routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

438 The twentieth century: 1900–45
multi-layered explorations of Irishness, considered by many critics to
have been influenced by Joyce, but having their own eccentricities,
their own mix of realism and fantasy, their own capacity to reveal a
grim reality in the midst of hilarious satire. An Beal Bocht, written in
Gaelic in 1941, was published in English in 1973 as The Poor Mouth.
EARLY GREENE AND WAUGH
Decline and Fall
(Evelyn Waugh)
Graham Greene was a convert to Catholicism and in much of his
work he explores problems of good and evil and the moral dilemmas
this entails. In several of his novels, characters who are failures in life
are shown to be closer to God as a result; indeed, salvation in Greene’s
world can sometimes only be achieved through sin.
Greene’s career before the Second World War culminates in Brighton
Rock (1938). For some critics, this remains his best novel, and it
continues to be one of the most popular. It brings together the detective
thriller genre (the plot derives from an incident in his earlier novel A
Gun For Sale), religious concerns, and allusions to the post-Waste
Land world. Greene’s Catholicism is important in his portrayal of Pinkie,
the young amoral ‘hero’, who is one of the major anti-heroes of modern
literature. He can be read as a personification of evil, a modern devil:
Catholic belief in God implies belief in the Devil, and in many of his
works Greene will examine the continuing presence of evil and
corruption. In Brighton Rock, Pinkie’s pleasure in killing and tormenting
his victims, especially his girlfriend Rose, takes the reader into a new
perception of unredeemed evil: it has rarely been pointed out that this
novel’s publication coincided with the rise of Nazism, and that the
‘heroism’ of evil in modern times is one of the major moral ambiguities
that artists have difficulty in facing. Greene is one of the few writers to
examine evil closely, which he did throughout his writing career, but
his Catholicism has been seen as in some way justifying his fascination
with the negative aspects of humanity, as if redemption will solve all
problems. More and more, however, Greene makes it clear that there