Right now, as I write this, I have just begun reading The Honorary Consul, a sweaty and stealthy thriller set in a quietly simmering riverside Argentinian town on the brink of revolution. It concerns a mistaken abduction that not only becomes a situation ripe for absurdist comedy but also a compelling debate for the very meaning of life. In other words, I have embarked on yet another life-altering adventure in the realm of Greeneland. And no, I don't mean the country that lies above the United States of America.
Unlike any alternate world that belongs only to the written word and vivid imagination of its creator, the world of Greeneland is nothing but the world around us, located in marked points on the world map and across the boundaries of the present and the past. And both the comic chaos and devastating pathos of this world is to be found in these places in those moments in history.
All this is possible, with such magnificent sleight hand, by the incredible storytelling powers of a real legend. Henry Graham Greene, also known as Graham Greene, was not just a peerless teller of thrillers that throbbed with almost palpable suspense and dread (that he called them 'entertainments' reveals how much he revelled in his inimitable craft) and devastating tales of the perennial conflict between good and evil, between sincere intention and the inevitable fallacy for sin but also, quite honestly, the most compellingly prescient and politically astute writer of the century, a storyteller who did not just tell fiction but told the truth that went beyond just facts that were reported in newspapers.
My first taste of Graham Greene was back when I knew next to nothing about him.
In 2012, the late Yash Chopra, yet another storyteller of consummate craft and uncanny subversion, gave us his swan-song, the not-so-warmly received Jab Tak Hai Jaan. The lavishly shot film was a middling affair at best, punctuated in memorable flashes with its director's signature strokes in romance and pulp but stretched beyond belief and yet, it has an interesting and uncanny connection with Greene's influence on the world. The leading lady of the film, Meera, played with insipid disinterest by Katrina Kaif, makes nevertheless a befuddling oath with God that she will leave her love Samar (Shahrukh Khan) if the latter protects him from harm. That moment of catharsis compels the embittered Samar to fight his own battle with God, a potentially dramatic narrative arc that could have done with more fireworks.
At the time, in my relatively tender age, I was astounded by this moral and spiritual conundrum. It was, thanks to a tweet by Shashi Tharoor, that I discovered that this came from a novel named The End Of The Affair and written by one Graham Greene. I longed, at that time, to discover it for myself but I was perhaps not that mature to appreciate the immaculate craft of a true artist of modern literature.
Five years later, in my hunger to discover Sir Carol Reed's deservedly lauded The Third Man, I was also driven ahead to discover Greene for the first time. I loved that brilliant, beautiful thriller for, among many things, the writer's superbly paced and unexpectedly poignant and witty script and I could not resist picking up Our Man In Havana, a rollicking lark set in that sultry yet seething Havana during the worst of Batista's tyranny. It was a deliciously preposterous yarn about a mild-mannered vacuum cleaner salesman who is forced to spy for Her Majesty's Secret Service and thus comes up with audaciously concocted fictions to keep his spymasters happy, till they come true. It is possibly, so far from experience, the lightest and most easily enjoyable of his novels and yet it is not hard to discern, beneath the breezy surface, sweltering darkness and much amorality thrust on people by their supposed allegiance to country and ideology.
If Greene could blend, so seamlessly, a light-hearted premise of cheeky satire with a very heightened sense of plausible menace, he could do anything, I felt. And so, the journey to the many marked locations of Greeneland began.
Much has been said about Greene being touted as a Catholic writer. It was a description that the writer himself disliked and with good reason. Indeed, it can be agreed that Catholic ideals of virtue, sin and redemption are prominently deconstructed in many of his works but his novels, themselves, are less about religion and more concerned with how mere mortals can be trapped in the warped wrangle of religion, ideology, vice and love and how they have to unravel the threads themselves to discover the meaning of their own existence. Not all of Greene's characters are Catholic or even atheists but they all argue inwardly, with fervent passion, about the very meaning of faith and the identity of God, as either a metaphysical force or an elusive deity, echoing the very real and believable pathos of every human being.
And what fascinating, indelible characters! Anti-heroes, brooding, burned-out men either committed to a relentless cycle of nihilism or cold-bloodedly cynical and forcefully indifferent to the workings of their own hearts. Women, given such blissfully free rein to follow their impulses, to take charge of the narrative and carved with both beauty and intelligence. Helpless, mild-mannered and well-intentioned people trapped in battlefields of religion, desire and redemption that demand moral compromises. And most unforgettably, flawed, failed, foolhardy yet dignified supporting players, characters who never remain on the periphery and who evolve, even with not-so-noble intentions, into fully fleshed human beings capable of not just empathy but compassion.
Be it the dreamy smuggler Carlyon of The Man Within, the slimy yet earnest smuggler Yusef of The Heart Of The Matter, the eponymous wet-behind-his-ears do-gooder Alden Pyle of The Quiet American or even the boastful and haplessly delusional Major Jones of The Comedians, these are not peripheral players in Greene's narrative but people of flesh and blood, both selfish and selfless, both flawed and surprisingly virtuous, which is what makes them endearing.
No other writer can give us such beautifully crafted heroes and heroines with such fascinating shades of both ambiguous grey and glowing white, from the perennially worried Jim Wormold in Our Man In Havana to the voluptuous Ida Arnold with her relentless quest for the ideal of justice in Brighton Rock, from the twisted vigilantism of Raven in A Gun For Sale to the confounding choice of penance of Sarah in The End Of The Affair.
And through it all, Greene has taken us on a whirlwind tour of the world around us, as seen and read about throughout the twentieth century. Dividing his oeuvre neatly between 'entertainments' and 'serious novels', the writer nevertheless blended both whip-cracking, lightning paced thrills, chills and spills with weightier themes and yet all his novels, even the more sobering works, are so wonderfully accessible and entertaining to all. And so much of his fiction reeks of not only comic punch or flawless tension and drama but also political prescience. Be it predicting astutely the disillusioned end of the Vietnam War a good two decades before the actual catastrophe or cautioning the world about the West' hypocrisy about apartheid in Africa, he was always more than willing to argue, to question and make more room for debate.
That, of course, does not ruin the magic of savouring his prose. The style is tight yet never stifling, the language elegant but never excessively verbose and the flow is so smooth and gripping that you will be compelled to turn pages even as you are astounded by how profound it all will feel. Greene also had an uncanny cinematic eye, which also explains why he scripted, with such relish, two of the greatest thrillers ever made and it is palpable in his books too, yet not in the picturesque way you would imagine. He describes the Sloppy Joe's Bar in Havana as desolate and without tourists in the city on the throes of revolution, he lingers, for unsettling, effect on the black glasses of a glaring Tonton Macoute in a stuffy office in Port-Au-Prince, he lets us taste and smell the mediocrity of a churchyard sale in a misty English town and he lets us marvel with wonder at the sights and sounds of the clockwork stalls at Brighton Pier.
My adventure in Greeneland is not yet finished. As said before, I am following him on his mesmerising trail of love, lust and machismo through humid Argentina but I am thinking of returning, across the border to Paraguay to conclude Travels With My Aunt,go up to Nicaragua with The Captain And The Enemy, then ride on the Stamboul Train and even be transported back in time to the panic-ridden nights of blitzed London, while being chased by The Ministry Of Fear. Blimey, I have not even visited Mexico to witness The Power And The Glory. So, I need to pack my bags yet again and forge on to these places to savour these experiences and to meet more of his compelling, indelible people with all their shades of Greene.
