what was graham thinking? what was I thinking to finish it? ( )

No, no, no, no, no.
Just when I thought Greene had begun to find his stride as a writer and that The Heart of the Matter really was his worst book, England Made Me proves me wrong. There are some great passages - all mostly within the first 30 pages - and then it is downhill from there....plot-wise. Because the story became so boring that I still have problems recollecting what actually happened. And I only just finished the book.
On the positives: Whatever happened between 1934 and 1935, Greene has now realised that female characters are also three-dimensional individuals, and that portraying women in novels as cliched side-kicks is best left to the Ian Flemings* of this world.
"It was true, she always knew; she was his elder by half an hour; she had, she sometimes thought with a sense of shame, by so little outstripped him in the pursuit of the more masculine virtues, reliability, efficiency, and left him with what would have served most women better, his charm."

(* I am aware of the anachronism - but can't help myself comparing Greene and Fleming from time to time.)

Review first posted on Booklikes - http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/981488/england-made-me ( )

Boring. ( )

A gripping story with Greene's usual sympathetic portrayals of characters caught out of their depth by circumstances. Anthony Farrant, a ne'er-do-well adventurer, finds himself employed by a Swedish tycoon, through the influence of his sister who is the tycoon's secretary and mistress. All of them and a few members of the press for good measure, find themselves sliding into dangerous areas, resorting to treachery and deceit. The writing has Green's usual taut control, oddly marred here by a couple of extraneous excursions into 1930s modern experimentation - stream of conscious, mosaic. ( )

When Green's great, he's amazing - as in The Power and the Glory. When he's bad, as in The Captain and the Enemy, he's utterly atrocious. I thought this closer to the second for most of the book, but then realized that I'd just been misled. The blurb made it sound like a potboiler (the blurb ends with an ellipses, for goodness' sake), and the characters' names make it read like a potboiler ('Krogh'? 'Minty'?). But it's not a potboiler. And it's been ruined for me forever now. But if you like grim reflections of life, you'll like this. Just ignore the blurb and the silly names. ( )