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Post-war<br />

Waugh<br />

493<br />

in London, working for a time in the Ministry of Information. This<br />

gave rise to his novel The Ministry of Fear (1943). But it is his 1940<br />

novel The Power and the Glory which remains – with Brighton Rock<br />

(see page 438) – his classic of this period. Again, the fascination with<br />

guilt and salvation is reflected in his thrillers just as much as in his<br />

more serious novels. In the world of spies violence, betrayal, treachery<br />

and human weakness are brought into play in terms of plot before<br />

they become moral or spiritual issues. So, although his ‘shockers’ are<br />

superficially novels of escape, like Maugham’s influential Ashenden<br />

stories (1928) or Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, they reveal a more<br />

serious purpose. His work creates an identifiable ‘Greeneland’ – a<br />

world of constant anxiety rather than easy excitements. Greene’s<br />

technique – his strengths in plotting and cutting from one scene to the<br />

next – and the sinister atmosphere of the thriller were influenced by<br />

his time spent as a cinema critic in the late 1930s.<br />

Greene’s late fables, such as Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb<br />

Party (1980), take the anxiety level of Greeneland to a new pitch: greed<br />

and total amorality threaten the superficial veneer of civilised behaviour,<br />

as they have done in all the threatened landscapes Greene has visited, as<br />

traveller, critic or novelist. From West Africa to Indo-China, Brighton to<br />

Cuba, wartime London to the Stamboul Train, the threats of betrayal are<br />

the same. In A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1992), published after<br />

his death, Greene makes a close analysis of how dreams and anxieties<br />

are related throughout his long writing career, leaving us with the thought,<br />

‘God is suffering the same evolution as we are, perhaps with more pain’.<br />

POST-WAR WAUGH<br />

In the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh served in the Royal Marines<br />

and this provided him with material for a satirical trilogy about the<br />

English at war: Men at Arms (1952); Officers and Gentlemen (1955),<br />

and Unconditional Surrender (1961), published together as Sword of<br />

Honour in 1965. In this trilogy, considered by some critics to be the<br />

best English fiction about the Second World War, the hero, Guy<br />

Crouchback, always tries to do his moral best but ends up doing<br />

something foolish or inconsequential. The publication of Brideshead<br />

Revisted (1945) had introduced a more sustained note of seriousness into

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