Well, this is bit strange. Apparently I can buy two books about the life of Graham Greene, both by the same author - Richard Greene. One is called "The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene" (512 pages) published Nov 2020 [1] and the other is called "Russian Roulette: A brilliant new life of Graham Greene" (602 pages) published Sep 2020 [2].
Yep, it was retitled for the US market. That, incidentally, happened with a number of Greene's earlier novels (A Gun for Sale, for example, became This Gun for Hire). Later U.S. editions restored the original titles. Interestingly, a request from the publisher to retitle his late novel, The Human Factor, led to Greene changing publishers so while everything before that was published by Viking Penguin, beginning with The Human Factor, his U.S. publisher was Simon & Schuster (and later Reinhardt Books, owned by a friend, for his last novel and the miscellaneous books that gathered many of his uncollected shorter writings).
> When Kim Philby was reviled as a mole for the USSR at MI6 (where he had been Greene’s drinking buddy and supervisor), Greene was the only notable British figure to visit the disgraced Philby in Russia, or attend his funeral in 1988. As Beatrice Severn declares near the end of Greene’s funniest novel, Our Man in Havana (1958): “I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations.… Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
> an NKVD agent and vice-consul in Istanbul, requested political asylum in Britain ... [and] ... offered the names of three Soviet agents inside Britain, two of whom worked in the Foreign Office and a third who worked in counter-espionage in London.
> Philby was given the task of dealing with [the NKVD agent] by British intelligence. He warned the Soviets of the attempted defection and travelled personally to Istanbul – ostensibly to handle the matter on behalf of SIS but, in reality, to ensure that Volkov had been neutralised.
What a nice guy that Philby, indeed so very "loyal to love".
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" was a thinly fictionalized retelling of this period. John le Carré's contempt for the people in the organizations he wrote about could be seen as a reaction to the excesses of the era Greene wrote about.
Perhaps by necessity, these aren't good people. The le Carré view can be summarized as, for that business you need people who only need the justification of the approval of their handler (and maybe a few dollars) or a story about being aligned to a secret power to release their inborn urge to be an utter piece of shit. He describes a world of compromised people, working and blackmailing each other all the way down. That they often use investment banking and journalism as a cover is no accident. I found his books more entertaining.
Greene covered much of the same ground in The Human Factor. I find Greene to be the more edgier cynic on intelligence agencies. Human Factor is ultimately more profound than Tinker, Tailor..
Amazing that it was even filmed in its time; today I don't it would be greenlighted.
Greene is certainly a more literary writer with more human insight, and le Carré would be more plot driven. I read Havana, Brighton, and Quiet American decades ago now. Genre wise, Alan Furst apparently took up the gauntlet, but his characters seemed like unmemorable plot devices to me.
Graham Greene is my favorite writer. Somewhere in his autobiographies (perhaps "A sort of life") he mentions a Swiss teacher who counted words in a sentence always trying to reduce them. Greene says it had tremendous influence on his writing.
An example of such economical sentences is in the preface of A Sort of Life on why an autobiography is somewhat limited versus biographies- "it begins later and ends prematurely."
Off-topic, but did anyone else see this entire thread previously? All of the comments here are listed as posted "3 hours ago", but I'm pretty sure I saw them all much more than 3 hours ago?
This was posted yesterday and I believe it was 're-upped' by HN admins which happens occasionally to posts that I assume they believe would receive more attention if posted at another time. I did not notice the comments at the time and so cannot confirm or deny your theory about the comments. I had assumed that comments to 're-upped' posts (my term, probably not correct) did not accompany the post, but I may be wrong.
Ah, if I access these comments from the comments pages of the users who posted them, the "3 hours ago" timestamp becomes "1 day ago", so that seems to resolve things. Thanks!
Which one do I buy?
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unquiet-Englishman-Life-Graham-Gree...
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russian-Roulette-Times-Graham-Green...