It's a Battlefield [Hardcover]

Graham Greene (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: William Heinemann (1952)
• ASIN: B00150H25U
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Avoid Razorblades, September 12, 2000

By 

Adam Lampe (Darwin, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: It's a Battlefield (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great!, January 12, 2000

By 

Frank Bodmer (Aarau, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: It's a Battlefield (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful, bitter little story, May 23, 2010

By 

HMShankman (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: It's a Battlefield (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

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.