The use of key‐words in the novels of Graham Greene—: Love, Hate and ‘The End of the Affair’

Extract

‘Every creative writer worth our consideration.......is a victim: a man given over to an obsession’, wrote Graham Greene in an essay on Walter de la Mare. Critics have not been slow in applying this statement to Mr Greene himself. He has been considered almost exclusively in terms of a few recurring obsessions: the vision of evil; the concept, borrowed from Peguy, of the sinner at the heart of Christianity; the theme of pursuit, and so on.

This critical approach has contributed much that is valuable to the study of his work. Unfortunately it has, by obscuring its variousness, inadvertently supplied ammunition to those critics who like to dismiss him as a mere manipulator of rigid and repetitive formulae. We can, for instance label both The Confidential Agent and The Power and The Glory as ‘Pursuit’ novels. But this does not take us very far. Apart from the fact that The Confidential Agent is an ‘Entertainment’, and The Power and The Glory a ‘Novel,’ the two books are of course entirely different. To determine the identity of each we must probe deeper than the obsessive symbol of pursuit, to the obsessive word. The key-word in The Confidential Agent is ‘trust’, presented mainly in its negative aspect as ‘mistrust’ or ‘distrust’. These three words occur at least sixteen times in The Confidential Agent. The irony of its title is therefore clear: the hero is a confidential agent who has confidence in nobody, and in whom nobody has confidence.