Graham Greene:The Serious Entertainer

The book under review is a valuable addition in the existing critical scholarship in the field of Graham Greene’s criticism. The first three chapters of the book deal with the novelist’s life, his short stories and early novels. Siddiqi transports us to the fictional world of Greeneland. It is a typical place characterized by ‘the element of something that has gone wrong.’ Whatever may be the geographical location, this world of Greene is full of filth, disease, operations, seediness, corruption, death and decay. Though the novelist is aware of the evil forces in the modern world, he stresses the fact that man is not without the mercy of God. The book is a work of a scholarly teacher who has tried to examine the novels of Greene from a new perspective. In spite of having read enormous critical books and articles on Greene our critic has retained his originality. I feel his critical approaches are different from others. He assesses The Quiet American as the ‘most mature of all his works.’ Secondly he has examined ‘entertainments’ which, according to him, have artistic merits and this, I think, had gone unnoticed by the earlier critics.