The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. 1: 1904-1939 by Norman SherryMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A dense and exhausting tome covering the first 35 years of Greene's life, from birth to the dawn of WWII. Sherry delves deeply into not only Greene's own memories, but interviews with those who knew him at the time and a mass of collected documentation-- sometimes too deeply, as after fascinating accounts of his schooling and University day, a long and tedious picking apart of love letters with his first wife Vivien when courting threaten to derail the reading experience. Thankfully, the narrative regains its momentum when the minutiae of a very ordinary courtship are over and the book returns to detailing the extraordinary course of Greene's life, closing with his solitary journey through a savagely Anti-Catholic Mexico and returning to England to find war preparations very much afoot.
Although Sherry can't resist the occasional moment of hero-worship and self-aggrandisement, he generally lets Greene's life speak for itself, and the result is an impressively collated and thoroughly enjoyable examination of the insipirations and influences on one of the most important literary figures of the 20th Century.
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