A book I read and its writer

A few years ago I read a book that sounded like an Autobiography. It turned out to be a book by Graham Greene. When I started reading it I didn’t know who Graham Greene was and I only read it because it was the only book available. It was more a recollection of his career than an autobiography, in any case, it was so well written that I thought I would read a novel by him so I bought Brighton Rock. There is something odd about Briton Rock but you can’t explain it exactly. But behind a veneer of normality, there is something bizarre.

While reading the book I wondered what it was. Was it illogical? Thought I but then I realized it was one of the most logical and well-crafted books I have ever read. Then I realized what it was - it was emotionally strange, almost all the characters seemed to have something emotionally wrong with them. The whole mood of the novel was bizarre, but it could not be defined. I wondered who on earth would have written such a novel and this is what I found out.

Graham Green (1904-1991) was an English novelist considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Both critically acclaimed and widely popular he earned a reputation as a great writer early on in his life, but strangely was never awarded the Nobel Prize. Greene considered himself a novelist who happened to be a Roman Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic novelist as some people liked to call him. Some of his novels are “The Power and the Glory”, “Brighton Rock”, “The Heart of the Matter” and “The End of the Affair”, “The Third Man”, “Our Man in Havana”, and “The Quiet American.” In all, he wrote more than 25 novels and other writings over a period spanning 67 years.

Graham Greene had bipolar disorder. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he wrote that he had “a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life” and “unfortunately the disease is also one’s material.” William Golding called Graham Greene “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.”