Thoughts on Greene

    Greene is an incredibly varied writer. His works are all unmistakably "Greene," yet they all have their own style and feel. I never got the sort of  'same story, different characters' or 'same theme, different story' feeling that many other writers give me when I read more than two of their works. Themes and ideas are referenced and called up between stories, but not in the same way. The perspectives on the themes always change. Between The Innocent and The Quiet American, the dynamic between innocence and experience changes immensely. In The Innocent, the narrator's innocence is something precious that has been lost. In The Quiet American, innocence is a kind of insanity.

   Although he is known as a Catholic writer, his 'entertainments' like The Third Man and Our Man in Havana are excellent. He can write an entirely serious character, like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, and funny character like the protagonist of Our Man in Havana, and fit them perfectly with their surroundings to make them believable and engaging. The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory are perfect examples, in my opinion. The two novels are so different, I absolutely despised the latter but enjoyed the former, yet they both have the unmistakable style of Greene. 

    Finally, Greene deals very well with perspective and motivation. He never had a purely evil antagonist; every "villain" has a backstory or some redeeming quality that makes them hard to hate. Every protagonist has character flaws that make us question their motives and their innocence.