Graham Greene (1) (1904–1991)

“She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me.”

I love a good love story full of moral ambiguity and gray areas. This book, my first by Greene, had all the makings of a 4 star book through the half-way mark of the tale. Love, lust, deceit, anguish -- that perfect cocktail for an intriguing book. Graham's prowess with his prose added to the enjoyment. However, around the 50% mark, the book veered into an odd philosophical direction. By the end of the book the plot had "jumped the shark" and was downright loopy.

I listened to a newish recording narrated by Colin Firth. Now, Mr. Firth could read the phone book and still have it sound more enticing than several books on the market. His narration was second to none, but it couldn't completely save the bizarre plot direction of this book.

3 stars… (more)

I didn't like this book. I didn't like any of the characters (not characters, really, but stereotypes that fell flat), I didn't care for the plot, and I didn't like all the digressions which is what the book really was about. I did enjoy some of the descriptions, especially Coral's assessment of Czinner, "She thought of him now as one of the untidy men who paraded on Saturday afternoons in Trafalgar Square bearing hideous banners: 'Workers of the World, Unite,'... They were the killjoys, who would hang the rich and close the theaters and drive her into dismal free love at a summer camp ... " In fact, Czinner turns out to be less of a revolutionary and more of a lost soul, trying to make the world better for the underdog, hoping at least for a hero's death, and yet someone who couldn't care less about helping the innocent young working-class woman whom he dragged into his mess. I didn't like the antisemitism, which is discussed and excused in Christopher Hitchens' introduction. Hitchens says that everyone did it in the 20s and 30s. He also says that in the second edition of Brighton Rock Greene edits "to make the racetrack gangs seem somewhat less palpably Semitic, and he presumably would not have done this unless prompted by some sort of uneasy conscience" never considering that maybe he did it because of public or editorial pressure. Greene conceived this work as an "entertainment" and hoped it would become a film. It did. I won't be seeing it.… (more)