The Quest for Graham Greene: A Biography

Graham Greene (one of my favorite novelists) was one of the most secretive men in modern letters, some of that because of his spy work in M16 in England, but much of it just because it was his nature. (It seems he enjoyed pitting friends and acquaintances against each other secretly and then watching them go after each other.) Thus many gaps appear in Greene's biography. West found a bunch of papers and letters belonging to a Greene colleague and thought they revealed some of the missing links in Greene's life. Scouring Greene's novels carefully for clues about his life and pouring over private archives also provided information about Greene's behavior and beliefs. Kind of. Greene was so secretive that even this doesn't seem to lead to much, and some of what West reveals comes across as a mountain made out of a molehill. Greene was a communist who believed Catholicism and Marxism shared a close affinity. He was also exiled from England in the mid-1960s, the details of which still remain under a cloud. He held very strong anti-American views, probably expressed most vigorously in his novels about Indo-China (THE QUIET AMERICAN) and Cuba (OUR MAN IN HAVANA). West's chief purpose in writing the book is to fill in gaps left in other biographies of Greene. It's helpful to know what these other biographers (mainly Norman Sherry and Michael Sheldon) have written before much of what West portrays can seem relevant. Though interesting for the most part in its own way, readers should start with those other biographers before reading West.

One of the weaknesses of Sherry's biography of Graham Greene is the additional information which has come to light since he began writing. This, in part, explains the fact that between the publication of the first and second volumes, the size of the work had expanded to three volumes with the second volume being far more detailed than the first. In writing this work, West has come at it with the view that his readers would likely be familiar with the other biographies and makes frequent reference to them (including scathing rebuttals to claims made in Shelden's travesty of a biography). This ends up creating a work which helps fill in the gaps that were unavoidable in Sherry volume 1 and makes this an essential companion to Sherry's work for the serious Graham Greene scholar (or fan).