Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
The End of the Affair
By David Lodge
The Life of Graham Greene,Volume Three: 1955–1991
by Norman Sherry
Viking, 906 pp., $39.95
Norman Sherry's Life of Graham Greene has occupied him continuously and exclusively for twenty-eight years, which may be a record of some kind. Greene died in 1991, having correctly predicted that he would not live to read the second volume (published in 1994). He also prophesied that Sherry would not survive to read the third and last volume, a remark in which one might detect some resentment at the ever-increasing scale and scope of the biography, and regret for having authorized its often embarrassing revelations. The prophecy was happily unfulfilled, but at times it was a close-run thing. Sherry promised to visit every country that Greene had used as a setting for a novel, a vow that took him to some twenty countries, entailing danger, hardship, and at least one life-threatening illness. He admits on the penultimate page of the biography that 'reaching the end had often seemed beyond my strength and spirit' and superstitiously left the very last sentence of his narrative unfinished.
Review, 5161 words
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