Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:30:09.854Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Marina MacKay
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Get access

Summary

“Let me lend you the History of Contemporary Society. It's in ­hundreds of volumes, but most of them are sold in cheap editions: Death in Piccadilly, The Ambassador's Diamonds, The Theft of the Naval Papers, Diplomacy, Seven Days' Leave, The Four Just Men …”

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)

When the twentieth-century British novelist Graham Greene divided his fictions into “novels” and “entertainments,” he implied a qualitative distinction familiar to all students of the novel. So, to give the examples of two books already mentioned, Greene's The End of the Affair, about an illicit wartime relationship ended by a religious conversion, was published as a “novel,” whereas, with its page-turning plot, its lowlife gangsters, and its seedy, sensational aura of degradation and crime, Brighton Rock was “only” an entertainment. But all readers of Greene know what's wrong with the distinction: that some of his “entertainments” are at least as complex and rewarding as his “novels,” rendering the terms useless for separating good fiction from bad. This interchapter makes a case study of one of Greene's best-known “entertainments,” The Ministry of Fear, a spy novel that reflects explicitly on the nature of genre fiction. While it's tempting to say that what differentiates literary fiction from the genre novel is that the former resembles life while the latter resembles only other novels, this is the very distinction that The Ministry of Fear overturns.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×