Customer Reviews

Ways of Escape & a Sort of Life

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because this book leaves me feeling that he felt his life was unreal and his fiction was real.

He lived in boredom punctuated by terror--manic/depressive, opium smoking, Russian roulette playing, suicidal.

Was he a spy, even after he left the Foreign Office? Was writing his cover for travel? Does boredom fully explain his uncanny knack for being in troubled places in troubled times?

No matter. He was a great stylist and craftsman. This autobiography (along with "A Sort of Life") is worth reading for his methods as a novelist and for portraits of friends, such as Waugh and Herbert Reed.

I'd have to agree with another reviewer who characterized this as "odd." Greene was apparently writing this in his 70s, and the prose isn't always as pellucid as one would wish. His writing career spanned roughly 1930 to 1980, and in spite of my cavil on the datedness of his style he is unarguably a major 20th century literary figure. (Apparently there's a huge 3-volume biography on him available.)
The essays really meander between the struggles he underwent in writing, his travels, his impressions of the political problems on the ground in Malaysia, Haiti, Vietnam and Cube between WWII and the 1970s.
It's full of juicy anecdotes, including his mixed experiences with Hollywood trying to bring some of his work to film. If you've enjoyed some of his novels (which, sadly, are dated as to style now, inevitably), you should pick this up from the library or a used book store and get some background on Greene's demons and motivations...