Books: Fine Fever

IT’S A BATTLEFIELD (214 pp.)—Graham Greene—Viking ($3.95).

Part of Graham Greene is genius and part sheer fudge, but which part is which and in what proportion? After following Greene through a dozen books from the London Embankment to the banks of the Congo (with scene-setting rainwater running down the back of his neck all the while), the reader sees at last that more than half of Greene’s attraction lies in this uncertainty. The republication of this 1934 novel (Greene’s fifth), never widely read in the U.S. or in Great Britain, is a fresh and welcome opportunity to test-taste the mixture.

The Vice of Virtue. The date of original publication might just as well have been 1934 B.C., since at the book’s appearance Greene’s present obsession with God and Guilt was still submerged. The rainwater in this novel is the gelid London variety; the central occurrence, around which hints of dark guilt flutter and settle like ravens, is the murder of a policeman. The murderer, a simple, solid workingman named Jim Drover, has been sentenced to hang, despite the fact that the policeman he killed had been about to club his wife in a scuffle at a leftist rally.

In an introduction that recalls the days when he was jobless and neither fudge nor genius seemed salable, Greene says that the book is about the injustice of man’s justice. It is, but Greene was Greene even then—and his real interest was the vice of man’s virtue. Everyone works to win a reprieve for Drover, but motives are messy. His wife is honest enough to know that she could recover from her husband’s execution but could not stand the 18 years of withering sexual faithfulness that would follow a jail sentence. The condemned man’s Communist friends want propaganda more than a reprieve, and his brother, a neurotic little man obsessed by revolvers, loves Jim Drover but covets his wife.

Accidental Justice. Two characters are among the best grotesques in Greene’s entire waxworks. Conder is the archetype of the author’s army of squalid journalists —a wretch so practiced at sleazy sleight-of-mind that, although he is a bachelor, he tells everyone that he has a wife and six sickly children. The other is the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, an old jungle hand stiff with integrity and old wounds and hated by his underlings at Scotland Yard. He is a magnificent Greene hero who pursues criminals with stolid skill, shutting away the unhappy knowledge that his quarries receive justice only accidentally.

Here is the Assistant Commissioner in action, as his men close in on a murderer: “A line of heavy men in soft hats walking cumbrously on tiptoe; only the Assistant Commissioner at the tail of the procession walked with natural lightness, all the useless flesh burned away by fever.” In that ridiculous and wonderful fever, Greene’s genius and fudge blend inextricably—each necessary, both unmatchable.