Description
“A HAUNTING AWARENESS OF WARTIME TERROR… A WORLD IN WHICH LOST INNOCENCE CAN NEVER BE RECAPTURED”: FIRST EDITION OF GRAHAM GREENE’S MINISTRY OF FEAR, 1943, VERY RARE IN ORIGINAL DUST JACKET
GREENE, Graham. The Ministry of Fear. London, Toronto: William Heinemann Ltd., 1943. Octavo, original yellow cloth, original dust jacket.
First edition of Greene’s widely praised 1943 work, an “hypnotic moonstone of a novel… few writers can distill drama from a twisted would with more skill than Greene” (New York Times), exceedingly rare in wartime dust jacket.
To Greene’s biographer, “Ministry of Fear is a war novel only on the surface… He is not interested in the rights or wrongs of the world conflict. Greene wants to know about the suffering enduring in one man’s war, and he brings its terrors to life with the same skill that he applies to his portrait” of life in the Blitz. Like his protagonist Arthur Rowe, Greene “finds he cannot return to an earlier innocence but that he can feel more ‘at home’ in a ruined world” (Shelden, Graham Greene, 283-4). At one point in the novel Greene describes Rowe as “a murderer—as other men are poets.” That description, the novel’s title, and subtle allusions throughout offer rich insight into Greene’s artistry. On publication of this classic novel, set in wartime London, the New York Times hailed it as an “hypnotic moonstone of a novel… few writers can distill drama from a twisted soul with more skill than Greene.” To critic Robert Hoskins, Greene deliberately invokes Wordsworth’s Prelude in Ministry of Fear, which Greene ultimately acknowledged. The link to Wordsworth further enhances the novel’s “haunting awareness of wartime terror not only as physical danger but as a loss of moral vision… a world in which lost innocence can never be recaptured” (Greene and Wordsworth, 33-41). Basis for the 1944 film noir by director Fritz Lang (Dark Page, 118). First edition: variant copies have been found with dust jacket front flaps displaying a printed price (this copy), or with no printed price: no priority determined.
Book fine; light edge-wear to colorful, near-fine dust jacket. An excellent copy of a seminal Graham Greene work.
