The Greenean Worldview

"Nobody... has ever wanted to be a Graham Greene character," "murderers, traitors, unhappy adulterous lovers, sinners of every stripe," writes Michael Dirda — The Man Within.

The Catholic novelist himself stated that "the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act." Mr. Dirda notes that the author "sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair" and to illustrate "the awful strangeness of the mercy of God."

[link via Arts & Letters Daily]