on a hill just outside the village, designed in a faux-Tudor style. The inhabitants are a group of environmentally minded middle-class hypocrites who prate of the virtues of unspoiled landscapes and smugly deplore the filthy working-class industrial cities that make their genteel comfort possible. Meanwhile, they've turned Bowling's childhood fishing pond into a dump filled with the refuse of their synthetic lives.
Ten years later, in the totalitarian society depicted in his novel 1984 (1949), Orwell imagined the ruling Party members working in 'enormous pyramidal structure[s] of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air,' against a background of an unreconstructed war-torn London. In the «low- ceilinged» basement cafeterias of their state offices, lower-level bureaucrats are served a diet of synthetic foods whose ingredients are as nauseating as anything Bowling had to endure and even more obscure. At one luncheon, they dine on a stew described as 'a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit.' It's made with 'cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat.' Whatever they are, these foods are sold under this society's universal brand name, Victory, a label that speaks of the Party's unremitting attempt to bring the real world to heel, stamping out whatever is natural and authentic and replacing it with ersatz goods. It is in its own small but critical way part of rulers' program to establish their complete political control. Synthetic gin, synthetic cigarettes, synthetic food-the poorer the quality, the better. It's a recipe for making synthetic people. It is part of the grand strate-873- gy to distance people from reality, to render them dissociated, befuddled, confused, and, consequently, malleable. If you can't be sure of what it is you're eating, how can you be sure of anything else? It's not such a long stretch from a diet consisting of odious synthetics to a politics founded on a menu of transparent falsehoods.
Many of the satiric moments in Graham Greene's novels revolve around a similar preoccupation with substitutes. This is especially true in what he chose to call his 'entertainments,' which today seem as likely to claim our attention as his more serious fiction.
Rather than in large architectural structures, Greene liked to house the bogus in smaller containers. In It's a Battlefield(1934), a communist organizer aptly named Mr. Surrogate retreats to the metal confines of a lavatory stall to escape an embarrassing encounter. It seems his upperclass origins make him feel uncomfortable in the presence of his less cooperative working-class comrades. Hiding in the stall, he tries to make his protracted stay seem natural by flushing the toilet at intervals. His name and his ruse do more to reveal his lack of integrity than any explanation ever could.
In the justly famous scene from The Third Man (1949), Greene houses his most charming villain in a Ferris wheel cabin. Surrounded by the cagelike architecture of the wheel's 'iron struts' and 'black girders,' the naive Rollo Martins has a moral showdown with his old friend, the perversely genial Harry Lime. As they rise in their swaying cabin, the occupied city of Vienna spreads below them, revealing the bombing scars it sustained in the Second World War. The narrator notes that 'the horizon slid away' and 'the piers of the Reichsbrucke lifted above the houses.' This eerily unnatural perspective provides a fit setting for Harry to justify his deadly enterprise as a trafficker in adulterated penicillin. At the apogee of their ride, the wheel pauses long enough for a parody of Christ's temptation on the mountain as Harry invites Rollo to join his profitable scheme. It only requires that Rollo think of the people they see on the ground below as statistics, much as modern governments do. But Rollo counters Harry's offer by asking him if he has seen any of his victims, those whom his useless penicillin has left to die or, worse, contract gangrene and meningitis. Unmoved, Harry responds against a backdrop described as a 'toy landscape' with 'the stain of the sunset [running] in streaks over the wrinkled papery sky beyond the black girders.' 'Victims?' he asks. -874-
Don't be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there… Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving-for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money-without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?… In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people and the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five-year plans and so have I.
In a toyland society, nothing is quite real, except, of course, oneself. It makes getting ahead at the expense of others so much easier. Here Greene is perfectly explicit about the connection between a dehumanized public policy and individual behavior. Harry's deadly trade flourishes because the occupying Allied forces have restricted the limited penicillin supply to their military hospitals. The civilians under their «protection» must either do without or turn to illegal channels.
If officials treat people so heartlessly, Harry reasons, why shouldn't he? Yet, in true Greeneian fashion, it is Harry's marketing of a bogus medicine that enables him to provide a genuine cure for his former friend. Rollo suffers from a case of culpable innocence. He is as morally childish as the western melodramas he writes for a living, in which good and evil are instantly distinguishable. In contrast to Rollo's fiction, however, Harry's unspeakable villainy veils itself with engaging humor and undeniable vitality. He always made things seem such fun, Rollo reflects. As his name implies, Harry Lime is that ultimate of bogus allures, a charming Lucifer. He's a dark angel, simulating his former radiance by means of the limelight of his contrived charisma. It is this difficult truth that Rollo must master before he can become morally mature.
The central plot element of Our Man in Havana (1959) is so thoroughly bogus it's not there at all. The story is constructed around a vacuum, literally and figuratively. The narrative begins when James Wormold, a financially strapped British vacuum cleaner merchant, is lured into espionage. He's recruited by the suave but incompetent Hawthorne to run a network of spies in Havana, where he manages a Phastkleaner shop. Initially, Wormold objects on the reasonable grounds that he has no contacts and nothing to report. But Hawthorne presses him to do what he can for the good of his home country, baiting his appeal to British patriotism with a hundred fifty dollars a month and another hundred fifty in expenses, 'free of income tax, you know.'
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Realizing his new employers have a vested interest in believing the worst, Wormold soon begins to invent high-tech horrors to satisfy their grim suspicions. Using his own merchandise for models, he draws pictures of monstrously elaborate weapons of mass destruction and tells his employers that these are being built by unnamed forces in the Cuban mountains. Inspecting the drawings in London, the chief of intelligence remarks that the weapons are surprisingly similar to vacuum cleaners. 'The ingenuity, the simplicity, the devilish imagination of the thing,' he nearly rhapsodizes. He is more perceptive than he could possibly understand. Greene's point in this delightful send-up of the espionage game is that suspicion creates a fatal vacuum in the imagination, a vacuum that sucks into its self-created maelstrom all the fear, hatred, and destructiveness of which the human heart is capable. The worse our imaginings, the better. The intelligence chief gleefully concludes that the weapons in Wormold's drawings are 'so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.' Astonished by his superior's evident relish, his assistant asks if this is desirable. The chief witheringly responds, 'Of course it's desirable. No one worries about conventional weapons.'
Espionage, it turns out, prizes absurdity. It urgently seeks to pervert the natural on behalf of the unnatural. Hawthorne assures Wormold that his vacuum shop is an ideal cover. Its 'natural air' will disguise the very unnatural deceptions of his new profession. When Hawthorne forces him into a clandestine meeting in a men's room, Wormold sarcastically asks if it might be good strategy to change trousers before leaving in order to confuse enemy spies. After considering this ploy for a judicious moment, Hawthorne concludes quite seriously that it wouldn't 'look natural, old man.' In this novel, the bogus does a dizzy dance with itself.
Many writers have been driven to satire by our century's peculiar excesses. But, in England, the decades between the wars belong to Waugh. They bear his signature as no other. He may not have been as intellectual or as well-read as Huxley. He may not have been as politically astute as Greene and Orwell. But looking back from our end of the century, he seems to have had perfect pitch for his age, both by temperament and by craft. -876-
Temperamentally, Waugh suited an age that was more than usually divided between tradition and innovation. He was himself alternately repelled and fascinated by his troubled times. They seemed to reflect his own inner division. Although he advertised himself as a reactionary, he recognized, in his own words, that 'the artist, however aloof he holds himself, is always and specially the creature of the Zeitgeist.' Waugh was torn between his conservative and anarchic selves. He was, in short, at war with himself. One part of him mourned the passing of the last century's gentlemanly code of values: decency, industry, and fair play. Another part, however, exulted in the mad gad-about of life of Mayfair's Bright Young People: willful, headlong, and 'careless of consequence.'
