Graham Greene’s New Relevance

Novelist Graham Greene, who would have turned 100 this weekend, will enjoy a posthumous resurgence this fall, thanks to a bevy of reissues put together for the occasion. The timing couldn’t be better, as Greene’s work seems to have a new relevance to modern events: “The Western world finds itself in international turmoil, in situations similar to those of Greene’s slumming characters, where it’s not always clear that one is doing the right thing. And we find ourselves trying to divvy up the world into categories of absolutes — Good and Evil — when our everyday existence, as echoed by Greene’s protagonists, tells us that things are much more complicated than that.”