(From the July South Bay Poly newsletter).
Book “review?” Or merely a “light once-over?”
I began with enthusiasm. Graham Greene gets the atmosphere rolling nicely. World War II. A man living on one side of the London “commons” has been having an affair with the wife of a “friend” who lives on the other side of the “commons.” The narrator now thinks the woman is cheating on him, so he convinces the husband to let him hire a private investigator. The woman often coughs terribly. I immediately knew she would die of TB or something—and she does.
But in the meantime, she finds God. She was baptized a Catholic when she was two. She doesn’t remember, of course. During an air raid, when the narrator is pinned under a door and appears to be dead, she promises God to reform if God lets him live. He survives, of course (otherwise he couldn’t be narrating, right?). Now the woman drops him and considers becoming a Catholic. The narrator suggests that she has been sleeping around right and left (misogyny, I wondered?).
Now the woman has given up the narrator, and continues to have a “non-marriage” with her husband. In many years of married life, she has never experienced an orgasm with her husband—though she did, apparently, and often, with the narrator. But now she can get on with dying (aggravated by the narrator’s tendency to drag her out into freezing rain for gut-wrenching conversations) and becoming a saint. By the end, she’s probably achieved three bona fide miracles—but not the one she really wanted: Rather than bringing peace to the narrator, he still feels miserable. Now if this had been a poly movie (a woman, two men, and God)…
Some people feel that spirituality and sexuality are like East and West—“Never the twain shall meet." I disagree… Anyway…I’m off to watch one or both of the film versions next.
