A great writer's achievement is more that the sum of individual novels. Greene's is a world where men are heroes without hope, continually betrayed to self-destruction by whatever is best in themselves. Profoundly conscious of the fragility of civilization and the corruptibility of the heart, Greece is nevertheless an affirmative writer. It is said that he has been denied the Nobel Prize because certain members of the Swedish Academy do not believe his work is 'of an idealistic tendency', which the conditions of the prize stipulate as a necessary qualification. Yet what can be more idealistic than his affirmation of the value of love and pity in a world given over to fraud and violence?
Thành tựu của nhà văn lớn, lớn hơn nhiều, so với bề dầy những tác phẩm cộng lại.
Với Greene, 'miền Greene', 'quang cảnh quê ta': một thế giới, nơi mà những con người là những vị anh hùng không hy vọng, thường xuyên bị phản bội, đến tự huỷ, bởi bất cứ cái thứ gì tốt đẹp nhất - những mầu sắc nội, the inner colors - ở trong chính họ. Nghe nói ông bị Nobel chê, là vì một số ông Hàn không tin rằng, tác phẩm của ông có mùi hiện thực, và đây là một trong những điều kiện tiên quyết của giải.
Sao mà ngu thế, mấy ông Hàn này! Còn gì hiện thực hơn, là tình yêu thương, và cùng với nó, sự thương hại, tủi thân, trong một thế giới chỉ có giả trá và bạo lực?
Allan Massie, The Novel Today

The individual voice is perhaps the only quality which Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Kingsley Amis share. (It is something which neither Golding nor Burgess has.) They may be considered, with Powell, to constitute the senior quintet among post-war novelists who are still writing. All have a body of work to their credit which is impressively coherent.

Obviously by far the greater part of Greene's work falls outside the period under review. Inasmuch as there has been little change in either his manner or matter, it might seem superfluous to dwell on him here. However, two of the books which he has published since 1970 are among his finest. They are also contemporary in theme. The Honorary Consul (1973), set in Argentina, deals in subtle and penetrating fashion with the origins and morality of political terrorism. It is his wisest and most tender novel, which may be seen as the culmination of his life's work, but also as going beyond anything else he has written. Its theme is expressed in the epigraph, taken from Hardy: `All things merge into one another - good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics.' Whereas the lonely and perturbed heroes of earlier Greene experience pity as something corrupting, now, in a sense that Hardy would have recognized, pity is revealed as the emotion which makes life tolerable. There is no condescension in this pity, for Charley Fortnutn, the weak and foolish hero who has nevertheless survived, finds himself extending pity to the young wife who has cuckolded him, and knows that the emotion springs from his own sense of unworthiness. So: `in an affair of this kind it was the right thing to lie. He felt a sense of immense relief. It was as though, after what seemed an interminable time of anxious waiting in the ante-room of death, someone came to him with the good news he had never expected to hear. Someone he loved would survive. He realized that never before had she been as close to him as she was now.'

Pity is the dominant note in The Human Factor (1978) also. Superficially this novel of the Secret Service may seem a slighter thing, for in it Greene plays again with genre fiction and employs many of the tricks of sleight of hand that characterize the thriller. But the heart of the novel is of the utmost seriousness: Castle, the hero, is led to justified treachery by his experience of pity and love. It is a bleak novel, with an ending that is as miserable as anything Greene has written. His characters are at the mercy of malign forces as far beyond their understanding as their control; and yet at the end one is left with a conviction of the strength and durability of love and pity.

A great writer's achievement is more that the sum of individual novels. Greene's is a world where men are heroes without hope, continually betrayed to self-destruction by whatever is best in themselves. Profoundly conscious of the fragility of civilization and the corruptibility of the heart, Greece is nevertheless an affirmative writer. It is said that he has been denied the Nobel Prize because certain members of the Swedish Academy do not believe his work is 'of an idealistic tendency', which the conditions of the prize stipulate as a necessary qualification. Yet what can be more idealistic than his affirmation of the value of love and pity in a world given over to fraud and violence?

Allan Massie: The Novel Today, a critical guide to the British novel 1970-1989
Longman (London and New York), 1990