What I Am Reading: "A Gun for Sale" by Graham Greene

In order to be as insufferable as possible, I’m always looking to internalize new vocabulary words. The one I am working on currently is “telos” and “teleological,” after I was reminded of it by China Miéville and in some other recent readings. The terms have to do with analyzing something based on its outcome, or effect, (or telos) rather than based on its cause or any other aspect. The real philosophical term is more complicated than that, but I’m just paddling in the shallow end, here.

This Graham Greene thriller is a good case study to help understand the term. I’ve read a lot of histories of the interwar period in the past couple of years, and all of these histories have been teleological: they frame the period through its outcome, and connect every event to the eventuality of World War 2. This book, however, as I found only after I picked it up, was published in 1936. The specter of an impending second world war looms over the entire book, but Greene did not know the form it would eventually take. It is set in the prelude to a second world war, not the Second World War. It’s a truer look into the mindset of the time period than could be any work of historical fiction, or of alternate history, by someone tainted with the knowledge of what actually happened in 1939.

The short book is a fairly straightforward “criminal is double-crossed, goes for revenge” story. Raven is an assassin who starts the book by carrying out his mission to assassinate a Minister of War in a country that we eventually learn is Czechoslovakia. Throughout the background of the story, glimpsed in newspaper headlines and heard in radio broadcasts, we are told that Italy, Yugoslavia, and other countries are mobilizing and issuing ultimatums in some unexplored configuration of alliances.

As you can perhaps tell, the idea of the future World War Two bears a greater resemblance to World War One than the actual World War Two did. It springs from an assassination; soldiers look forward to the trenches; gas drills are conducted and masks are handed out. Anyway, Raven is framed through a payment in stolen bills, and goes on the run from the London police to a small town at the end of a rail line. Here, he becomes entangled with his hostage, Anne, who has traveled to the town for work in a play; and with her boyfriend, Mather, the London policeman hunting what appears at first to be a simple thief on the run.

These three main characters are not the interesting ones, however. Each of them is fairly one-note: Raven is twisted by hatred, Anne dislikes war but also dislikes murder, and Mather is sworn to do his duty. More interesting are the side characters they encounter: the town’s Chief Constable, the industrialist and his minion who engaged the assassination to profiteer (a classic slightly-politically-conscious thriller plot point), the hosts of the sketchy rooming house. The lattermost especially was more memorable than the “generic scumbag” character that could have been slotted in here: Acky, who hosts and then hides the sins of the profiteer’s minion (Raven’s handler), is trying to be reinstated by the Bishop after some kind of clerical sex scandal, to the point that his disgrace has driven him partially mad.

Another such side character is Buddy, a medical student who leads the “rag” of the students rioting around town to pick up anyone who wasn’t properly prepared for the gas attack drill that occupies the story’s dénouement. Buddy is a chummy leader-of-men who is in his element directing the rabble; but is narrated as having a background of intellectual and sexual inadequacy despite his bluster, and the reader is told that this is his last hurrah before settling into a life of provincial dullness. Buddy, not coincidentally, is super psyched to be in the war, as it is a chance to extend his moment of glory and (comparative) charisma. It is the same for other similarly pathetic characters. This makes Buddy’s mugging by Raven, as the latter, having escaped the cops and let Anne go, heads for his last rendezvous with the profiteers, all the more meaningful (and, if I may say, delicious for the reader):

“It was a moment in his life that he never forgot; he was not allowed to forget it by friends who saw nothing wrong in what he did. All through his life the tale cropped up in print and in the most unlikely places: serious histories, symposiums of famous crimes; it followed him from obscure practice to obscure practice. Nobody saw anything important in what he did: nobody doubted that he would have done the same; walked into the garage, closed the gate at Raven’s orders. But friends didn’t realize the crushing nature of the blow; they hadn’t just been standing in a street under a hail of bombs, they had not looked forward with pleasure and excitement to war, they hadn’t been Buddy, the daredevil of the trenches one minute, before genuine war in the shape of an automatic in a thin desperate hand pressed on him.” (p. 147, Penguin Classics edition).

Grim? Sure. Mocking? Sure. But set ups and developments like this and some others (Raven’s remorse over killing the Minister, who was downtrodden just as he was), plus the book’s snapshot of a time in history, give the book its character.