Customer Reviews

The Third Man and The Fallen Idol

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The Third Man, written originally as the outline for the screenplay of Carol Reed's famous 1949 film of the same name, is set in occupied Vienna just after World War II. The sectors established by the conquering British, Americans, French, and Russians contribute to an atmosphere of tension and mystery, and an almost palpable aura of menace as residents and visitors alike must deal with four different governments, four sets of officials, and four collections of laws as they move throughout the city.

Rollo Martins, an author of cowboy novels, arrives in Vienna to visit an old school friend, Harry Lime, only to find that he has arrived on the day of Lime's funeral. Investigating Lime's death, Martins learns that a neighbor saw the traffic accident that killed Lime and observed three men carrying Lime's body from the scene. Only two of those men have been identified--the third man has vanished.

As Martins investigates Lime's death, the novel is by turns exciting and darkly humorous, intensely visual in its descriptions and action, but lacking the characterization and thematic focus which one associates with most of Greene's work. The novella is full of wit and dark theatrics, and includes everything from a chase through the sewers to a love story.

The Fallen Idol, sometimes known as "The Basement Room," is, by contrast, a psychological, rather than plot-based story. Nine-year-old Philip, who idolizes the family's butler Baines, since his parents pay little attention to him, is left with Baines and his wife while the parents go on vacation. Baines is having an affair, and Philip innocently discloses this to his wife.

The resulting confrontation results in an accident in which the wife ends up dead, and Philip, panicked, runs out, only to be picked up by a policeman, to whom another naive remark conveys the idea that Baines has murdered her. Irony and a delightfully drawn child's point of view (unusual for Greene) make The Fallen Idol one of Greene's more interesting and twisted stories.

Both The Third Man and The Fallen Idol led to film collaborations between Greene and director Carol Reed--The Fallen Idol in 1948, and Reed's more famous film of The Third Man in 1949. Dark humor, elaborate ironies, and surprising twists characterize both stories and show Greene to be a master manipulator of perceptions. Mary Whipple

As Graham Greene admits in the preface of the novella "The Third Man", this story 'was never written to be read but only to be seen'. When invite by director Carol Reed to write a screenplay, the British novelist decided to write a short story first and then develop the script. As he confess, it is too hard to write a movie without having worked on the story previously, because the movie depends also on characterization, mood and atmosphere, and these are hard to be captured in the first time in a screenplay.

"The Fallen Idol" on the other hand, was already a published story when Reed invited Greene to work in the screenplay. The writer suspected it wouldn't be a good movie, but accepted the 'challenge' due to the respected he had for the director.

Greene wrote "The Third Man" only as a blueprint for the script and, nevertheless, both story and movie are great. It is a novella with a little more than 100 pages, and yet largely entertaining, as the writer wanted it to be. Not many writers are capable of doing such a amazing story without pretension -- because it is not easy to acquire simplicity.

The plot is not complicated as well. A British writer arrives in the pos-War divided Vienna to meet an old friend, who turns out to be dead. But there are some suspicious events surrounding his death -- and he also has a gorgeous girlfriend, who is very sad. Rollo, the main character, ends up investigating the death and there comes many twists in the plot of the story.

"The Third Man" is a very short narrative, nevertheless, Greene succeeded in all he wanted. More than anything, the story has atmosphere. Vienna is destroyed, picking up the pieces -- so are the characters who are caught in a plot bigger than themselves. However much Rollo doesn't want to be involved with his friend's death -- he can't avoid due to the train of events that catch him.

The writing is Greene at his best. The plot is convincing and well built with tension and fun coming from every page. Although the novel is slightly different from the movie, fans of Carol Reed's genial "The Third Man" can't be disappointed with the short story that was the genesis of this that is considered the best British movie ever.

"The Fallen Idol" is even a shorter story, and Greene couldn't believe it could be translated into a movie. It is a good piece of writing with believable characters and an engaging plot. But, when compared to "The Third Man" it lacks energy -- but it is not really a problem, since Greene's writing are never bad.

The author states in the preface that "The Third Man" was never written to be read but only to be seen" which perhaps explains the sketchy treatment of characters throughout the story.At times I was confused by the various people in the book and had to reread some pages.The storyline was interesting and quite exciting and I look forward to seeing the film. The other story in the book,"The Fallen Idol",is only 30 pages long but Greene manages to convey a sinister atmosphere and great depth of characters-a very enjoyable story.

Mr Graham Greene's short novel is set in Vienna just before the end of the Second World War. The city is described as "smashed and dreary" and when the action starts, Vienna is still divided up in zones among the Four Powers: the Russian, the British, the American and the French zones. Rollo Martins's line is the writing of cheap paperback Westerns under the penname of Buck Dexter. Martins received an invitation from Harry Lime of the International Refugee Office to join him in Vienna. When Martins arrives at the Hotel Asoria, there is no Lime expecting him, but only a cryptic message for Mr Dexter from a man called Crabbin. Martins then decides to look for Lime's apartment, but once he arrives there, a neighbour, a Herr Kurz, informs him that Harry Lime is dead after having been run over by a car. The burial is to take place the same afternoon at Vienna's Central Cemetery. Martins goes to the ceremony and immediately after that, he is accosted by a man called Calloway, a policeman from Scotland Yard, who asks him if he knew Harry Lime.
This is the beginning of Graham Greene's classic espionage thriller, very well constructed with wonderfully drawn characters and a suspenseful plot.

On the backcover of the book:

THE THIRD MAN

Rollo Martins is invited by his school-friend hero, Harry Lime, to post-war Vienna, 'a smashed dreary city' occupied by four powers...

Everyone has a racket, but Martins learns that Lime 'was about the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living'. What's more, LIme has just been killed - by accident? The truth is almost more than Martins can stand...

THE FALLEN IDOL

Philip is a small boy left in a large Belgravia house with Baines, the butler, and 'thin, menacing, dusty' Mrs Baines. And Baines has a girl-friend. Soon Philip is 'caught up in other people's darkness...'

Greene writes in the preface that "The Third Man was never intended to be more than the raw materiall for a picture". Still, the novel is not lack of intricated plots, suspenses, character's thought processes, and Greene's typical sharp wits. The Fallen Idol was not written for the films. It is a short story with intensity and suspense: a boy got involved in the lives of adults.

Graham Greene is the master of suspense, even in these two rather short stories. That's all I have to say about this book.

Despite what other reviewers have written, The Third Man works first as literature. I know Vienna pretty well and am impressed at the desolate picture Greene creates of it--the smashed tanks and bombed buildings that turned the wintry city landscape into "great glaciers of snow and ice." The English pronunciation, "glassy-airs," makes the line read more smoothly than "glay-shurz." If Greene derided The Third Man in later years, the reason could be the pure artist's distrust of a work that achieves such phenomenal commercial success.
The Third Man is narrated by Colonel Calloway, a competent but world-weary, cynical police inspector of the British Occupation Army at the end of the Second World War. The problem for the American, Rollo Martins, in Calloway's opinion, is that Martins "believed in friendship, and that was why what happened later was a worse shock to him than it would have been to you or me." And then Calloway apologizes for being presumptuous about others' conceptions of friendship.
My copy of The Third Man arrived five days after I ordered it. I had to replace my old Pocket Book 1974 edition when I realized the Pocket Book editors had deleted Calloway's more trenchant observations of the Russian Occupation Army--as an arm of Stalin's foreign policy initiatives--in the spirit of "Detente," the policy of accomodation that characterized the early seventies, or until the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
But the Russians are portrayed only as boorish lackeys of a totalitarian state. The real evil is perpetrated mostly by ex-pat Americans led by Harry Lime and Colonel Cooler. In one remarkable passage, Greene describes Lime's evil as something out of Christopher Marlowe: "Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan--it carried the horrifying gift of eternal youth."
Odd to think of romance blossoming in such an environment. Greene describes Anna Schmidt, with her head bent against the chill winds, "a dark question mark on the snow."
The Third Man, a classic! (five stars)

Penguin has released a thin volume that contains Graham Greene's novella The Third Man and his short story The Fallen Idol. Moviemakers turned both of these works into successful films. I recommend this volume, though I enjoyed The Third Man much more than I enjoyed The Fallen Idol.

The Third Man is much more famous than The Fallen Idol. The novella concerns a hack writer who journeys to Vienna, Austria, to see a friend shortly after World War II. Once in Austria, the writer finds that his friend has died under mysterious circumstances. The writer begins to investigate and finds that his friend was involved in some repellent activities.

There are many things to like about The Third Man. Greene does a great job of evoking Vienna. Prior to reading the book, I was unaware that each of the four Allied Powers had governed part of Vienna after World War II; Greene weaves the post-war tensions among the Allies into his story. Greene also paints vivid images of Vienna as a cold, ruined city struggling through winter.

Another great aspect of The Third Man is its characters. Greene had a talent for writing about characters facing complex moral questions. Unlike so many other writers, Greene never gives his characters (and his readers) an "easy out"; whatever decision the character makes is bound to be imperfect and painful. The manner in which Greene's characters respond to these situations is both revealing and fascinating.

The publisher tacked on The Fallen Idol in an apparent effort to bulk up the book. (The Third Man is only 120 pages and The Fallen Idol is about 35 pages). I liked the plot of The Fallen Idol; in the story a young boy is exposed the failures and deceits of adults. The adults involve him in their affairs and the experience bruises the boy's psyche.

Though I thought that The Fallen Idol had great potential, I also thought that the story was "a near miss." Somehow, The Fallen Idol didn't draw me in completely. I was too aware that I was reading a story that Greene had contrived.

(As a final note, the book contains a preface for each of these stories. Readers should avoid reading these prefaces until after they have read the stories. Maddeningly, each preface contains some "spoilers" that may detract from the reader's enjoyment).

Readers who want to enjoy complex, literate stories of suspense, will find no better writer than Graham Greene.

Gobbled this twofer down on a transatlantic flight. Third Man is indeed inferior to the film, which Graham all but concedes upfront, introducing it as a workmanlike story written as a sketch for the movie. You just can't get Orson Welles' screen magnetism, Reed's elegant canted angles or the kickass zither from the page, and the movie's ending is just worlds better. But a good read nonetheless.

Fallen Idol is the real gem here. So lean and vivid. I love the feverish child-logic that drives it. Certain leaps and passages are a bit WTF? till you remember the driving consciousness is that of a 7 year old. Both stories hinge in different ways on children & disrupted innocence (with the image that fixes Lime's nefariousness in Rollo's mind in 3rd Man and the whole structure of Fallen Idol), which gives a smart thematic thrust to their collection together.

Ian Thomson's foreword [in the UK Random House edition, though possibly not in this item] is quite good too, calling the above disrupted innocence motif "an awareness of sin and human wretchedness that can be termed 'Catholic.'" It's everything an intro to a short little volume should be, chatty and stage-setting but deftly incisive: "Frontiers have a dynamism of their own in Greene's fiction: they set off a reflex of unease." Indeed.