Early Graham Greene

THE SHIPWRECKED (244 pp.)--Graham Greene--Viking ($3).

In 1935 a little-known English writer published his seventh novel, England Made Me. The critics brushed it off with mild praise; a writer whose pages steamed with so much excitement could not also be significant. When a U.S. publisher imported the book, it sold exactly 933 copies. But now that Graham Greene has become famous as a literary analyst of sin and salvation, it is being reissued as The Shipwrecked.

Swift but erratic in pace, and streaked with a social consciousness that was quickly to fade from his later novels, The Shipwrecked is written in the vibrato style that has become Greene's trademark. Where his more mature books, like The Heart of the Matter, treat human weakness in religious terms, The Shipwrecked tends to blame it on a decaying society. But in its unpretentious, entertaining way, it proves again that Graham Greene could hardly be dull if he tried.

Charming Rotter. In a sleazy London bar, Kate Farrant, thirtyish and handsome, waits for her twin brother Anthony, a globe-trotting ne'er-do-well. When he bounces in with "the shallow cheer of an advertisement," she guesses he has lost his job again. To Kate, her charming rotter of a brother is a frightening vision of the failure she might have been, yet she loves him helplessly, as if he were more than a brother. To salvage him, she takes Anthony back with her to Sweden, where she is ensconced as mistress to Erik Krogh, Europe's richest man and apparently a facsimile of Swedish Match King Ivar Kreuger.

For a while, life in the Krogh empire is delightfully plush. Anthony becomes Krogh's bodyguard, teaches his joyless boss how to relax, begins an affair on the side with an English lady tourist, and picks up extra change by funneling news about Krogh to a journalist. But when Anthony discovers that Krogh is swindling half the world, he rebels: he is not "unscrupulous enough to be successful." Suddenly dangerous, Anthony is casually destroyed by one of Krogh's assistants.

Efficient Monster. Like all of Graham Greene's novels, The Shipwrecked is basically concerned with the problem of evil, this time through a contrast between Anthony's genteel, old-fashioned shiftiness and Krogh's impersonal ruthlessness. For all his faults, Anthony is human, and he clings with redeeming inconsistency to "the conventions of a generation older than himself"; Krogh is merely an efficient monster who manipulates people as if they were pins on a map.

Author Greene sometimes wrenches his story to underline his idea: Krogh, for example, becomes a conventional stereotype of the rich man too busy to be happy. But in Anthony Farrant he has created an unforgettable character, a bewildered and pathetic Ishmael who personifies the moral shabbiness to which Greene has repeatedly returned in his later, better books.

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