Greene and Red

Graham Greene was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. No British writer ever described the world with such a consistently unflinching, unforgiving eye for human weakness and failure, innocence and corruption, faith and betrayal, good and evil.

His fiction uniquely combined reportage, theology, melodrama, politics, black comedy and high adventure.

From early thrillers like The Man Within, through the great religious novels of the 1940s - Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair - to late novels like Doctor Fischer of Geneva, Greene was a compelling story teller who couldn't write a dull sentence.

In the month of his centenary, however, the literary world seems more interested in Greene's life than in his books.

New revelations about his sex life and speculation about his friendship with the Soviet double agent Kim Philby have accelerated a process by which public interest is constantly tugged towards Greene's life and away from the novels.

Like "revelations" about Picasso's love life, Brecht's supposed plagiarism, Yevtushenko's "collaboration" and Neruda's alleged love of luxury, Greene's association with Philby is useful to those who wish to discredit his political loyalties.

If Greene was a political innocent, a "gullible" pawn in a game between British and Soviet intelligence, then his account of the world in which we live can be reduced to "Greeneland," the private fantasy world of a writer whom the Observer recently described as a "chronicler of damaged faith and human wretchedness." Cue all the old cliches about existential anguish, mortal sin and despair.

But this version of Greene is based on a wilful refusal to recognise another aspect of this complex and contradictory writer - the extent to which Greene's sympathies lay with the poor, the hungry and the oppressed.

A writer who once told Allende that he was "forever searching for communism with a human face," Greene clearly identified with the forces of social justice and revolution, both inside and outside his books.

At Oxford in 1925, Greene and Claud Cockburn famously joined the infant Communist Party for a few weeks. This may have been, as Norman Shelley calls it, a "prank," but it was enough to deny Greene a visa to the US in 1952 under the terms of the McCarthyite McCarran Act.

The US authorities deported him from Puerto Rico in 1954. As Greene noted drily, he was prevented from entering the US for many years by "the plastic curtain." The FBI kept files on him for the rest of his life.

But they were right to suspect Greene of being anti-American. Over the next three decades, he became a fierce critic of US foreign policy.

In a letter to The Times in 1967, Greene wrote: "If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union, just as I would choose life in Cuba to life in those southern American republics like Bolivia, dominated by their northern neighbour, or life in North Vietnam to life in South Vietnam."

He was a friend of Castro, Torrijos, Allende and Ortega, an admirer of Ho Chi Minh and of Gorbachov and a passionate supporter of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, which he saw as a "small country fighting a bully in the north." In one of his last public appearances, Greene spoke at a conference in Moscow in 1987, urging an alliance of Catholics and communists against injustice in Latin America.

But it is within Greene's fiction that his political sympathies were most consistently developed. His novels were like reports from the front line in the wars between the weak and the powerful.

Greene always had a romantic attachment to "the little man" in his struggles against the powerful. In his novels, the good, the kind, the generous and the noble are almost always defeated. But, in defeat, they achieve a stature that diminishes the victory of the bullies.

There were the novels which sympathetically represented Third World liberation struggles - The Comedians (Haiti), The Honorary Consul (Argentina), The Quiet American (Vietnam).

There were the tragic, minor characters - the revolutionary Dr Czinner in Stamboul Train, shot as he tries to cross into Yugoslavia, the communist bus driver sentenced to death in It's a Battlefield after a policeman is killed on a demonstration, the South African communist Carson in The Human Factor, who dies of "pneumonia" while in custody. Even in The Power and the Glory, Greene acknowledged the idealism of the young communist lieutenant who hunts down the whisky priest.

In the spy thriller The Confidential Agent - filmed in 1945, starring Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall - a Spanish Republican agent battles his way through London against Franco's agents and their British sympathisers.

The Quiet American was a prophetic denunciation of Washington's interference in Vietnam, several years before the first US troops arrived in the country.

Above all, there was the wonderful Monsignor Quixote - televised in the 1980s with Alec Guinness and Leo McKern. Two characters out of Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo stories - an unreliable, old-fashioned priest and the local communist mayor - set off on a hilarious, picaresque journey across Spain, tilting at the windmills of the contemporary world.

Along the way, they compare their faiths and discuss their respective doubts, the one a "Catholic in spite of the Curia," the other, possessing "more belief in communism than in the party."

The two friends conclude that there is more to the Roman Catholic church than the Inquisition and a lot more to communism than Stalin.

And there was more to Greene than his relationship with Philby or his chaotic private life. There were the novels. Read them, enjoy them and take heart.

ANDY CROFT