In the introduction to The Tenth Man (revised and published 1985, written 1940s), author Graham Greene said that in "1948 when I was working on The Third Man I seeme to have completely forgotten about a story called The Tenth Man which was ticking away like a time bomb somewhere in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in America."  He had written the story in story form as a basis for a screenplay, much like he did with other stories, but this one apparently slipped his mind.  It wasn't until 1983 that a stranger purchased the rights to the story and offered to let Greene revise it and publish it in novel (well, novella) form.  With most writers I would not be excited to read a story they themselves forgot about.  But from one of the best writers of the twentieth-century, I was more intrigued than put off. 

This is a short novel tightly packed into four parts.  The basic premise is this: thirty Frenchmen are in a German prison camp during Word War II.  Among them is "a Paris lawyer called Chavel, a lonely fellow who made awkward attempts from time to time to prove himself human."

I don't know how much work Greene put into revising the story, but when the book began I knew I was in good hands - it was so well put together.  The first small chapter introduces the characters and the prison, but it is focused on watches and time in general; the prison itself is almost incidental.  Two of the prisoners, one of them a mayor, have watches and they constantly bicker about whose has the correct time.  On this particular day, the mayor's watch stops because he forgot to wind it the night before.  It is incredibly amusing to read Greene's account of the mayor's anxiety about finding some privacy in a small prison to wind and set his watch without being noticed, and thus losing his clout as the keeper of the correct time. 

But that day was marked permanently in the mayor's mind as one of the black days of terrible anxiety which form a private calendar: the day of his marriage; the day when his first child was born; the day of the council election; the day when his wife died.

Though this is an amusing account, it is also a great vehicle Greene uses to describe the setting and mentality of the prisoners: "Prison leaves no sense unimpaired, and the sense of proportion is the first to go."

The tone of the book changes quickly when the guards come to tell the prisoners that three of them are to be executed the next morning - the prisoners can choose for themselves who it will be.  To accomplish this impossible decision the men draw lots. 

Some men drew the first slip which touched their fingers; others seemed to suspect that fate was trying to force on them a particular slip and when they had drawn one a little way from the shoe would let it drop again and choose another.

They draw lots in reverse alphabetical order, so one of the last to choose is a lawyer named Chavel.  It's a great scene as we watch Chavel calculate the odds.  First, 10:1.  Then the first to draw chooses the marked paper, so the odds suddenly change to a comfortable 14.5:1.  However, as more and more choose, the odds increasingly point to Chavel.  Of course, he draws the marked paper.  In a fit of anxiety Chavel offers all he has to someone willing to take his place.  Surprisingly, someone accepts.  Here the psychological story begins.

Philosophers say that past, present and future exist simultaneously, and certainly in this heavy darkness many pasts came to life: a lorry drove up the Boulevard Montparnasse, a girl held out her mouth to be kissed, and a town council elected a mayor; and in the minds of three men the future stood as inalterably as birth - fifty yards of cinder track and a brick wall chipped and pitted.

It seemed to Chavel now his hysteria was over that that simple track was infinitely more desirable after all than the long obscure route on which his own feet were planted.

It may seem like I've given away a lot of the novel, but this is merely the stage setup.  The rest of the novel is concerned with that "long obscure route" that Chavel has chosen.  But where most novelists would be content with this clever psychological game and would then simply show episodes where Chavel felt guilty or hollowed out, Greene explores so much more.  Sure, there's guilt and shame, but what about the possibility of love, of getting back all he signed away, of losing something even more valuable than his possessions and his life?  Of having the opportunity to sink even lower?

However, the joy of this short book is in the plot and the clever writing.  It's not a nuanced look at any psychological issues, politics, or anything else really.  Perhaps in preparation for filming, the scenes are basic, the characters few.  But despite that, it is densely packed and feels like a novel of more substantial size.  It goes without saying that if I'm this intrigued by a story that Greene forgot about, I'm in for a treat when I read the ones he didn't almost discard.

After you read the book:

I know Graham Greene was a bit annoyed at being categorized as a "Catholic writer" rather than as a writer who happened to be Catholic, but the ending of this novel makes it hard to escape that classification.  It was obvious the whole time that the book was moving toward Chavel's redemption by death, though the path was unclear.

Sadly, for me, the ending didn't excite me as much as the rest of the book.  It was a bit too convenient for my taste.  And now I'm thinking of another "Catholic" writer whose stories always moved toward redemption but whose endings were less . . . uh . . . convenient: Flannery O'Connor.  Remember the ending to "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," "Everything that Rises Must Converge."  O'Connor had the ability to execute her theme of redemption in shocking and upsetting ways.  Always unexpected, her endings were perfect, both stylistically and in the context of the story.  Though I loved reading The Tenth Man, I will never dwell on its resolution.  It wasn't shocking.  It wasn't strong.  It is forgettable when compared to the rest of the story.  And isn't that a shame when the theme is redemption?

Graham Greene's widely-acclaimed masterpiece, The Power and The Glory, is set in the Mexico of the 1930's - a time when the Catholic church was viciously persecuted by an atheistic government.  This seems, these days, to be a little known facet of history - of the 15 book group members, noone knew of it before reading the novel.

At the time of Greene's novel the catholic clergy have fled, been forced to marry, or executed.  Only one priest remains - he has no name as befits his symbolic status.  Yet he's also individual, a deeply flawed and extremely unsaintly priest.  A "whisky" priest who has fathered, in a drunken moment, a daughter, at once the cause of his greatest joy and sorrow.  To obtain salvation, he must repent.  But how can he repent, when his sin has produced the greatest love of his life?  Not that he spends much time with her.  He is on the run and has been for eight years.  Yet, while he can escape, he chooses not to.  Because the people need him - for confession, to administer the sacraments.  There is no doubting the sincerity of his belief, the seriousness with which he takes his vocation.  Time and again, instead of making his escape, he turns around to administer to the spiritual need of a fellow human being.  The analogy with Jesus Christ is clear.  "No greater love hath a man that he lay down his own life in behalf of another" Yet the whisky priest is in a state of mortal sin and, if he is to die a saint, he must die in a state of grace ....

New Testament analogies appear throughout.  Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Judas and Barabbas figures all make their appearance.  The Judas mestizo figure is particularly unpleasant.  The lieutenant, the atheistic counterpart of the priest, is also finely drawn.  He is acting according to his principles - wanting to rid his country of the church, which luxuriates in its own glory, never providing for the physical welfare of the starving masses.  Yet, while his motives may be sincere, he too is imperfect.  His zeal leads to impatience and frustration at the lack of cooperation from the populace.  This eventually leads him to murder.  The lesson worldly power corrupts?

The complexity of the characterisation, the paradoxical nature of the proponents on both sides of the religious divide, unforgettable key scenes (black comedy while wine purchasing, the world in microcosm in the prison cell, the half-world or limbo of the deserted village, the final ideological showdown between priest and atheist), and the irony inherent in the history of the traditional saint are all elements that showcase the skills of a great author.

As a whole, though, this was not an entirely pleasurable reading experience.  As the priest progressed in circles through the countryside,  the narrative pull was slow and agonising and repetitive.  Absolutely intentional.  As hard on the reader as on the priest?  And I was relieved to reach the end.  But thinking about the novel is an entirely different experience - there is much to dissect and analyse.  Layers and layers of paradox to tease out, discuss and debate.  The similarities of the two main characters.  The positives and negatives of alcohol. And the title .... where is the power and the glory in this novel?  Determine that and you've understood the heart of the matter.

Group rating: 1/2

Personal rating:  

The Quiet American is a book which keeps you turning back to the copyright page as you read, suspecting the publishers of some conjuring trick. 1955? Really? The setting of a civil war in Vietnam makes me want to place it 15 years later. And the subject matter of American involvement in foreign wars makes it no older than 15 minutes ago. In fact, like all great literature, it's news that stays news, and (as Ezra Pound didn't say) it's good anytime.

The book is narrated by Fowler, an English reporter on the conflict, who is telling the story of the war and the parts played by himself, his American friend Pyle, and Phuong, a local woman who has been lover to both.  Fowler thinks himself detached:

'You can rule me out,' I said. 'I'm not involved. Not involved,' I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists call themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action - even an opinion is a kind of action.

But his view of himself is no more complete than his opinion of Pyle, as a 'quiet American.'

On what did he relax? I found his light reading on another shelf: a portable Thomas Wolfe and a mysterious anthology called The Triumph of Life and a selection of American poetry. There was also a book of chess problems. It didn't seem much for the end of the working day, but, after all, he had Phuong. Tucked away behind the anthology there was a paper-backed book called The Physiology of Marriage. Perhaps he was studying sex, as he had studied the East, on paper. And the keyword was marriage. Pyle believed in being involved.

Pyle's involvement goes deeper than Fowler believes, and the whole book can be read as a succinct (it's 180 pages) depiction of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  And speaking of hell, it contains relatively little religious angst for a Greene novel, though he can't resist the occasional burst of world-class nihilism:

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who believed in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would no longer be the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

Which is what you get with Greene: in fact, these lines could have come from Bendrix in The End of the Affair, or Scobie in The Heart of the Matter.   And if you find this sort of thing dreary rather than bracing (and I admit it's less seductive to me than it was a decade ago), then Greene's books are probably not the pastures for you.  But there is much more to him than that anyway, of course.  Aside from his impeccable dialogue (and one of the surprises of The Quiet American is how funny it is, particularly in the cynical responses Fowler makes to Pyle when discussing Phoung's future), he has an almost peerless ability to merge a dramatic, exotic storyline with the most sombre and penetrating of human insights.  But for me one of his greatest attractions has always been the apparent messiness of his books, his refusal to allow you to get a clear grip on moral certainties and straight polarities of character: "we all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we can't get out."  They're something to get your teeth into, less fresh fields than a jungle.

To prepare for his new responsibilities, Quixote sets off on a road trip with his best friend Sancho Zanzas (Leo McKern), ex-town mayor and diehard Communist.

What begins as a casual vacation sonn turns into an adventure of discovery for the naive priest. From a wayward kidnapper to a secluded bordello, from a lewd film house to the ever-present, ever-watchful militia, Quixote encounters a host of hilarious oddities with Sancho as his earthy guide.

But when the quiet Quixote comes face-to-face with the ridiculous antics of one small village, he can remain passive no longer. He assumes a courage and fury of his demented namesake to "tilt at the windwills" to do battle with evil.

Sir Alec Guinness en su papel de Padre Quijote, un hombre y sacerdote del tranquilo El Toboso. El antecesor del legengario El Quijote, el padre lidera una vida sin acontecimietnos completamente distinta de su pariente, hasta que tiene la oportunidad de iniciar un viaje con el sacerdote que lo promociona al rango de Señor.

Para presentarse para sus nuevas responsabilidades, Quijote fija un viaje en la carretera con su mejor amigo Sancho Zancas (Leo McKern), el ex-alcalde del pueblo y aferrado comunista.

Lo que comienza como unas tranquilas vacaciones se vuelve en una aventura para descubrir el ingenioso sacerdote. De un caprichoso secuestrador a un retirado burdel, de un lascivo estudio a la siempre presente siempre vigilante milicia, Quijote enumera una serie de divertidisimas rarezas con Sancho como guía.

Sin embargo, cuando el tranquilo Quijote, se topa con las ridiculas payasadas de un pequeño pueblo, no puede permanecer pasivo. El asume el coraje y la furia de su demente tocayo para "luchar contra los molinos de viento" y pelear contra el demonio.