![]() ![]() ![]() Or if it is, he doesn’t recognise it as one. This isn’t one of the moral dilemmas he sometimes has to face. He sells the business when a newspaper starts sniffing around…. He’s convinced himself there were no losers: the artist earns more than enough to live on, the buyers get something interesting to show their friends, and Brown himself does pretty well out of it. But he’s happy enough to tell us the money-making scheme he dreamed up after the war, getting a penniless artist to create modern art pastiches, then persuading gullible people to pay thirty or forty pounds in case the (fictitious) artist becomes the next Picasso. Brown, the narrator, is embarrassed to introduce himself to Smith and Jones on the ship sailing to Haiti from America, in case they think he’s joking. Are Greene’s novels always comedies so dark they aren’t really comedies any more? That’s what this one seems to be, with absurd little comedy moments and almost farcical details. Greene-land, it used to be called, that place inhabited by a worldly-wise and world-weary narrator who wants to let us know how far things have come from some ideal place he remembers or imagines. ![]()
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