The literary style of Graham Greene was one of the most recognizable writing styles in twentieth-century English literature. The
novels are written in lean, realistic prose, having clear, exciting plots (avoiding
modernist experimentation, which might account for his popularity), and using cinematic visual sense in description. Yet, he concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives, the mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. Usually, they are deeply troubled with internal, existential struggles, are world-weary, and cynical, finding themselves rootlessly existing in seedy and sordid circumstances. The stories usually occurred in poor, hot, and dusty tropical backwaters in countries such as
Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and
Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.
The novels of Graham Greene often had religious themes at the centre. In his
literary criticism, he attacked most
modern literature for having lost the religious sense and for lacking such themes, which he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters who:
wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin. Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul carrying the infinite consequences of
salvation and
damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the fallen world Greene depicts, and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin and doubt. Indeed,
V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since
Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil.
The novels often powerfully portray the Christian drama of the struggles within the individual soul from the Catholic perspective. Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction — in the world, sin is omnipresent to the degree that the vigilant struggle to avoid sinful conduct is doomed to failure, hence, not central to holiness. Friend and fellow Catholic writer
Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the
Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologian
Hans Urs von Balthasar as giving sin a mystique.
Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents. Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view, by Edward Short, is in
Crisis magazine
http://www.crisismagazine.com/april2005/feature2.htm, and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by
Joseph Pearcehttp://www.catholicauthors.com/greene.html.
Catholicism's prominence decreased in the later writings. The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and was replaced with a
humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching. Left-wing political critiques assumed greater importance in his novels, for example, he attacked the
American policy in Vietnam in
The Quiet American; the tormented believers portrayed were more likely to have faith in
Communism than in Catholicism. Critics usually agree, however, that his profound novels are the early ones wherein Catholicism has a major role.
Unlike other "Catholic writers" such as
Evelyn Waugh and
Anthony Burgess, Greene's politics were always left-wing, though some biographers think politics mattered little to him. In his later years, he was a strong critic of
American imperialism, and supported the
Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, whom he had met. For Greene and politics, see also Anthony Burgess
Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene In
Ways of Escape, reflections of his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing when compared with Cuba's . In Greene's opinion, “Conservatism and Catholicism should be .... impossible bedfellows”. .
Nonetheless, despite his seriousness, Graham Greene greatly enjoyed parody, even of himself. In 1949, when the
New Statesman magazine held a contest for parodies of Greene's distinctive writing style, he submitted a pseudonymous entry and won second prize; the first prize was awarded to a parody entered by his younger brother
Hugh.
The resulting work,
The Stranger's Hand, was later completed by another writer and cinematically rendered by the Italian film director
Mario Soldati. In 1965, Greene again entered a similar
New Statesman Graham Greene writing style parody contest, again pseudonymously, and that time won an honourable mention.
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