Books in Brief: The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene

The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, by Marie-Françoise Allain (Simon & Schuster, 176 pp., $13.95)

Asked if he were disappointed at not winning the Nobel Prize last year, Graham Greene said no, he was waiting for an even bigger prize. Asked what that was, he replied, “Death.” This eschatological perspective is what we find in The Other Man, a new and rare collection of interviews with Greene by the French journalist Marie-Françoise Allain. “I am not a Catholic novelist,” Greene insists. “I am a novelist who happens to be Catholic. The theme of human beings lonely without God is a legitimate subject. To want to deal with that doesn’t make me a theologian.” Yet there is a preponderance of Catholic characters in Greene’s novels, from Brighton Rock to The Honorary Consul to Monsignor Quixote. And they are not Easter Sunday Catholics: Their lives are shaped by their interpretation, however skewed, of Christian verities. Catholicism gives Greene’s characters the peculiar moral force they embody. Greene says this is simply because “Human beings are more important to believers than they are to atheists.” This book reveals Greene as an artist mesmerized by the beauty and challenge of Catholicism (“The basic element I admire in Christianity is its sense of moral failure,” he tells Mme. Allain), for which he makes an aesthetic case in his novels, yet also as a man struggling to remain orthodox even as he is drawn toward Communism and what he calls “the dangerous edge of things”—the narrow boundary between loyalty and heresy, faith and skepticism, belief and rejection.

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.

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The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, by Marie-Françoise Allain (Simon & Schuster, 176 pp., $13.95)

Asked if he were disappointed at not winning the Nobel Prize last year, Graham Greene said no, he was waiting for an even bigger prize. Asked what that was, he replied, “Death.” This eschatological perspective is what we find in The Other Man, a new and rare collection of interviews with Greene by the French journalist Marie-Françoise Allain. “I am not a Catholic novelist,” Greene insists. “I am a novelist who happens to be Catholic. The theme of human beings lonely without God is a legitimate subject. To want to deal with that doesn’t make me a theologian.” Yet there is a preponderance of Catholic characters in Greene’s novels, from Brighton Rock to The Honorary Consul to Monsignor Quixote. And they are not Easter Sunday Catholics: Their lives are shaped by their interpretation, however skewed, of Christian verities. Catholicism gives Greene’s characters the peculiar moral force they embody. Greene says this is simply because “Human beings are more important to believers than they are to atheists.” This book reveals Greene as an artist mesmerized by the beauty and challenge of Catholicism (“The basic element I admire in Christianity is its sense of moral failure,” he tells Mme. Allain), for which he makes an aesthetic case in his novels, yet also as a man struggling to remain orthodox even as he is drawn toward Communism and what he calls “the dangerous edge of things”—the narrow boundary between loyalty and heresy, faith and skepticism, belief and rejection.

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.