Customer Reviews

It's a Battlefield

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We are all essentially alone, caught up in our own chemical, physical and social orbits(or "battlefields"), unable to connect with other people or affect our own destinies, like a man on death row. Apparently. Greene plays out a typically existential perspective in terms of the death row simile and, as usual, everything is not as it seems. This is not a story about a man unfairly condemned to death (we never get to meet him), or the machinations of various individuals to get him off. Rather it's about how his situation affects them and, as you can imagine, being part a Greene menagerie, it isn't at all pleasent. The half dozen or so characters we become aquainted with vary wildly in class and preoccupations, and one gets an idea of the variety of London life in the thirties. But they also tend to vary in interest. Undoubtedly, Conrad Drover, the condemned man's brother, is the strongest character: his paranoia provides the only real suspense in the book. But I was rather fond of Condor, a journalist who lives alone above a pub, who creates elaborate fantasy lives which are taken at face value by his friends and workmates. There's a weak section dealing with Condor's landlord, the pub owner, and Drover's sister-in-law going off on a jaunt in the country, a brief and illusory moment of liberation. On the whole, though, this is a poignant novel on the human condition told with Greene's characteristic irony and economy of style.

The story is about the people who are in different ways involved with the fate of the bus driver Drover who is condamned to death sentence. A clever constructed story which tests all persons who take part of it. The tension bases on the different ways these people manage it. It was astonishing that the main person Drover never appears. Although he acts as the read line. At the beginning it is quite confusing but it is worth finishing it because after seeing it clearly, you will be fascinated.

It's London, between the wars, 1934. A man has killed a policeman during a strike; a riot had broken out, the bobby was poised to hit the striking workman's wife, and he instinctively defended her with his pocket knife.

The workman's name is Jim Drover. He's been sentenced to hang. An aging Assistant Commissioner, recently returned from the East, has been asked by a Minister to report to him on the pulse of the people; this has nothing to do with sentiment, or justice, he's up for reelection, and he wants to know if the workers will riot if the workman is hanged, or will they feel the Minister is weak if he is reprieved.

Drover's suffering wife has a sister who just wants to find a man and have a good time, and the condemned worker has a brother, Conrad, who loves him deeply, but who is also hopelessly in love with his brother's wife. There is a pompous Communist leader in love with the ideas of Equality and The People, not so much the people themselves. And a reporter who has invented so many lives for himself that he sometimes forgets which is the real one.

This is Greeneland; there are no happy endings waiting for anyone. Instead, there are questions to trouble the conscience. Conrad is the main character in the book, his thoughts laying out the major themes. Jim received a poor defense, the lawyer himself barely cared. If he is reprieved, he will be in jail for 18 years. Who will support his young wife? How can she possibly be expected to be loyal to him, allowed to see him only once a month for all those years? With this kind of justice, is it better for Jim to hang, and free her, or to live on in prison, knowing that his beloved will betray him, again and again? Is the equality for Everyman that Communism promises at meetings a possibility, or a fantasy to keep the worker occupied while the real powers, people with money and influence and connections, blithely keep doing whatever it is they've always done?

This is a beautiful, bitter little story. GG worked as a sub-editor at the Times, and in some ways, this is a love letter to London at this particular time in his life. The gifts of his compassion, his sympathy for all victims, and the beauty of his language are all very much on display here. It's a Battlefield may not be one of GG's major books, but it's a terrific snapshot of the concerns and anxieties consuming pre-World War II England, full of passions and ideas to stir the heart.

I read this somewhat early novel by Graham Greene half expecting to find it slow going, but I was pleasantly surprised by the effective, dramatic development of the story, which centers around the people who know a bus driver held for murder.

Various characters are more or less involved in the following incident: Jim Drover, a communist bus driver, killed a policeman during a riot at Hyde Park Corner because he thought that the policeman was going to attack his wife Milly. He is now in prison sentenced to death. Milly lives in a shabby, droughty house and although she loves his husband, she starts an affair with Jim's brother Conrad, a chief clerk at the Regal Assurance Company. Conrad is unsure whether, provided that Jim's appeal is successful, the alternative of spending 18 years in prison is a better one to being executed. In any case, his depression and hatred lead him to buying a gun and trying to kill the Assistant Commissioner without realising that the bullets in the guns are blanks. Then there is Mrs Coney, the dead policeman's wife, forced by Milly to sign a petition to save Jim from execution. And Kay Rimmer, Milly's sister, a worker at a match factory, a prostitute of sorts who frequently visits Mr Surrogate, writer of books of economics and socialist idealism.
If "it's a battlefield", the reader may wonder what those protagonists are fighting for. Although Mr Greene casts a critical glance at institutions such as the Scotland Yard, trade unions, politics or the law, the characters' actions often appear to be meaningless. But perhaps this is the author's point: whatever the battle, one struggles in vain... "Brighton Rock" or "The Human Factor" are more carefully constructed novels in which Graham Greene showed his talent as a novelist.

The story was very stupid, I was not able to understand anything. There are so many different places where the story plays that you have to take care not to fall asleep. The main person Drover, who killed a police officer, never appears. For me the book was a nightmare to read.