Graham Greene

[Scheherazade]

Is he the best British writer of the 20th century or what???

[Eiseabhal]

Well he's an interesting bigot.

[kev67]

My uncle liked Graham Greene. I have only read two of his books, Brighton Rock for school, an The Comedians (I think). He does not do it for me and I find that Roman Catholic stuff a bit wearing.

[Dreamwoven]

There was a TV programme on Greene last night on SVT channel 2, watched part of it.

[Emil Miller]

Greene is very much an acquired taste but once I had read Brighton Rock, I went on to read most of his other work. Being a convert to
catholicism he makes the religion a feature of some of his novels, as did another convert Evelyn Waugh. It probably does turn off some
readers but I found that the writing was so good that it didn't bother me unduly.

[Jackson Richardson]

Muriel Spark is a third RC convert for whom the religion is central, but never simplistically pious. (Waugh and Greene being the others.)

[Eiseabhal]

I spent part of my childhood in my Catholic grandparent's home and part with my Calvinist mother. Greene always makes the non-Catholic character the bad one. Perhaps that was because he was a convert. It left a bad taste in my mouth when I read him. But he is interesting. I made a point of reading a chunk of his work.

[nick mcglue]

Greene was excellent,but I'd rank a few over him:

Joseph Conrad (much better)
Virginia Woolf (much better)
Evelyn Waugh
J.G. Ballard
Salman Rushdie
Kazuo Ishiguro

And, if you were including Irish in British, we'd have to include James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and John Banville.

[MANICHAEAN]

It may be an acquired taste, but I've always appreciated the tortured Catholicism of Grahame Greene.

Instead of blindly accepting Church dogma he constantly questioned its validity in his novels.

My favourite book in fact is " The Power and the Glory" about the nexus of integrity that still existed within the " whiskey priest."