Product Description

Anthony Farrant has always found his way, lying to get jobs and borrowing money to get by when he leaves them in a hurry. His twin sister Kate persuades him to move and sets him up with a job as bodyguard to Krogh, her lover and boss, an all-powerful Swedish financier. But Farrant does have a sense of decency, and when Krogh gives orders that offend him, he leaks information to Minty, a down-trodden journalist, with drastic results.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22770 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 207 pages

About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

Customer Reviews

Atmospheric thriller
Atmosphere is key: the England left behind, and the watery, autumnal Sweden where twins Tony and Kate find themselves. They are about 33. Kate is the secretary and lover of powerful financier and "match king" Erik Krogh. Tony is a ne'erdowell who's knocked about the Empire and has nothing left but good looks, charm and a fund of unreliable stories. Kate gets Krogh to give Tony a job, and from then on the characters slide inevitably towards the brink of disaster. Tony and Kate corrupt Krogh - they take him out of his stiff routine and into the dubious company of would-be actresses and drunken professors. Krogh wonders if it's too late to get back some of the humanity he shed on the way to the top. But the glimpse of life Tony and Kate give him is a pretty shabby affair, after all. Tony has always gone from girl to girl. Now he picks up an English visitor from the provincial town of Coventry and they have a brief affair. Then they fall unexpectedly in love and Tony promises to leave his job and meet Lucia in a Moroccan cafe in Coventry a week from today. Tony has realised that Krogh is a bigger crook than either Kate or himself: he's fiddling the market and is brutally callous to any of his employees who are likely to cause trouble and dent his company's image. Like Macbeth, he employs a seedy hitman for this purpose. There are other Shakespearean echoes: the drunken professor gets funding from Krogh to put on his own translation of Pericles, and at the tawdry bar (while a Krogh employee is beaten up in the lobby), the professor answers every remark with an iambic pentameter. You expect everyone to start speaking in verse. Welcome to Greeneland!

A highly accomplished piece of work
I found this novel both interesting and enjoyable. The relationship between the twin brother and sister is the main focus of this work and as the plot deepens thr reader sees how this relatoinship changes.

Oozing with atmosphere
Reputedly the novel that brought Greene to literary prominence, this 1935 work is full of the brooding, seedy atmosphere that was to become such a trademark of his writing. As in so many of his novels, there's not a great deal of `action'. The storyline (in brief, the decline and fall of a borderline conman who fails at a succession of jobs) is sustained, instead, by a series of more or less shabby and inconclusive encounters involving the principal character, Anthony Farrant. Though Farrant finds a kindred spirit in his sister Kate's employer, Krogh (whom she has persuaded to give her brother a job), the bond between the two men eventually proves Anthony's undoing at the hands of one of Krogh's trusted but jealous employees. Not a great novel, but full of memorably desperate characters worn down by their efforts to keep up appearances, and oozing with atmosphere.