Publisher's Synopsis
From "The Man Within" (1929) to "The Captain and the Enemy" (1988), Graham Greene engaged in a lifelong dialogue with Joseph Conrad's political, psychological and melodramatic fictions. Repressing Conrad's political anxieties, his early work displaces the protagonist's existential dilemma into the form of the thriller or, alternatively, the "Catholic" novel. After "The Quiet American" (1955), however, Greene's novels return to politics, introducing comic variations which transform Conrad's "masterplot" into a mixed genre uniquely his own. This study of the subject also places Greene's career in the context of the 19th- and 20th-century British novel.
