Yes, yet another book on Graham Greene, following on those by Anthony Mockler, Michael Shelden and Father Leopoldo Duran, not to mention Norman Sherry's mammoth official biography, which is still in progress. West's ostensible reason for his is a cache of papers he came across in Ealing, including hundreds of letters from Rene Raymond, nee James Hadley Chase, to Greene and others, documenting a tax scam perpetrated by a solicitor, one Tom Roe, on behalf of a number of illustrious clients, including Charles Chaplin, Noel Coward, George Sanders, and Greene.
West contends it was fear of prosecution by the Inland Revenue that caused Greene to flee England and settle on the continent, first in Paris, then Antibes, and finally in Switzerland. And it is around this rather bizarre episode that he builds what amounts to another rehashing of his subject's motives, loves and apparently sinister lifestyle.
In extended summary we are brought through Greene's birth in 1904 in Berkhamsted, where his father was the headmaster of the public school; the fact that he was an inverted, lonely boy who, at the age of 16, had to be sent for psychoanalysis; the years at Oxford; the trips to exotic places during holiday time; work as a journalist; the great success of his first published novel, The Man Within; the failure of the next two; more hack work; gradual development as a writer; then the affairs, most notably the passionate relationship with Catherine Walston (with whom it is said he wished to have sex behind every high altar in Europe; why not on, rather than behind?); his flirtation with espionage during and after the second World War; subsequent lonely wanderings; an autumn relationship with the married French woman, Yvonne Cloetta; decline, despair, death.
West has a breathless, enthusiastic style and unlike, say, Michael Shelden, is obviously a Greene admirer. In the concluding pages of his work he remarks that "Greene was to die in exile, one of those good people who, for peculiar undefinable reasons in the middle and later years of the twentieth century, Britain chose to force into exile" - yet surely the central theme of his book is that it was greed on the part of his subject and a desire to get out of paying tax that were the cause of his separation from the land of his birth?
He also has the habit of setting up interesting little set-pieces and then demolishing them before they have had time to settle. For example, he tells us that when living in the home of quack psychotherapist Kenneth Richmond at the tender age of 16, Greene most probably had an affair with Richmond's wife, Zoe. We are then informed that some 40 years later, Zoe wrote to Greene out of the blue, asking him to help with publicising a book that her son had written - a son that Greene did not know she had. The implication, of course, is that the precocious 16-year-old had fathered the boy, but West then demolishes the imputation that he himself has set up by writing: "It may have been thought best not to tell Greene of the son's birth for the very reason that he might conclude that it was his child."
It is not until page 190 that we arrive at the raison d'etre for this volume's very existence. The whole affair seems completely over the top: Roe, who, from his photograph alone - small, fat, black hornrimmed glasses, staring eyes, prominent teeth - seems highly untrustworthy, was given large sums of money by people like Chaplin, Sanders, Coward and, of course, Greene, to set up tax shelters. Like a certain person of standing here in Ireland of recent unhappy memory, who took in some of our more eminent broadcasters and playwrights, Roe used the money for his own purposes. The whole thing blew up when, on the Geneva-Lausanne highway in July 1965, a car driven by Roe was pulled over by the Swiss police. In the boot of the vehicle was found $100,000 in forged notes.
Roe was charged, and soon layer after layer of conspiracy unfolded, a web of deceit much too complex to go into here. Suffice to say that the Mafia was involved, and that film mogul Harry Saltzman, partner of Cubby Broccoli in the making of the Bond films, visited Roe in prison and offered him the job of running his Paris operations when he was released - to persuade him to keep his mouth shut? - and that other prominent personages scurried for cover like the proverbial rats from the sinking ship.
According to West, Greene was advised by the tax authorities to take himself off to the continent, otherwise he might be charged for fraudulent conversion of undeclared monies. Whatever the truth of the whole business, it is a fact that Greene lived the last 30 years of his life abroad.
West has written a very readable book which, I suppose, should be regarded as a companion piece to Norman Sherry's authorised version. Are there more revelations to be uncovered? I, for one, would like to know if Greene dyed his hair, did he have his own teeth, what was the state of his bowel movements, did he wear Y-fronts or boxer shorts, was he left-handed, on which side did he hang, and so on. Biographers, unfortunately, never seem to mention such trivia - trivia which I feel bring the whole person alive. So it goes . . .
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic