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THE SHIPWRECKED by Graham Greene

THE SHIPWRECKED

by Graham Greene

Pub Date: Jan. 9th, 1952
ISBN: 0670640387
Publisher: Viking

A republication of an early novel which appeared in 1935 under the title England Made Me, and which was not widely read at that time. And it is doubtful whether it would be widely read today were it not for the name which is now a passe partout to the popular public. For while there is something of the style, the now acerb- now compassionate sense of human frailty which Greene later developed, there is certainly none of the philosophic purpose of his later books, or the narrative intensity of what he was to term his "entertainments". The situation here which is set up, and only fitfully pursued, concerns three people whose precarious paste have brought them to a point of diminishing returns as youth fades with no indemnity of security- or content. For Kate Farrant, who becomes the secretary and mistress of Krogh, a Swedish industrialist, there is only the satisfaction of material comfort to offset her singlehearted affection for Tony, her twin, a living example of the past she'd escaped. For Tony, with his accomodating charm and easy plausibility, there is only a succession of fraudulent jobs and easy women. And for Krogh, a symbol of the power he has created rather than a man, there is a life lived out in public gestures and private defeat.... A provocative, occasionally speculative portrayal of marginal lives- to which disenchantment lends its finality.