meets Greek," "The Second Death," "Jubilee," and "A Drive in the Country." Overall, I highly recommend Graham Greene's short stories

Graham Greene is the best of The Destructors and writer of many stories. A fantastic read for the eclectic bookofile.

It is fear which dominates these stories. It may be the fear of the afterlife as we in see in the Second Death or fear of darkness as the story The End of the Party reveals. In the first story, Greene's Catholic faith coems to the forefront though the omniscient author feigns disbelief and uses a neutral tone, there is no doubt that he is sharing his friend's fear of hell. The latter has had a near death experience and has seen Christ who knows everything about him. Now that death is inevitable, he feels that he has not heeded the first warning and that now he is on his way to hell. Sometimes, I ask, was Greene himself terribly afraid of death well knowing that he was not living up to the moral standards required by his beliefs? Did his conversion at the age of twenty two weigh hevaily on his conscience and so he had to return to the scenario of a visit to hell time and again?

As I have already remarked soemtiems the fear stems from other sources. In The End of the Party the adults fail to understand that darkness may not go down well with everyone. The game of hide and seek, though entirely innocent, proves fatal as one of the children simply cannot stand being in the dark. Greene is hindting at the adults' failure to understand the individual child's psychology and our general tendency to categorize without distinguishing individual traits which may make all the difference.

In 'A Little Place Off the Edgeware Road|" the fear stems from a particular character's difficulty to retain his sanity. In a dark cinema, he feels a clammy hand touching his. He quickly comes to the conclusion that the man is a murderer and rings up the police. The twist at the end is characteristically Greenelike: the police come to pick our unfortunate character rather than the presumed murderer.

Graham Greene is one of those authors like Hemingway who may "go out of style" --this will be a great pity--there transparant but subtle modernism of the first half of the first half of the century Greene and Waugh will go out of style. Already they are being replaced by a Rushdie sense of the text as an elaborate joke or rather elaborate shape.
These are wonderful stories and like Poe's should be preserved and cherished.