Driving with Graham Greene, Master of Imagery

                There are few better ways to pass the time on a solo journey by car than by listening to an audiobook.  My long-distance driving this year has been especially enlivened by Graham Greene novels – Brighton Rock read by Samuel West, The Human Factor read by Tim Piggott-Smith and A Burnt Out Case read by Richard Morant.   All three voices are smoothly urbane and perfectly capture the cool detachment of the central characters. 

Listening to a good reader is as pleasurable as reading a book for oneself and the only drawback to the audio medium is that it’s harder to track back to a sentence or passage you would usually re-read (and perhaps underline) immediately.  What’s most startling about Greene’s prose is his imagery. Here are three examples from the first twenty-five pages of A Burnt Out Case of moments where I’ve laughed or gripped the wheel a little tighter than usual.

‘Father Thomas, with eyes sunk like stones in the pale clay of his face, swallowed his coffee in a hurry, like a nauseating medicine.’

‘(Rycker) had a small black moustache like a smear of city soot and his face was narrow and flat and endless, like an illustration of the law that two parallel lines never meet.’

A scene in The Congo: ‘On the other shore the great trees, with roots above the ground like the ribs of a half-built ship, stood out over the green jungle wall, brown at the top like stale cauliflowers.’

A Burnt Out Case, like the other two Greene audiobooks mentioned above, is available in Dublin City Libraries.