Graham Greene (1) (1904–1991)

The more I do not read Contemporary Fiction, the more important the predecessors become. Case in point: Graham Greene. Never has the degradation of every but one of the dramatis personae been so trepidatiously depicted. Imagine someone writing in those years between the apexes of Hammett and Chandler, a British Catholic, setting his terrors at the most cliched of sites, the seaside resort. Impotent wanna-be gangsters collide with both semi-professionals and well-meaning interlopers. Being me, I knew how it all would end. Graham Greene proved me very wrong, to my delight.… (more)

Graham Greene is, of course, more celebrated for his fiction than for anything else, but this, a book of travel writing as he made his way through Sierra Leone and Liberia, is a masterpiece of the genre and as worth reading today as when it was published. I haven't visited either of these countries myself, but I am familiar with the discomforts of exploring Africa - I wove my way from Ghana to South Africa overland more than a decade ago - and so much of what Greene writes rings true: the illness, the dirt, the lack of food, but also the warmth of the people he met, and the beauty of the places he saw.… (more)