|
The Third Man, by Graham Greene Wow, now this was cool. Graham Greene turns his considerable talents as a storyteller and an explorer of the soul towards a good old-fashioned crime story. I gather he did a fair bit of this, and some spy fiction as well. And some actual spying. (Seriously! How cool is that?) Graham Greene wrote this as a treatment for a film, and then wrote the screenplay for what became the (apparently classic) film, which considerably overshadows the book itself in the minds of the public, critics, etc. So this is almost like reading a junior novelization by a literary giant. Who happened to also write the thing he's novelizing. Which hadn't been made yet. OK, anyway. You should read this - it'll take like an afternoon and it's a really cool story and the descriptions and stuff are done with flair and care. I sort of saw the twists coming, but didn't really. It's kind of odd that the narrator is so removed from the story - he has key roles to play in the plot and brings a tremendous amount of detail and shade to the proceedings, but he himself is kind of a cipher with hardly any actual personality traits. I guess if Greene'd written it in the third person omniscient, he'd have to have a) come up with some other way to get all the neat little insights into the protagonist, and b) developed the character of the guy who's currently the narrator, which might have slowed down the flow of things. This book made me want to go rent the movie, and it went great over the corndogs at Clocked.
|