Greene disliked being described as a Catholic writer. None the less, his name became known around the world as the author of The Power and the Glory, and even more The Heart of the Matter, novels in which his obsession with the problems of being a Catholic are at the centre of the narrative. From the size of his readership, and the controversy his novels caused outside and inside the Catholic Church, Greene's writing clearly touched on issues which seemed important and pressing at the time they were written. These novels continue to be the ones most generally admired, even by critics, like Michael Shelden, who are hostile to Greene and his reputation. The appeal of literature has never been dependent on the assumption of shared beliefs between writer and reader: the power to excite, interest, and challenge through the quality of the writing, the vibrancy of the language, matter more. None the less, Greene's position at the close of the twentieth century continues to raise problems of response which need to be discussed. As a Catholic writer in his period, he is far from being alone: Bernanos, Claudel, Mauriac remain figures of indisputable importance in France – a prominence shared by Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Graham Greene in England. In this chapter I shall concentrate less on the doctrinal issues – brilliantly discussed by Roger Sharrock in his book Saints, Sinners and Comedians (1984) – than on the perspectives which give Greene's preoccupations their cultural significance.

Greene's first major Catholic novel was Brighton Rock. In writing about it, Greene admitted that he began to use Catholic characters because he wanted ‘to examine more closely the effect of faith on action’ (WE 59). In 1937 the problem for ‘Christian’ Europe was also beginning to express itself in stark terms. To what extent did 1,900 years of Christianity provide any kind of defence against the evil in Nazi Germany. These were problems which the writer could not avoid – particularly a writer like Greene, who saw writing as a form of action, and who, influenced by Henry James, recognized the problem of evil in human nature as central to the religious sense on which, he believed, art depended. Pinkie is not a symbolic figure, but he is a representative figure; and the Brighton which Greene describes belongs more to an ‘imaginary geographic region’ than to the actual town.