Matt Snediker’s Reviews > The Human Factor > Status Update

Graham Greene one of the few mid-century white English writers where it doesn’t feel like their cosmically beautiful poetry (prose, whatever) is wallpapering a hidden layer of ugly pink fiberglass phrenology, beating loudly from behind the genocidal gypsum, filling the wood-plank ribcage of their ideological torso.

Like he’s kind of the OG quirked up white boy.

Or maybe that’s Oscar Wilde.

You HAVE to do a *turn* at some point in a story like this, and that was just such an excellent chapter. A master of the form. The confidence Greene’s typewriter exudes — each key hammering effortless and without resistance, and no more than a millisecond after the last one, and followed another .01 later by a subsequent lettersmack — is so comforting, so impressive.

“Davis looked up from the bill and saw Daintry. It was as though two emigrants had come on deck for the same pur-pose, to look their last on their country, saw each other and wondered whether to speak. Davis turned and made for the door. Daintry looked after him with regret—but after all there was no need to get acquainted yet, they were sailing together on a long voyage.”

Are you fucking kidding me, man?????

The way Greene subtly and smartly communicates the evil and wickedness VIBRATING beneath the thin paper-mache veneer of British Politeness, the bushy-lipped roseate-cheeked racism underpinning not just an imperial project but a culture, a way of life, is really virtuosic. Each domino being tenderly arranged in its exact, precise, perfect, little, position; ready, to, be, toppled, over.

I actually could read a book about a stuffy British man who lives in the countryside leisurely, one by one, visiting every single shop in London and having a pleasant little conversation with the person behind the register until he’d covered every apothecary and bookstore from Camden, on down to Fulham, and then back up to Whitechapel, so long as it was Graham Greene writing it

I mean,Jesus Christ. He’s too good

The way British people talk is so crazy lmao. I wanna study them like an iguana in a tank. They’re such fascinating little mustachioed pasty alcoholic singing gnome professors. They’re unreal. They’re like if a warehouse full of teacups and pots and dishes got turned into a nation of living breathing people and then one day they accidentally conquered the world and had to figure out how to run it.