The power and the glory novelist6/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() He was a journalist, a teacher, a converted Catholic, an Englishman in frequent exile, a screenwriter, an ambitious novelist, an author of “entertainments,” a spy, a sympathizer of guerrillas and dictators alike, and a man of deeply held moral beliefs. Greene, born 115 years ago today in Hertfordshire, lived a complex, globetrotting, ambivalent life. The literary work must be done swiftly, and to great effect, and there was no one for it like Graham Greene, a writer who could conjure up a life, a setting, a dilemma, and a worldview, all in a few neat lines. Although sci-fi and fantasy writers tend to get the nod as masters of the craft, world-building has long been a cornerstone of the thriller, especially the international thriller, that rarefied form in which a reader is dropped into a new terrain, a new culture, and has to learn to decipher its signs and signifiers well enough to know when the whole enterprise is being compromised. It’s no wonder that Graham Greene, a man who sampled so abundantly from life’s many offerings and made it a matter of constitutional pride never to turn down the chance of an adventure, excelled at what we now call world-building. ![]()
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