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4.5
There are actually two short works included in this book. The first, No Man’s Land, was written by Greene as a treatment for a film (never made) to follow up the success of The Third Man. And the second is an unfinished story, The Stranger’s Hand, written around the same time.Both are, like The Third Man, cold war stories, written against the backdrop of divided Europe, with borders drawn around and dropped over people by powers they had no part in making. There is a feeling of layers — the people of the cities and territory, their occupiers and police forces, and the embedded culture of agents, spies, and smugglers.In No Man’s Land, Catholics regularly undertake a pilgrimage to a cave near the town of Ilsenhof in the predominantly Protestant Harz region of Northern Germany, with Ilsenhof itself falling within the Russian Zone of occupation. The Russians are interested in recently discovered uranium deposits. Americans and British are interested in the Russians’ interest in the uranium deposits. Boundaries are everywhere, crossings are watched and violated, and no one is exactly who they say they are.The context is perfect for a story about trust, or as Greene says, “the crime of trust.”The story in No Man’s Land is told to the narrator, Redburn, by “Richard Brown.” Redburn spots Brown immediately as not who he appears to be and gradually gets in a position of trust for Brown to tell him his story. Brown recounts what he has done and what has happened to him.Brown’s mission was to retrieve a small bit of microfilm hidden away inside the Russian zone. Redburn isn’t the only one who has realized that Brown isn’t who he says he is. Brown got himself captured, and that could have been that.But the two factors in the story — the jumble of loyalties within an occupation zone and the currents of trust and distrust — work in Brown’s favor. We know, of course, that Brown is safe, since he’s telling the story.The interplay of trust and loyalty involves at its core Brown, his captor, Starhov, and Starhov’s mistress Clara. These are all people, in personal relationships and on their own sides of a Cold War, with uranium at stake. It’s almost a chess game, but the pieces are playing themselves.This is one of Greene’s great strengths, I think, throughout his writings. He places relatively ordinary people in the midst of historical circumstances and tensions, and lets their completely ordinary emotions and personalities play through it. There’s no super-dramatic heroism, no super-dramatic failures, just the playing out of human lives through circumstances bigger than they are.The Stranger’s Hand shares atmosphere with No Man’s Land. We are in Venice now, also in the tense, struggling post-war world. And in the middle of it, there is a young boy, Roger Court, deposited by his aunt and waiting at a hotel for his long-absent father to meet him and take custody of him.Roger is effectively an orphan, with separated parents awaiting a father he doesn’t really know. And his father doesn’t show up at the hotel.His father, Major Court, has made the mistake of recognizing a man who has been taken into custody as an agent. Naturally, he catches the man’s fate like a contagion and falls into custody himself.Roger is “helped” by local officials, who are less interested in finding his father than in protecting themselves. Roger is in no position to figure out who to trust — the sympathetic Commissioner, the doctor he meets who greets him with “an air of gentle kindliness,” or Roberto, a waiter with connections and street-sense.The story wasn’t finished by Greene. Like No Man’s Land, it is a film treatment, but unlike it, The Stranger’s Hand was actually filmed and released as a movie, with an ending written by Guy Elmes. A summary of the ending is appended to Greene’s story, giving it a film-worthy conclusion (even if you may find it a little too film-worthy).Kind of obviously, these are not among Greene’s best stories. There’s no lost, undiscovered The Power and the Glory or The Quiet American here. I wanted to read them because I’ve read all of Greene’s other novels and stories, and I wanted to get complete.But they are good Greene stories, entertaining, and with that quality he has of playing human nature and human tensions out within larger historical tensions and significance.NOT TOP NOTCH GREENE, BUT GOOD.After penning the screen treatment for what would be a classic movie, "The Third Man," Graham Greene made two attempts in the early 1950s at crafting another Cold War spy film. The first, "No Man's Land," was left unfilmed, while the second, "The Stranger's Hand," was effectively abandoned by the author midway. Published together in 2005, readers can now judge for themselves whether they represent lost treasures or table scraps.Neither rises to the level of classic, but both show real potential. Fans of Greene's "entertainments" like "Our Man In Havana" will find these spy stories enjoyably familiar. Both present gripping suspense, a strong sense of setting, and lost-at-sea protagonists who retain our sympathies however opaque their actions may be. As first drafts, they are promising. Alas, that's really all they are, and in the case of "Stranger's Hand," not really even that."No Man's Land" introduces us to a character named Brown, who crosses into the Iron Curtain on a mysterious mission. Early on, the story's narrator informs Brown that "iron" is a misnomer, "it's like any other curtain - you can push your way through, only it has so many folds and you can get so easily lost in the folds." Brown discovers those folds include a beautiful woman who is as obsessive about him as he is for her and a Soviet captain who presents an unsettlingly humane adversary.The story reads like proto-John le Carré, nicely ambiguous without being too self-tortured by fashionable doubts. Running under fifty pages, the narrative is a bit too lean in places, and like editor James Sexton points out in his introduction to the Hesperus edition, there is a dicey plot twist involving coincidence that beggars belief. One senses that if Greene had pushed to publish this story, he would have reworked it toward a more satisfying whole, though what's here is engaging enough as your basic spy yarn, limned with Greene's characteristic concerns about Catholicism and unfaithful women."The Stranger's Hand" has the makings of a great story. A young boy is trundled off to Venice to meet his father, but the man never appears. Having read too many adolescent spy yarns, he imagines his father in the clutches of a nasty villain, which the reader alone knows is actually the truth. His attempts to enlist aid draw only annoyance from bored police. Hope springs from an unlikely source, a hotel waiter who calls the boy "kiddo" but takes him seriously.Greene left the story unfinished; another writer finished it for a film adaptation, changing the waiter to a waitress and employing a more heroic spin. For all the potential in "Stranger's Hand," Greene's fragment of a story isn't enough to pull one in. The boy's contradictory feelings are ably presented, adventurous one moment, crying the next, but the progress he makes on the case is neither convincing nor satisfying. The wrap-up by Guy Elmes, summarized here, is a hackneyed slog that suggests "Stranger's Hand" was one lame movie.Two introductory essays, by Sexton and writer David Lodge, prove useful. Both light upon Greene's real life at the time to make connections to the stories, as well as offer answers to the question of why he gave up on both when he did. They also elucidate on how the stories fit into the larger Greene opus, which adds to one's appreciation for Greene's writing here. He's not at his best, but he's still Greene, and still good.The two short novels in this book are Graham Greene's two Cold-War thrillers.In No Man's Land the main themes are security measures taken by the Russians against information on the uranium workings on the Czech-Austrian border and a kind of Teresa Neumann character who attracts religious pilgrims from outside the area. Actually Greene later changed that aspect of the story in favour of a visitation from the Virgin Mary herself, who appears, holding a rose, to two children, in an area that had recently come under the control of the Russian occupying forces in the Harz mountains. Greene wanted to exploit the recent uranium discoveries at Eisleben in the Soviet zone.In both stories the personal and political are entwined. Then Stranger'sHand features the plight of an eight-year boy, Roger Court, who is posted like a parcel by his aunt to a strange city, Venice, to meet a long-absent father who fails to turn up. Greene writes memorably about an alienated childhood and the rituals with which the boy seeks to distract himself, the improvised game of cricket, and the moments when his courage and self-control suddenly give way to helpless tears, are beautifully judged. Here again the background is Cold War espionage and intrigue so that the confrontation across the frontiers of disputed territory serves as a metaphor for moral and emotional disconnection.This nice little release is of two film treatments written by Greene at the peak of his career, just after 'The End of the Affair'. The two tales, 'No Man's Land' and 'A Stranger's Hand', are both barely novella length, but they grip the reader's attention in an efficient way. The former is perhaps more recognisably set in 'Greeneland', as it concerns a cold war spy mission, a hesitant and flawed hero, and plenty of Catholic imagery (the climactic scenes are in a Pilgrim's Shrine). Overall it is quite a satisfying tale, and a genuine sense of danger and tension in crossing the Iron Curtain is generated. In that regard, the story is an interesting companion piece perhaps not so much to Green's greatest works such as 'The Heart of the Matter', but to earlier thrillers like 'A Gun for Hire' and 'Stamboul Train'.'A Stranger's Hand' meanwhile, is a fairly standard tale of a young boy seperated from his mysterious father in Venice. This work is in fact unfinished and the book concludes with a summary of how the story was continued and ended in the film adaptation.For fans of Greene's work, this nicely produced hardback book is unmissable, although I would argue that only the title story is really recognisable as a story by him.
