The Man within My Head by Pico Iyer: review

When Nicholas Shakespeare and Pico Iyer were schoolboys, they fell in love with Graham Greene. Now Iyer has written the book Greene’s fans feel he deserves

Nicholas Shakespeare - The Telegraph - 30 Apr 2012

5

Graham Greene Photo: Rex Features

We create gods to explain away our inhumanity. Out of a similar impulse, some of us form father figures in our heads – quite different from our actual fathers – to help make sense of an often senseless world. For Pico Iyer, an English-educated travel writer now living in Japan, that virtual father is Graham Greene – the first words of whose first novel began with the telling epigraph: “There’s another man within me.”

Greene had a medium’s gift for getting inside our skin in a way that some of his more highly regarded contemporaries do not. One means by which he achieved this was to keep the child in himself alive. It is part of what makes him such a writer’s writer. “He was all of us, but more so,” in the opinion of his most obvious successor, John le Carré. “I wanted to be him,” Paul Theroux confesses to Iyer. The American novelist Michael Mewshaw treads a step further: “I felt I could become Greene.”

Be careful, though, which Greene you wish to become. Gram Grin, as Kingsley Amis called him, can be a treacherous presence. Iyer notes that Greene’s “unfortunate biographer” Norman Sherry was so possessed by his subject that he ended up as Greene “the figure of tormented self-doubt”. Iyer is alert to the pitfalls of being inhabited by the wrong man – the selfish, self-conscious sinner, half languorously hammocked between easy paradoxes; a character, for instance, like Father Rivas who announces “I believe in the evil of God” – in what Greene told me was the favourite of his novels, The Honorary Consul.

Iyer, on the contrary, is determined to write “a counterbiography”: not the life of Greene, “but what it touches off in the rest of us”. He speaks for many readers and writers when he explains his seductive project to his Japanese wife, Hiroko. “I’m interested in how one can feel so much closer to someone one’s never met than to those one’s known all one’s life… Why do I feel he understands me as nobody I’ve met in my life can do? Why do I feel that I understand him, as none of his other readers quite do?”

In his attempt to answer these questions, he has written the work that those who love Greene (as I do) have dreamt of writing and, in doing it so well, absolved us of the need.
Full review at The Telegraph


The Man within My Head
by Pico Iyer
256PP, Bloomsbury t £14.99