#GREENE_Graham

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Nobel Laureates Few People Now Read

R.F.A. Sully-Prudhomme French poet and first Nobel Laureate (1901)

Jose Echegaray y Eizaguirre Spanish dramatist (1904)

Henrik Pontoppidan Danish novelist (1917)

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler Swiss poet (1919)

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont Polish novelist (1924)

Erik Axel Karlfeldt Swedish poet (1931)

Frans Eemil Sillanpää Finnish novelist (1939)

Par Fabian Lagerkvist Swedish novelist and poet (1951)

Salvatore Quasimodo Italian poet (1959)

Yasunari Kawabata Japanese novelist (1968)

Among the rather better-known writers who were nominated for the prize but didn’t win were: Joseph Conrad    Henry James    Marcel Proust    F. Scott Fitzgerald    Virginia Woolf    Graham Greene   

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Spies and Double Agents

Ted Allbeury, The Secret Whispers

Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy

James Buchan, Heart’s Journey in Winter

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

Frederick Forsyth, The Fourth Protocol

Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul

Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

John Kruse, The Hour of the Lily

John Le Carré, The Perfect Spy

Gavin Lyall, Spy’s Honour

W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden

Anthony Price , The Labyrinth Makers

Ruth Rendell, Talking to Strange Men

Hardiman Scott & Becky Allan, Bait of Lies

See also: ACTION THRILLERS    HIGH ADVENTURE    HISTORICAL ADVENTURE    WAR: BEHIND THE LINES   

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CONRAD, Joseph

Polish/British novelist (1857-1924)

Born in Poland, Conrad ran away to sea at 17 and ended up a captain in the merchant navy and a naturalised British subject. He retired from the sea at 37 and spent the rest of his life as a writer. There was at the time (1890s--1910s) a strong tradition of sea-stories, using the dangers and tensions of long voyages and the wonders of the worlds sailors visited as metaphors for human life. Most of this writing was straightforward adventure, with little subtlety; Conrad used its conventions for deeper literary ends. He was interested in driven' individuals, people whose psychology or circumstances force them to extreme behaviour, and the sea-story form exactly suited this idea. His books often begin as yarns', set in exotic locations and among the mixed (and mixed-up) human types who crew ocean-going ships. But before long psychology takes over, and the plot loses its straightforwardness and becomes an exploration of compulsion, obsession and neurosis.

HEART OF DARKNESS  (1902) This 120-page story begins as a yarn': Marlow, a sea-captain, tells of a journey he once made up the Congo river to bring down a stranded steamer. He became fascinated by stories of an ivory-merchant, a white man called Kurtz who lived deep in the jungle and was said to have supernatural powers. Marlow set out to find Kurtz, and the journey took him deeper and deeper into the heart not only of the Dark Continent', but into the darkness of the human soul. (Francis Ford Coppola's 1970s film Apocalypse Now updated this story to the Vietnam War, making points about US colonialism as savage as Conrad's denunciation of the ivory-trade).

Conrad's major novels are Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. His short-story collections (an excellent introduction to his work) are Tales of Unrest, Youth, Typhoon, A Set of Six, Twixt Land and Sea, Within the Tides and Tales of Hearsay.

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Typhoon (which deals with corruption and exploitation of a different kind, this time using as its metaphor a passenger steamer caught in a typhoon in the China Sea);

The Secret Agent (about the conflict between innocence and corruption among a group of terrorists in 1900s London)

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World is an sf novel of Conradian intensity. Lionel Davidson, Making Good Again Robert Edric, The Book of the Heathen a modern novelist examines Conradian themes in the Conradian setting of 1890s Belgian Congo). Graham Greene, The Comedians John Kruse, The Hour of the Lily Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Foretopman Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

 more :Tags  Pathways  Themes & Places

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THEROUX, Paul

US novelist and non-fiction writer (born 1941)

Some of Theroux's most enjoyable books are about travelling: The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, The Kingdom by the Sea, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Happy Isles of Oceania, The Pillars of Hercules and Dark Star Safari. In all of them the narrator, the writer himself, feels detached, an observer of events rather than a participant - and the same is true of the people in Theroux's novels. They live abroad, often in the tropics; like the heroes of Graham Greene (the author Theroux most resembles) they feel uneasy both about the society they are in and about themselves; they fail to cope. The hero of Saint Jack (1973), a US pimp in Singapore, hopes to make a fortune providing rest and relaxation for his servicemen compatriots, but the pliability of his character makes him the prey for every con-man and shark in town. In The Mosquito Coast (1981) an ordinary US citizen, depressed by life, uproots his family and tries to make a new start in the Honduran jungle, with tragic, farcical results. Picture Palace (1978) is the life-story of a famous photographer who has hidden all her life behind her camera, reduced existence to images on film, and now, in withered old age, agonisingly contrasts her memories of youth, warmth and affection with the dusty prints which are all she has to show for them.Honolulu Hotel (2001) is an episodic novel set in a rundown hotel in Hawaii. The manager is an unsuccessful writer, battling with the personal demons that beset so many of Theroux’s charac- ters, who acts as witness to the tragi-comedies and mini-dramas that unfold in the seedy rooms of the hotel.

MY SECRET HISTORY  (1989) André Parent is an American writer, born at the time of the second world war, randy for women and hot for every experience the world can offer. He teaches in Africa, writes novels and stories, makes a fortune from a travel book. He fulfils his adolescent ambition, to fuck the world', only to find that he has lost moral identity. The book is wry, funny, and no comfort to Americans, intellectuals, writers, the middle-aged, or indeed anyone else at all.

Theroux’s other novels include Waldo, The Family Arsenal, Doctor Slaughter, Chicago Loop, Millroy the Magician, an acid science fiction fantasy O-Zone, My Other Life (a kind of companion to My Secret History), Kowloon Tong, The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro and Blinding Light. Sinning With Annie, The Consul’s File and The London Embassy are collections of short stories. Fresh Air Fiends is a collection of travel essays; Sir Vidia’s Shadow is a memoir of Theroux’s 30-year friendship (now ended) with V.S. Naipaul, horribly compelling in its revelations of the insecurities and jealousies of the literary life.

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To My Secret History : John Fowles, Daniel Martin Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul

To Theroux's novels in general : William Boyd, Stars and Bars Timothy Mo, Sour-Sweet P.H. Newby, Leaning in the Wind

To the travel books : Jonathan Raban, Coasting Colin Thubron, Behind the Wall V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers

To O-Zone : Robie Macauley, A Secret History of Time to Come

To the short stories : Lawrence Durrell, Antrobus Complete

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1984

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)

Maxim Gorky, Foma Gordeev  (underbelly of Tsarist Russia in decline)