A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene
At first glance, Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale is a thriller genre, presenting a crime committed by an avowed, confessed villain, followed by a police chase. However, in the hands of a great writer, even clichés like this can be transformed into completely satisfying novels.
First published in 1936, A Gun For Sale is set in a Europe where war looms constant and threatening, casting a shadow of fear and even depression over all human interaction. Graham Greene seems to use this context to allow the book to make a significant, but very subtle point, a claim that conflicts, even large conflicts like wars, are driven by interests, abetted by the intent to make a profit. The greater the conflict, the greater the potential gain. Just as individuals compete for influence, prominence, control, and dominance, so do societies, groups, businesses, and even countries. And some of the protagonists play dirty and rarely receive justice. When they do, we are gratified, feeling the same rightness that could bring about a happy ending.
A Gun For Sale has several important characters, more than a review can list. Raven is the first we meet, the blackness of his name immediately suggesting a plot functionality, as he is the anti-hero, the hitman who completes the bloody task in the book’s first pages. Cleft-lipped and always resentful of his disfigurement, both physical and psychological, as a result of a painful upbringing, he suggests a figure the reader might be invited to despise, perhaps a bogeyman from genre fiction pantomime, always accompanied by a menacing , trademark fanfare.
But Graham Greene is not such a worldly writer. We eventually got to know Raven well. Though we’re never really invited to like him, we eventually sympathize with his plight, if only by virtue of the fact that there are some apparent social heroes who are actually a daring spectacle more in service to our scorn. Raven is betrayed and sets out to track down the perpetrators of his humiliation.
Raven leaves a trail and a policeman, Mather, takes up the chase. By chance, Mather’s girlfriend Anne boards the same train as Raven from London to Nottwich, an industrial city where she will appear in the chorus of a pantomime. Cuervo and Ana meet and, seen from a distance from the pursuer, they reach each other.
Mather’s copper colleague, Sanders, is an interesting foil for Raven. Both are disfigured. Raven’s problem is with her appearance and she longs to get rid of the cleft lip that disfigures her face, a disfigurement that Anne downplays, thus building her confidence. Policeman Sanders, on the other hand, stutters. He is quick of wit, but not of voice, and is aware that his handicap has cost him his promotion.
Mr. Davis, also known as Cholmondley, among other things, is the greasy footman employed by Sir Marcus. The latter is an industrialist, owner of a steelworks in Nottwich, a business that has seen better days. Mr. Davis is a true scoundrel, he considers theater girls fair game, picking them up regularly and coaxing them into the dirty room he rents to a truly surreal couple to protect his reputation. Freemason Sir Marcus barely clings to life, but retains enough pride, or perhaps malice, to inflict untold suffering on others, simply to preserve his own status in a future he does not have.
And then Raven goes after Cholmondley, who answers to Marcus. Mather and Saunders chase after Raven and Anne seems to be on everyone’s side. And everything goes well.
But Graham Greene does much more than tell a story. Through simple language and structure, and through a plot that would grace a B-movie at best, it penetrates the psyche of its characters, situates them in social class and history, and manages with deft levity to convey a remarkably strong sense of place, setting, and context. Through his simply constructed prose, we see people, places and events from a multiplicity of perspectives and are left with a complexity of associations with each character. And for this reason, precisely, the cliché is left far behind.
