Hide-and-Seek
“The End of the Party” is one of the most anthologized stories of Greene, a soft and subtle tale of dread and horror that ends with a shockingly ironic twist. It is a story of identical twins, but rather than pursue the good/evil trope, it portrays the potential for psychic empathy or, perhaps, the lack thereof. Everything moves toward the darkness of a simple game of hide-and-seek:
“Several children ran upstairs, and the lights on the top floor went out. Darkness came down like the wings of a bat and settled on the landing. Others began to put out the lights at the edge of the hall, till the children were all gathered in the central radiance of the chandelier, while the bats squatted round on hooded wings and waited for that, too, to be extinguished.”
“The Case for the Defence”
This crime story turns on the imagery which is presented as evidence at the trial of a man for murder. The narrator describes the key moment in the commission of the crime:
“He was a heavy stout man with bulging bloodshot eyes. All his muscles seemed to be in his thighs. Yes, an ugly customer, one you wouldn't forget in a hurry — and that was an important point because the Crown proposed to call four witnesses who hadn’t forgotten him, who had seen him hurrying away from the little red villa in Northwood Street.”
All seems to be going according to expectations until a surprise witness for the defense is asked to stand up:
“…and there at the back of the court with a thick stout body and muscular legs and a pair of bulging eyes, was the exact image of the man in the dock.”
Spoiler alert: this is another story about identical twins.
Philosophical Contemplation
“Across the Bridge” is ostensibly the story of the last hours of a con man, but by the end the events of the narrative are revealed to actually be merely a premise for philosophical contemplation of the meaning of life. Everything leads inexorably toward the climactic event of the story which is the stimulus for the contemplative philosophizing and that event is presented through vivid imagery:
“I think the order of events was this — the dog started across the road right in front of the car, and Mr Calloway yelled, at the dog or the car, I don’t know which. Anyway, the detective swerved — he said later, weakly, at the inquiry, that he couldn’t run over a dog, and down went Mr Calloway, in a mess of broken glass and gold rims and silver hair, and blood. The dog was on to him before any of us could reach him licking and whimpering and licking. I saw Mr Calloway put up his hand, and down it went across the dog’s neck and the whimper rose to a stupid bark of triumph, but Mr Calloway was dead.”
The Destruction
“The Destructors” is a about a post-war gang of hooligans who to take out their frustrations on the only house remaining intact in a lot devastated by the bombs dropped by German planes during the London Blitz barely a decade earlier. The reasoning behind this seemingly wholesale example of anarchy in the UK for anarchy’s sake is somewhat conveyed during one spectacular piece of imagery:
“The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators — and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen house as it had now become.”
