posted on 09 Oct 2024

England Made Me by Graham Greene

This is, I suspect, one of Greene’s lesser known (and less read?) novels – originally published in 1935 and, as if to acknowledge its comparative obscurity, republished in 1953 as The Shipwrecked (although the original title has since returned to bookshelves).

The focus of the book is Anthony (Tony) Farrant – self-confident, handsome and a womaniser, he’s an inveterate chancer/petty criminal who has been steadily running out of places in the world he can go without being drummed out of every job, club or social grouping he tries to enter.

Farrant is one of a pair of twins and he’s back in London to meet up again with his sister, Kate. Kate, despite not having seen her brother for a long time, feels deeply protective of him and has set up this meeting in order to persuade Tony to go back with her to Sweden, where she has become the close companion of the slightly mysterious but coldly calculating financier, Erik Krogh. He, Kate asserts, will find Farrant a suitable vacancy in his company.

Tony is initially reluctant to go because he’s self-aware enough to know that his only skills are essentially shady ones. But, confronted by the fact that all his other roads are closed to him, he consents to give his sister’s plan a shot.

Farrant discovers Krogh is big news in Stockholm and wherever he goes and whatever he does is a story that can be sold. As a result, a freelance journalist, Minty, has attached himself to the financier and lives by selling stories about him to the newspapers – and Tony immediately spots and opportunity to make some money by cultivating a relationship with the journalist.

And, true to kind, Farrant also strikes up a relationship with a young British woman tourist, visiting from Coventry, to who he spins more of his usual fantasies and drags her into a dependent relationship. 

Eventually, Kate engineers a meeting between Tony and Krogh and an odd chemistry seems to take place and the ice-cold Krogh warms to Farrant and ends up offering him a job as his bodyguard. This – inevitably – gives Tony privileged access to what’s going on in the financier’s empire and it’s not a pretty story. Krogh, it turns out, is also a fraudster, albeit on a bigger scale than Tony.

As we’ve come to expect, Tony is going to betray both Kate and Krogh. However, this time it’s a deadly betrayal because you don’t mess with the likes of Krogh without consequences. Ultimately, Tony will disappear only for his body to turn up in the harbour, a sad victim of an ‘accidental’ drowning.

And there’s nothing more Kate can do for him but to honour his spirit by moving on to find something new.

A climate of damp fog pervades England Made Me and a sort of physical grubbiness that mirrors the moral grubbiness is all embracing. The book is quite slight as a story but the portraits of individuals make it well worth reading. Krogh, Minty and Tony Farrant all come off the page as fully-rounded characters who are wrapped-up in a minor tragedy that is feted to end as it does.

Greeneland (as one of our previous contributors has written about it) is peopled by the morally corrupt or ambiguous and this early outing – it was Greene’s fourth published novel – sets something of a template for what comes along later.

Paperbacks are not hard to find – cheaply – but hardbacks are more difficult to come across and the cost of first editions will curl your hair.

 

Terry Potter

October 2024