Book Review: THE TENTH MAN by Graham Greene

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"And when God came the Enemy was always present. He was God's shadow. He was the bitter proof of God."

I immediately thought of decimation when I saw the title... The Ancient Roman punishment where every tenth man is killed, which 20th century commanders still did. Heavy stuff.

But then I saw how thin it was. "It's only around 150 pages, it will be a nice book to relax with on a Sunday morning," I told myself, as I haven't fully recovered from the past 3 Greene heavyweights of the previous weeks (THE QUIET AMERICAN, THE POWER AND THE GLORY, and THE END OF THE AFFAIR).

Greene's gift was writing about The Eternal War in a world where God is in everything, even base impulses or shallow things like inexplicable attractions of one book over another.

Once again I entered the mind of a craven pathetic excuse of a human being, and ashamedly saw myself in his thought processes. When the Germans in a POW camp selected our protagonist for execution, he gave up all his wealth to exchange places with another.

That was just the set up. The heart of the drama lies in the aftermath of the war. How does one live, knowing that one was party to a murder? How does one move on, after meeting the mournful sister and mother of the bereaved, seeing proof that more than one life was destroyed by one's cowardice?

I'm amazed at how complete the novella is. Make no mistake. It may look like a lightweight, but it packs nearly as heavy a punch as the other longer, Catholic novels!

What IS the attraction of Greene for this reader? Perhaps because the sinner in me feels seen and understood. In his novels I find both shame and hope, despair and joy. Not a lot of books offer this, and for Greene to consistently offer this in volume after volume is a mark of his greatness.

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