A Gun for Sale (20th Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Flawed, but frequently sensational early Greene.
Review: 'A gun for sale' is considered a minor Graham Greene work, two years before his acknowledged first masterpiece, 'Brighton Rock'. Admittedly, the book is hugely flawed - the plot becomes increasingly implausible; the dialogue is sometimes false; the characterisation, especially in the central relationship between Raven the runaway hitman and Anne, sometimes doesn't quite ring true. But there is so much that is excellent - the mixture of dusty, fish and chips realism with almost whimsical fantasy, precise detail clashing with a nightmare-world of physical grotesques; the brilliant control of language, in which a deliberately limited vocabulary is used to imprison characters in a social and implicitely metaphsical destiny. The first half is a superb, almost intolerably nerve-wracking, thriller, and the second, as Raven seeks revenge during a practice gas raid, is dottily surreal. The allusions to fairy tales, history , poetry, popular music, drama, philosophy etc. open the book from its generic base, and makes it infinitely richer than it first appears. It should be read anyway by anyone who loves the cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville, who based his masterpiece 'Le Samourai' on it. A flawed, yet fascinating work.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed, but frequently sensational early Greene.
Review: 'A gun for sale' is considered a minor Graham Greene work, two years before his acknowledged first masterpiece, 'Brighton Rock'. Admittedly, the book is hugely flawed - the plot becomes increasingly implausible; the dialogue is sometimes false; the characterisation, especially in the central relationship between Raven the runaway hitman and Anne, sometimes doesn't quite ring true. But there is so much that is excellent - the mixture of dusty, fish and chips realism with almost whimsical fantasy, precise detail clashing with a nightmare-world of physical grotesques; the brilliant control of language, in which a deliberately limited vocabulary is used to imprison characters in a social and implicitely metaphsical destiny. The first half is a superb, almost intolerably nerve-wracking, thriller, and the second, as Raven seeks revenge during a practice gas raid, is dottily surreal. The allusions to fairy tales, history , poetry, popular music, drama, philosophy etc. open the book from its generic base, and makes it infinitely richer than it first appears. It should be read anyway by anyone who loves the cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville, who based his masterpiece 'Le Samourai' on it. A flawed, yet fascinating work.

Rating:
Summary: Best Forgotten
Review: An assassination takes place in the 1930s. Britain is at risk of involvement in another European war as a result. The assassin, Raven, is on the run from the police, but is also out for revenge on his paymasters, who have double-crossed him.

I thought that this was a very dated thriller, a creaky old potboiler, in which Greene makes a preposterous use of coincidence to keep the plot going. Greene is by no means at his best - it has a contrived and very unconvincing feel to it.

Perhaps the chief interest of "A Gun For Sale", as in so many of Greene's early works, is that it reveals an England in which social tensions and violence were never far beneath the surface. The desperation of ordinary people being matched by the amorality and corruption of the wealthy.

Other than that, little to write home about.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: unlikely noir thriller
Review: Murder didn't mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the minister once : he had been pointed out to Raven as he walked down the new housing estate between the little lit Christmas trees--an old rather grubby man without any friends, who was said to love humanity. -Graham Greene, This Gun for Hire

Raven is a hired killer with a harelip. His profession and his deformity combine to give him a passion for privacy. But when he's hired to kill a socialist minister who's active in the peace movement and ends up also shooting an elderly woman from his household staff too, he's suddenly one of the most sought after men in England. And when the man who hired him, Mr. Cholmondeley, pays him off in counterfeit notes, he becomes an easy man to track. In addition, his strong sense of professional ethics lead him to try and find Cholmondeley and whoever's behind him, rather than simply hiding out.

Through a circuitous set of circumstances, Raven is helped in his search by a young woman, Anne, whose boyfriend just happens to be the lead detective on his case. She recognizes how dangerous Raven is, but feels sorry for him and, with Europe sliding into war, thinks she can use him to strike back at the shadowy forces who wanted the peace loving minister dead.

Though it lacks the universal moral tension of some of Greene's better work, this is an entertaining noir thriller. The plot depends on a few too many fortuitous twists, but if you take it in the spirit of say The 39 Steps or a Hitchcock movie, the implausabilities aren't unbearable. Perhaps the most interesting reading of the book is as a forecast of the central ethical dilemma of WWII. Think of Raven as the USSR and of Anne as the Allies. She accepts Raven out of sympathy for his physical and spiritual deformities and assumes that he, despite his amorality, can be twisted to serve her own noble purposes. In the end, a lot of folks die as a result of her naiveté.

GRADE : B-

Rating:
Summary: unlikely noir thriller
Review: Murder didn't mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the minister once : he had been pointed out to Raven as he walked down the new housing estate between the little lit Christmas trees--an old rather grubby man without any friends, who was said to love humanity. -Graham Greene, This Gun for Hire

Raven is a hired killer with a harelip. His profession and his deformity combine to give him a passion for privacy. But when he's hired to kill a socialist minister who's active in the peace movement and ends up also shooting an elderly woman from his household staff too, he's suddenly one of the most sought after men in England. And when the man who hired him, Mr. Cholmondeley, pays him off in counterfeit notes, he becomes an easy man to track. In addition, his strong sense of professional ethics lead him to try and find Cholmondeley and whoever's behind him, rather than simply hiding out.

Through a circuitous set of circumstances, Raven is helped in his search by a young woman, Anne, whose boyfriend just happens to be the lead detective on his case. She recognizes how dangerous Raven is, but feels sorry for him and, with Europe sliding into war, thinks she can use him to strike back at the shadowy forces who wanted the peace loving minister dead.

Though it lacks the universal moral tension of some of Greene's better work, this is an entertaining noir thriller. The plot depends on a few too many fortuitous twists, but if you take it in the spirit of say The 39 Steps or a Hitchcock movie, the implausabilities aren't unbearable. Perhaps the most interesting reading of the book is as a forecast of the central ethical dilemma of WWII. Think of Raven as the USSR and of Anne as the Allies. She accepts Raven out of sympathy for his physical and spiritual deformities and assumes that he, despite his amorality, can be twisted to serve her own noble purposes. In the end, a lot of folks die as a result of her naiveté.

GRADE : B-