BIOGRAPHY: EAMON MAHERreviews Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and AuthorshipBy Michael G Brennan Continuum, 192pp. £19.99
AT THE TIME of his death, in 1991, Graham Greene was acclaimed as a writer whose religious sensibility imbued him with a unique ability to explore the dramas associated with faith. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1926, Greene, according to Michael G Brennan, “draws the reader into his sustained interrogation of the intellectual and spiritual demands of twentieth-century English Catholicism”. Rather than being peculiarly “English”, I find that his treatment of Catholicism has a more universal resonance. Issues like liberation theology, political espionage, religious persecution, the struggle between good and evil, hope and despair, love and betrayal are all explored in the fictions.
An avid traveller, Greene liked to experience new cultures, and his adventures deepened his understanding of human nature and broadened his literary scope.
Prof Brennan set himself the task of mapping the extent to which Greene’s fascination with religious faith impacted on his fictions. Greene always had difficulty with the label “Catholic writer” and preferred to describe himself as a writer who happens to be a Catholic. In spite of his protestations, one cannot avoid remarking on the central role that faith plays in his work. Brennan notes the telling comment Greene made to his future wife Vivien in 1925: “You see I haven’t the courage of my non-faith.” In this he echoes the dilemma of many of his characters.
Brennan has obviously studied all Greene's work in some detail. Although it is important to discuss the less-known works, it is the classics that will attract the interest of most readers. The publication of Brighton Rock, in 1938, first alerted the public to the arrival of a serious literary talent. The sinister main character, Pinkie, with his "soulless grey eyes" and homicidal tendencies, may not be in Brennan's view "irrevocably separated from Christian concepts of goodness and the possibility of Divine redemption".
Greene was undoubtedly influenced by the French writer Péguy, “who thought that he loved his fellow humans too much to see any of them eternally damned”.
Similarly, Greene had an affinity with sinners. Witness the alcoholic whiskey-priest in The Power and the Glory(1940) who leads a life that is far from exemplary. He fathered a daughter with his housekeeper and is conscious of his many shortcomings as a priest. But his continued commitment to his vocation in communist Mexico leads to his eventual capture and execution at the end of the novel. Grace works in strange ways, and Greene suggests that this flawed man may well be a saint.
Even more theologically problematic is Scobie, the hero or anti-hero of what is commonly considered Greene's masterpiece, The Heart of the Matter(1948). The epigraph to the novel quotes Péguy's statement that "the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. No one is as expert as the sinner on the subject of Christianity. No one except a saint".
Scobie slips into an adulterous affair out of pity more than lust, and he receives Holy Communion while in a state of mortal sin. In desperation he kills himself in the full knowledge that such an action will ensure his eternal damnation. However, Father Rank assures Louise, Scobie’s wife, that her husband “really loved God”. As so often happens in Greene’s work, the issue of the salvation or damnation is once more couched in doubt.
Writing about another of Greene's best-known novels, The End of the Affair(1951), Evelyn Waugh opined: "It is a book that only a Catholic could write and a Catholic could understand". Brennan's scholarly study manages to ensure that people of all faiths, and none, will be able to read Greene through new eyes and better understand his paradoxical relationship with Catholicism.
Eamon Maher's latest book, edited with John Littleton, is The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism?(The Columba Press)
