A Stone Unturned

Someone once described Graham Greene as the novelist of decolonizing Britain. England during and after the war and the imperial fall was his true subject, the uncut stone from which he chiseled his themes. Think of knob-kneed, lonely-hearted Wilson, the sunburned colonial officer in The Heart of

the Matter, which many consider Greene's most achieved novel, and the notion seems a natural. But what about the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, the messy domestic duplicity of the narrator in The End of the Affair, or the dog-walking double agent of The Human Factor? These are among the ranking inhabitants of Greeneland, as we've come to think of the territory, but fitting them into the thesis makes it seem reductive.

Is it, finally? Range through Greene's work and you begin to see the argument's validity. Greene's writing is all tied together by a running concern for a certain England at a certain time. His novels are maps for a journey through the moral, emotional and psychological terrain of a nation in triumph and decline at once--and then a nation re-encountering a world it so recently thought it had mastered. Between all the lines of all the histories to come, Greene may as well have advised us, this is the good and bad of who we were, this is how it looked from where we sat.

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