And while I was able to correctly guess Hugh’s surname from the reference on page 490 to Greene’s other brother who had just died, there was no help in finding his daughter Caroline Greene’s place in the index, because she is listed under her married name Bourget and not cross-referenced with the other members of the family under Greene. I read back a couple of pages and found on page 490 that Hugh (again, no surname) was his closest male friend and unlikely to recover from cancer, but it was not until I consulted the index that it was clear that Hugh was Graham Greene’s brother (who hadn’t been mentioned for 50+ pages). For example, towards the end of the book, on page 493 there is a reference to Hugh taking a turn for the worse, with no surname. In some places, the text helpfully clarifies events and people with a reference to a page number, but not always when it’s needed. Nobody reads a biography of a long life like this and commits every name to memory. The other problem that was exasperating was that in a text of 500+ pages, there were passages which referred to one of the numerous people in Greene’s life without an adequate reminder of who the person was. Those and other examples of sloppy editing, irritated me so much that I took occasional breaks from the reading because I found myself being distracted from what is otherwise an entertaining biography of a writer I really admire. Graham Greene’s special subject was not a journalist, he was. Jerrold’s books were not a fairly prolific author, that was Jerrold.

It was not Greene’s fiction (the underlined subject of the sentence) which was devoted to films, it was Greene himself.

Those hanging clauses, dear readers, are why it took me so long to read this biography of Graham Greene by Richard Greene. (p.264, underlining mine to indicate the subject of the sentence) (p.158, underlining mine to indicate the plural subject of the sentence)Īs a journalist, Graham Greene’s special subject was faith under conditions of oppression. (p.97, underlining mine to indicate the subject of the sentence)Ī fairly prolific author, Jerrold’s books were unreadable.

Devoted to films from childhood, Greene’s fiction always had a cinematic aspect, and the actual writing of scripts intensified this quality.

Monsieur quixote