Loving Graham Greene

This short book packs much more of a whallop than all the self-indulgent, over-written books all too prevalent these days. I had just finished Atwood's The Blind Assasin (a book three times longer than it needed to be--assuming it needed to be at all) when I read this. What refreshment it was! It's not too short, but perfect in its economy. It's the story of a wealthy, earnest woman seeking to do good in this troubled world by taking as her model the life and works of Graham Greene, who she met briefly and corresponded with excessively. (The aging author must have questioned the outcome of his life's work and resulting fame by this exhausting and passionate fan.) Gloria Emerson tells her story in a way that is funny, precise, and wise. A group of well-intentioned meddlars with lofty aims muddle through Algeria, attempting to liberate a politically incorrect writer. All are presented with clear eyed irony, precise and telling characterization. It's sufficient to say that their misguided innocence makes an even greater mess of things in Algeria. Read it and find more. Loving Graham Greene made me want to return to the novels of the master. He would have been proud.

I really enjoyed this well-written, brief story. The tale of Molly Benson, the spacey Graham Greene-obsessed do-gooder and her ill-advised trip to Algeria is entertaining and amusing. Gloria Emerson has a knack of drawing characters with obvious and amusing flaws, without making her narrative or characterization seem obvious, contrived or hackneyed. This is a short novel, one that you can enjoy in a few gulps, but you won't get the sense of being cheated. Molly is quite a character. She met Graham Greene, briefly, once and from that meeting believed, in her own mind that she and Greene were quite close. After his death, she believes he would have wanted her to lead an expedition to Algeria and she drags a couple of her friends there. Molly lives in a world of delusion. You'll read about her and think, "This woman is a little nuts, the world is simply not as she imagines it". Her life is both funny and sad. Funny in that her delusions lead her to do amusing things, sad in that she has the delusions at all. I think, though, that most will find slivers of themselves in her, for who doesn't act believing in something that just is not true, or won't happen, out of sheer hopefulness. Emerson has given us an amusing character study and a very well-written novel. Enjoy.

In a tapestry of made-up minds, honest reporters live at risk. Gloria Emerson was such a reporter in Vietnam and in Gaza. She pays affectionate tribute to perhaps the greatest thriller writer in "Loving Graham Greene" by sending quirky heiress Molly Benson, the female protagonist Greene never attempted, to a doomed Algeria to hire bodyguards for honest journalists. Like many Greene characters, Benson is a decent person over her head amid evil, whose good works do harm. Her reporter's eye and ear won Emerson's "Winners and Losers" the National Book Award with telling details like the GI who looked in a mirror and said, "I had no idea who that was." Her writing skills turn a clever conceit into a brilliant novel. The determined Molly Benson and her companions are richly-drawn characters in a sparse world of countervailing menaces, the police state versus Islamic fundamentalism. The civil war in the shadows tightens its noose as the innocents look for ways to save the outspoken. The naïve, half-informed Pyle in Greene's "The Quiet American" was "impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance." Emerson's Benson has a capacity to understand there is a great deal she doesn't understand. She's an ironic, irritating heroine - a tall, middle-aged, ferociously liberal woman whose brother Harry was a reporter martyred in El Salvador. Molly knows every book Greene ever wrote, down to the names of the dogs, met him once by chance, pestered him with letters and undertakes her mission to carry on his spirit and Harry's after their deaths. Emerson writes with a scalpel dipped in ink, every detail as perfect as the story and characters. This funny, literate thriller is tribute to the power of the word to inspire action in the face of despair.