Ralph Bowen

Greene was fascinated with the way popular forms (hence his attraction to the thriller-including Brighton Rock) could express the only true "subject-matter for art, life as it is and life as it ought to be." Part of that fascination led him to a lifelong interest in film, an interest shared, among others, by Waugh, Huxley, and Isherwood. In Greene's case, the influence of film on his fiction is evident in his use of realistic but highly charged detail, quick narrative cuts, and spare, telling dialogue. His thirties universe of doubt, distrust, and betrayal is masterfully fashioned out of these techniques. Good novelists of the thirties, of course, are numerous. In paying attention to some I think prominent and interesting, I don't mean to slight the host of accomplished otherswriters like William Plomer, Rose Macaulay, Anthony Powell, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, John Cowper Powys, Rex Warner, and Ralph Bates, to name a few-whose work is also of value. The extent of worthwhile fiction in the thirties simply exceeds the capacity of this discussion to deal with all of it ...»