It’s A Battlefield.

GREENE, Graham.

$150.00

Item Number: 119772

London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1934.

First edition of this early novel by Greene. Octavo, original cloth. In very good condition. 

Though at first it sold few copies, the novel was praised by Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford. (Later the book was to sell 120,000 copies) Writing in the Spectator, V. S. Pritchett found great merit in what he called an adventurous, intelligent, "genuine modern novel". The New York Times thought it "engrossing, alive, and decidedly well worth reading" That reviewer praised Greene's "cinematographic" style, and Greene later said that the novel was "intentionally based on film technique" (Surprisingly, and to Greene's lasting amusement, it was one of the few novels he wrote that was never made into a film.) The novel's style is also influenced by Ulysses, The Waste Land, Mrs Dalloway and, as Greene admitted, Joseph Conrad. He alludes to Conrad by naming Drover's brother after him. Graham Greene later described it as his "first overtly political novel".[1] Its theme, said Greene, is "the injustice of man's justice." Later in life, Greene classified his major books as "novels" and his lighter works as "entertainments"; he ranked It's a Battlefield as a novel and not a mere entertainment.