Ways of Escape makes one feel, yet again, how much a writer of the Thirties Greene is. The work he did in that decade, from Stamboul Train (1932), England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936) to Brighton Rock (1938), The Lawless Roads (1939), and The Power and the Glory (1940), is not his best; much of it is overwritten, besotted with a rhetorical extravagance taken over from Conrad's The Arrow of Gold. But if not his best work, it is his most typical, producing his major themes, situations, and images.
Greene's mind, like Auden's during the same decade, was appeased mainly by lurid occasions. The imagery common to Greene, Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, and Spender is of frontiers, maps, passports, an atmosphere not of death, Juliet's tomb, but of terror, mostly sought for its frisson…. The enjoyment of insecurity, fear, and terror, sought as an escape from boredom and depression, is one of Greene's themes in Ways of Escape. When we accept the force of it in him, we find ourselves revising our sense of Auden and his friends; reading Look, Stranger! and Letters from Iceland as rituals against boredom, not merely against the public nightmare, dread, and war.
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