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...