"Sherry's biography of the first 35 years of Greene's life is exhaustive, that is probably the thing to start with. If you are not a fan of Graham Greene, I cannot emphasize enough that you should not read this book. Though Greene had an incredible life, this biography is not meant for those who just want to know about his travels. Rather, this is for Greene obsessives. Even, a huge fan of Greene - he is probably my favourite English language author - was not thoroughly enough prepared for this. To fully appreciate it I would probably have to have read all his books. And so I can't really recommend this to most people or acclaim it as a truly great biography because the reader requires too much knowledge. That's not to put down Sherry's work; the whole thing is an incredible study of a person. Now I just have to find and read the other two volumes."

Incidentally, I am just getting to Volume 2 four years later. It's next up in my list of To Read.

"'I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple'"
The Life of Graham Green p. 621

1 0f 23 books all for $10

An enormous and exhausting literary study of the life and work of a major modern writer of the 20th century. Sherry's 3-volume biography chronicles Greene's life and works and adventures and affairs providing a fascinating account of an extraordinary life. Sherry theorizes that the private Greene can be best understood through his fiction and I tend to agree with this. The main male characters in Green's major novels, like The Heart of the Matter, the End of the Affair and the Quiet American, reveal the private Greene which I have come to recognize from reading Sherry's all-consuming but awe-inspiring biography, Greene's own memoirs, and dozens of articles about Greene. The fictional and real life Greene is cynical, passionate, restless, melancholic, kind and intelligent all at once. He tends to side with the underdog and has shown through his writings a great sympathy for human foibles and folly. In this sense, he is a writer of great humanity. Sherry conveys the many facets of Greene's traits and personality vividly although his prose, alas, is a bit dry, and anything but elegant. It's rather ironic since his subject is a master of English prose.

Clearly, I'm missing something. This was one of the most tedious books I've ever trawled through; it is not a biography, it is a partially digested mash of quotation from letters, journals, and books, with almost no synthesis or analysis whatsoever. This is clearly a conscious decision on Sherry's part, but it makes the book almost unreadable. Every tiny factoid is backed up with in-text quotation; nothing ever happens, but we are told about literally everything that happens through someone else's words. It could have been one fifth the length without losing anything other than the embarrassing style of Greene's love letters.

Why did he convert? Let's quote Greene, instead of actually thinking about it. Why did he go to Liberia? No particular reason is given in the letters, so let's assume there isn't one. Why Mexico? And so on. Greene led a truly interesting life, and Sherry makes approximately nothing of it. His conversion is recounted in the same style, and at the same length, as negotiations for books that he never published.

The only possible reasons for this are i) that Greene was alive when Sherry was writing, and Sherry felt obliged not to speculate about anything; and ii) Sherry did so much work and read so many tedious, over-egged letters and journals that he just had to stick it all somewhere. I might get through the next volume, because I'm genuinely interested in the man, but dearie me, the last volume is even longer than this one!

Jesus Christ, the most incredible biography I've ever read.

I haven't read the other two (three?) volumes, but from what I understand Norman Sherry went slowly insane over the course of writing them and by the third volume he's like, "At 12:06 PM on January 3rd, Graham Greene had a bowel movement."

Ironically, that kind of obsessive attention to detail is what makes the first volume such a fascinating read.

Exhaustive and sometimes exhausting. I may need a book club just for this trilogy, the first part of which is consuming the second half of 2008 for me. Still, it's everything, everything, everything you ever wanted to know about the man. The slow pace is at times difficult but the revelations about Greene are well worth the investment.

January 11, 2009: I finished Volume I on the last day of 2008, aided by the Panamanian sun and the slightly alarmed encouragement of friends on holiday. NB: I don't think Sherry intended his books to be beach vacation reading. The historical context of Greene's early years, particularly his travels to Liberia and to Mexico, makes the first volume well worth the exercise. Onto Volume II, which clocks in at the comparably light 508 pages and promises much prurient provocation.

The first volume of an extremely comprehensive biography of the complex British author Graham Greene. A fascinating read, if you're a fan, providing great insights into his novels.

Long.

A dense and exhausting tome covering the first 35 years of Greene's life, from birth to the dawn of WWII. Sherry delves deeply into not only Greene's own memories, but interviews with those who knew him at the time and a mass of collected documentation-- sometimes too deeply, as after fascinating accounts of his schooling and University day, a long and tedious picking apart of love letters with his first wife Vivien when courting threaten to derail the reading experience. Thankfully, the narrative regains its momentum when the minutiae of a very ordinary courtship are over and the book returns to detailing the extraordinary course of Greene's life, closing with his solitary journey through a savagely Anti-Catholic Mexico and returning to England to find war preparations very much afoot.

Although Sherry can't resist the occasional moment of hero-worship and self-aggrandisement, he generally lets Greene's life speak for itself, and the result is an impressively collated and thoroughly enjoyable examination of the insipirations and influences on one of the most important literary figures of the 20th Century.

Great Volume I biography of one of the 20th century's greatest writers. And certainly one of the 20th century’s great biographies. Now on to Vol II!

these three books are basically pretty good, but at times the biographer started to remind me of the malevolent narrator from Nabokov's Pale Fire, his asides and comments suggested that he would really like to be telling you about his own experiences and what happened to him, Norman Sherry while he wrote these 'bleedin books that cost him 26 odd years of his life....'.

With GG it seems that pretty much his fiction is draw very much from what he really did, but would never actually admit to, like all the prostitutes and the other random various things. The fact that GG played Russian roulette with himself a few times, and his compulsive need to write every day, would suggest he was a little bit off his rocker, and that we were fortunate that this ocd produced something readable for the rest of us.

After reading this magnum opus it did leave me wondering what if anything of GG i would like to read next / ever, as in some ways this book has perhaps slightly over deconstructed the plots and meanings of the various books... I hope i do still love his stuff, but reading these three volumes over the autumn has left me needing to take a moment to take stock. That said i have been rationing myself to one GG each summer holiday over the past few years so perhaps that way to go on with it - and it just leaves me curious to see if Norman Sherry ever got to write a book about his own adventures as it seemed thats what he would like to do, i also wondered if he was gay too because he really went on about his helpful doctor on his travels.