An imposing glass and steel building and the unfeeling multinational financier who inhabits it — both more frigid than the coming Scandinavian winter — stand in contrast to a ragtag lot of British expatriates who live in Stockholm and are thoroughly dependent on the amoral, oppressive Erik Krogh’s business empire. The English in this novel are mostly pathetic characters. They weren’t successful back home and now live on the margins of both Swedish society and interwar modernity. Despite their expatriate and downtrodden status, they are not rootless or devoid of loyalty to community in the way that the modern, international world of finance is depicted in this populist Graham Greene novel from 1935. The English expatriates have memories, nostalgia, a sense of belonging, a perceived identity and, ultimately, some basic core values to which they adhere to varying degrees. Elements of England Made Me often read like a fable set against the backdrop of unrestrained, predatory capitalism — perhaps not surprising considering the novel was written in the Great Depression.
Kate Farrant lives in Stockholm; she works for Krogh, one of the richest men in Europe, and she’s also his girlfriend. When her perpetually unemployed twin brother, Anthony, arrives in Stockholm, following years of living an unsettled, chaotic life in Asia, she tries to bring order to his messy existence by finding him gainful employment as Krogh’s new bodyguard. Anthony is a big-talker, a serial liar, and a petty fraud. He’s so transparently dishonest and his dishonesty earns him such paltry “victories” in life, that he comes across as pretty benign and even likeable. His basic decency and a sense of justice breaks through when he discovers how reprehensible Krogh really is and decides that he can no longer work for him.
The most comically tragic character in England Made Me is called Minty, another English expatriate and a tabloid journalist. Krogh’s life and his company’s shady dealings have the potential to provide plenty of material for the tabloid press. Minty does his best to chase leads and stories. His journalism is a grubby business. He lives in a rooming house with barely a cup and saucer to call his own. He is mostly estranged from his family in Britain. He disparages women in a way that, in our contemporary parlance, makes him akin to the Incel movement. And his attempt to use his status as an old boy of Britain’s prestigious Harrow boarding school with anyone who might listen at the British mission in Stockholm fails to earn him the acceptance he so desires.
Minty hopes to use Anthony Farrant as his “eyes and ears” in Krogh’s business empire, believing that he’ll serve as a source of information and juicy stories. Farrant lies about having attended Harrow as well and Minty soon discovers that what Krogh’s British bodyguard says of himself is often untrue. Minty finds Farrant’s shabbiness and petty dishonesty encouraging — if he’s desperate, it may be easier to get him to serve as a source. And I think another reason Minty finds him winsome is that Farrant’s desperation means that he isn’t threatening. At one point we read: “Farrant needed money. Farrant sported a false tie. Farrant was safe.”
Minty is the novel’s most memorable character. In fact, I found myself wanting more scenes with him. His one small joy in life is to drink coffee, yet even that modest pleasure is taken away when a surgery leaves him unable to consume hot liquids. He’s petulant, petty, hateful and vindictive — and somehow likeable, or at least pitiable. Credit goes to Greene for that impressive feat. Minty is also the novel’s neurotic and transactional Roman Catholic; most Greene novels have at least one such Catholic character. One passage depicts this particularly well:
Tomorrow he would have to remember to keep his mind free from malice and uncharitableness in honour of St. Zephyrinus; today he could give full rein to every instinct. St. Louis had never done anything to help him. Weak in bed he had prayed to him after he had been drained, but St. Louis had not heard; the despised, the forgotten Zephyrinus had replied.
One of the things that the deeply repressed Minty hates the most is the human body. During a visit to the British mission, as he stands at the edge of the carpet soaked and dripping from the rain, he’s sickened by the fact that one of the diplomats is perusing a magazine containing nude images, while the Minister himself takes great care to be well-groomed at all times. Minty becomes resentful and we get one of the novel’s compelling passages:
Yes, it was ugly, the human figure. Man or woman, it made no difference to Minty. The body’s shape, the running nose, excrement, the stupid postures of passion, these beat like a bird’s heart in Minty’s brain…To use powder, to take such care with one’s clothes, to be so carefully brushed, the hypocrisy of it sickened Minty. The body still remained, its functions were not hidden by Savile Row. To think that God Himself had become man. Minty could not enter a church without the thought, which sickened him, which was more to him than the agony in the garden, the despair upon the cross.
The turning point in this story involves a fairly minor character, known as the Young Andersson. The young man, a naive, bright-eyed factory worker in one of Krogh’s plants, believes in the promise of capitalism, sees Krogh as the future, and finds his socialist father to be an old-fashioned, irrelevant bore. We read: “His father’s socialism was something old, tiresome, didactic…’A fair share for the worker,’ ‘proletarian unity,’ like a long Lutheran Sunday his father’s phrases went droning on. They had no more meaning to young Andersson than ‘three in one,’ ‘the persons of the blessed Trinity.'” When his father, an advocate for the rights of workers, is falsely accused and dismissed from his job, the Young Andersson takes a long train journey to Stockholm to visit Krogh personally and advocate for his father. He’s convinced that Krogh and his company care and will do the right thing. Instead, he’s degraded, abused and beaten. He looks up to Krogh to such an extent that he’s at a loss to comprehend how brutally he’s treated. The scene is so distressing to witness, that Farrant’s sense of morality is awakened.
Some of the elements of this novel make for difficult reading. Greene switches points of view frequently. It takes a focused reader to follow. He also incorporates stream of consciousness, at least in traces. Finally, insinuations abound that Kate and Anthony have an incestuous relationship, or at minimum desire one. I found this to be a distracting subplot. But what the novel does exceptionally well is provide a portrait of what is often called the Lost Generation — young Britons and Europeans disillusioned and adrift after World War I. The thirty-something Anthony Farrant embodies this sentiment and one passage encapsulates it nicely:
They were not fresh enough, optimistic enough, to believe in peace, cooperation, the dignity of labour, or if they believed in them, they were not young enough to work for them…He thought: it’s because I’m not young enough and not old enough: not young enough to believe in a juster world, not old enough for the country, the king, the trenches to mean anything to me at all.
Krogh and his awful British fixer — a man called Hall who fawns over him and will engage in any ruthlessness to prove his loyalty — represent a nihilistic view of the world. The likes of Anthony Farrant or Minty, however, represent men in the midst of an existential dilemma, facing the headwinds of a world where tradition, values and old loyalties have been upended and where economic and political whirlwinds tear through and destabilize everything.
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