Graham Greene belongs to the category of obsessive artists: all of his writing life he has seen the world in essentially the same way, and he has written his novels—twenty-four of them now—to give forms to that vision. This is in no sense a pejorative, or even a limiting judgment: some visions are important enough to demand, and to justify, a lifetime's attention, and Greene's achievement as a novelist is surely a function of his obsessive single-mindedness.
Greene's world has always been a battlefield on which two contrary principles—call them The Power and The Glory—eternally confront each other. The Power is all the world's big-battalions—all governments, police, organized crime, big business, political parties; it is always corrupt, and it always prevails. The Glory has been represented in the novels mainly by individual instances of Christian faith, though it has also appeared as political idealism, and even occasionally as love. Greene has never represented it as a counterpower in the world: the ecclesia triumphans has never been a part of his vision, and he seems equally unable to imagine an actual government that would be Glorious. Faith is not for him a way of winning, but a way of living with defeat…. (p. 32)
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