Greene’s novels deal with real life burning problems. His observations are concentrated on the actual details of poverty and misery. The author penetrates into weak spots in the capitalist world, does not try to find out the reasons for the evil he sees. Social conditions are shown only as a background to his novels. Neither does he try to comprehend the causes of spiritual crises experienced by his contemporaries.

Life of Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born in 1904. He was educated at an English School, the head-master of which was his father. His childhood was not at all happy; he describes this period of his life as “…something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way”.

In 1922 Greene became a student of Balliol College, Oxford. At the age of twenty-two he became sub-editor on the staff of a newspaper The Nottingham Guardian. It was during this period that his first novel, The Man Within, was written. From 1930 onwards his work as a novelist has been steady and continuos. In 1940 he became literary editor of the spectator and the year following entered the Foreign Office. During World War II Greene spent some years in Africa. It had been his cherished desire from childhood to see that continent.
In 1944 he wrote for an anti-fascist journal which was illegally published in France.

Literary Work

Some bourgeois critics class Greene among the ‘modernists’. They substantiate their classification by the fact that Greene’s works, like those of modernists, are marked by disillusion, skepticism and despair, and that the themes employed by Greene and the modernists are much the same. These critics fail to understand the real nature of Greene’s pessimism, which rests upon a deeply-rooted sympathy for mankind, a sympathy not to be found in the modernists.

Though Greene, like the modernists, deals with the problem of crime, his approach to it is quite different. Unlike the modernists, who are mostly interested in the description of the crime itself, Greene investigates the motives behind the crime. He gives a deep psychological analysis of his criminals by investigating the causes that led to murder.

According to his own words, Greene wants to make the reader sympathize with people who don’t seem to deserve sympathy. The author tries to prove that a criminal may possess more human qualities, that is to say, may sometimes be better at the core, than many a respectable gentleman. He doesn’t, however, always succeed in giving a truthful interpretation of the motives of the crime he deals with, though in his later works his approach to the subject becomes more realistic. He shows the corrupting influence of capitalist civilization on human nature, and tries to prove that many of the bad qualities in a person are the natural result of cruel, inhuman conditions of life.

Though crime and murder, the problem of ‘the dark man’, motivate many of Greene’ s works, the main theme of his novels is pity for man struggling in vain against all the evils of life; his longing for sympathy, love and friendship; his striving for happiness, which is inevitably doomed to failure.

In the thirties Greene’s protest against human suffering brought him to Catholicism, but he did not become a true Catholic. His novels The Heart of the Matter, A Burn-Out Case, The Comedians and many others reject the dogmas of Catholicism, and his talented realistic descriptions are more convincing than his ideology and Philosophy.
In The Heart of the Matter, a true Catholic, Scobie, commits suicide when he becomes aware of the fact that the church cannot free people from suffering. For this idea the novel was condemned by the Vatican.

Greene is known as the author of two genres – psychological detective novels or ‘entertainments’, and ‘ serious novels’, as he called them. The main theme of both genres is much the same (the problem of ‘the dark man’, deep concern for the fate of the common people. But in the ‘serious novels’ the inner world of the characters is more complex and the psychological analysis becomes deeper.