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Book Reviews297 In this closing paragraph I must raise the question of whom this book is for. I think it is directed, as a kind of responsa, to other Lawrence critics. A rather narrow audience! Without watering down his ideas, Schneider could have made the whole study more compact — perhaps less ambitious — thereby rendering it more accessible to students of literature, and among them, the avid reader of Lawrence. SHARON WEINSTEIN Hampton University ROGER SHARROCK. Saints, Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. 298 p. At age 80 and after half a century as a novelist, Graham Greene remains one of the most durable writers in the English-speaking world. Twenty-five novels, four volumes of short stories, four plays, three travel books, two autobiographies, and eight miscellaneous books testify to his vitality. As late as last fall, for example, he published another book, this one on the late Panamanian strongman, Omar Torrijos. But Greene's long list of works has not necessarily assured him the wide respect that one might expect. Although a symposium on Greene (with 28 papers) at West Chester University last October on the occasion of his eightieth birthday demonstrated his continuing appeal to scholars and critics, there have been some dissenting voices who have treated him less reverently. Some Catholics, for example, have been displeased with his handling of religious themes in Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Heart of the Matter. Other critics have carped about his techniques and his views of modern society, while many Americans have been annoyed by his anti-American and pro-Marxist sentiments in The Quiet American and The Comedians. "Greeneland," as one critic has labeled the world of Greene's fiction, is clearly not to everyone's liking. In this new book Roger Sharrock of the University of London attempts to provide a clear and chronological analysis of the mind and art of what he unabashedly calls "almost certainly the most distinguished English novelist living today" (11). In seven chapters he analyzes Greene's fiction without a "pre-determined critical approach" and instead makes his study "a reading ... or rather a score of readings" (275) of all of the novels from The Man Within (1929) through Monsignor Quixote (1982). Sharrock sorts these novels into three slightly overlapping "phases": prewar (from The Man Within through The Confidential Agent, 1939), middle or Catholic {Brighton Rock, 1938, through A Burnt-Out Case, 1961), and humanistic {The Quiet American, 1955, through Monsignor Quixote). The development of Greene's fiction , Sharrock thinks, shows "the growth of a professional from the training period to the great performances and on from them to the easy, informal relaxation of tension in the latest book" (276). Sharrock believes that in the early books, that is, through The Power and the Glory, Greene was in a "period of training and early achievement" in which he fused "the mechanics of the thriller with the world of desire and aspiration represented by romance" (276). In these novels Greene was concerned with themes of innocence and initiation played out in the spiritual desert of the twentieth century . In the novels after World War II (the middle phase) Sharrock shows that Greene's writing is characterized by a more disciplined narrative method, a tighter 298Rocky Mountain Review economy, a better command of rapid transition, and a more prominent use of impressionistic imagery. But in the third phase the rhetoric becomes simpler and less poetic as the earlier startling imagery is replaced with "prose aphorisms, the disenchanted accumulations and distillations of observed wisdom" (277). Sharrock feels, in summation, that "Greene's great technical achievement has been the elevation of the form of the thriller into a medium for serious fiction," thus making "the form of the mystery story peculiarly his own as an instrument for the expression of contemporary betrayal and violence" (12). For Sharrock, Greene is somewhat like Henry James in earnestly seeking, in troubled times, the ideal form of the good novel. Or as James wrote (quoted by Sharrock): "We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion...

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