Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killing of a European Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as a whole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes. When the first of these is traced, Raven is a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossing him and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice.
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“Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature.” –John Le Carré
--This text refers to the
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From the Inside Flap
Raven is an assassin, a hired killer, and his brutal murder of the Minister of War raises the spectre of war across Europe.
--This text refers to the
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edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed, but frequently sensational early Greene.,
This review is from: A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)
'A gun for sale' is considered a minor Graham Greene work, two years before his acknowledged first masterpiece, 'Brighton Rock'. Admittedly, the book is hugely flawed - the plot becomes increasingly implausible; the dialogue is sometimes false; the characterisation, especially in the central relationship between Raven the runaway hitman and Anne, sometimes doesn't quite ring true. But there is so much that is excellent - the mixture of dusty, fish and chips realism with almost whimsical fantasy, precise detail clashing with a nightmare-world of physical grotesques; the brilliant control of language, in which a deliberately limited vocabulary is used to imprison characters in a social and implicitely metaphsical destiny. The first half is a superb, almost intolerably nerve-wracking, thriller, and the second, as Raven seeks revenge during a practice gas raid, is dottily surreal. The allusions to fairy tales, history , poetry, popular music, drama, philosophy etc. open the book from its generic base, and makes it infinitely richer than it first appears. It should be read anyway by anyone who loves the cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville, who based his masterpiece 'Le Samourai' on it. A flawed, yet fascinating work.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A parable?,
By Philip Spires "Author of Mission, an African ... (La Nucia, Spain) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Gun for Sale (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
On the face of it, A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene is a genre thriller, featuring a crime committed by a confessed and declared villain, followed by a police pursuit. In the hands of a great writer, however, even clichés such as this can be transformed into thoroughly satisfying novels.
First published in 1936, A Gun For Sale is set in a Europe over which war looms constantly and threateningly, casting a shadow of fear and even depression over all human interaction. Graham Greene appears to use this context to allow the book to make a significant, yet very subtle point, an assertion that conflicts, even grand conflicts like wars, are pursued by interests, instigated by an intention to profit. The grander the conflict, the greater the potential gain. As individuals vie for influence, prominence, control and dominance, so do societies, groups, companies, even countries. And some of the protagonists play dirty, rarely receiving the comeuppance of justice. When they do, we are gratified, sensing the same rightness that a happy ending might provoke. A Gun For Sale has several important characters, more than a review can list. Raven is the first we meet, the blackness of his name immediately suggesting a functionality for the plot, for he is the anti-hero, the hired gun who completes the bloody assignment in the book's first pages. Hare-lipped and ever resentful of his disfigurement, both physical and, as a result of a painful upbringing, psychological, he suggests a figure that the reader might be invited to despise, perhaps a pantomime bogeyman of genre fiction, always accompanied by a threatening, trademark fanfare. But Graham Greene is not that mundane a writer. We eventually come to know Raven well. Though we are never actually invited to like him, we eventually sympathise with his plight, if only by virtue of the fact that there are some apparent social heroes who in reality are a darned sight more deserving of our contempt. Raven is double-crossed and sets out to track down the perpetrator of his humiliation. Raven leaves a trail and a policeman, Mather, takes up the pursuit. By chance Mather's girlfriend, Anne, boards the same train as Raven from London to Nottwich, an industrial town were she will appear in the chorus line of a pantomime. Raven and Anne meet and, viewed from the distance of the pursuer, become accomplices. Mather's fellow copper, Sanders, is an interesting foil to Raven. Both are disfigured. Raven's problem is with appearance and he yearns to be rid of the hare-lip that disfigures his face, a disfigurement that Anne plays down, thus engendering his trust. The policeman Sanders, on the other hand, stammers. He is quick of wit, but not of voice, and is aware that his impediment has cost him promotion. Mr Davis, also known as Cholmondley, amongst other things, is the greasy lackey employed by Sir Marcus. The latter is an industrialist, owner of a steelworks in Nottwich, a business that has seen better times. Mr Davis is a right cad, regarding theatre girls as fair game, regularly picking them up and persuading them into the grubby room he rents from a truly surreal couple in order to protect his reputation. The freemason Sir Marcus is barely clinging to life, but he retains sufficient pride, or malice, perhaps, to inflict untold suffering on others, merely to retain his own status in a future he does not have. And so Raven pursues Cholmondley, who answers to Marcus. Mather and Saunders pursue Raven, and Anne seems to be on everyone's side. And it all works out. But Graham Greene does much more than tell a tale. Through simple language and structure, and via a plot that would grace a b-movie at best, he penetrates his characters' psyches, locates them in social class and history, and manages with a deft lightness of touch to convey a remarkably strong sense of place, setting and context. Through his simply constructed prose, we see people, places and events from a multiplicity of perspectives and are left with a complexity of associations with every character. And that, precisely, is why cliché is left far behind.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Should be considered major,
This review is from: A Gun for Sale (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
Mine is clearly a minority opinion, but I think this novel is actually more complex and interesting than many other critics and readers do. I remember first reading it in a college British literature class and finding Greene's juxtaposition of a typical crime novel, the backdrop of international intrigue and the paranoia conspiracy of traitors everywhere, Raven's disfigurement, and what was for me a very moving relationship between Raven and Anne a wonderful and engaging read. I just reread it for a critical study I've been doing and, while I agree there are holes in the plot, I'm not sure they are anymore distracting than the series of coincidences that drive Brighton Rock. I read BR recently also, for the first time, and I see why critics rate it higher--the psycho-sexual pathology of Pinkie, the moral-religious issues of his "Roman" identity, but I have to say I find lonely Raven a more memorable character in many respects.
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