Greeneland
I first read Graham Greene when I was nineteen. The University of Nottingham had a full run of his novels in the library. I spent much of my first term reading them when I should have been studying dull classics of early literature for my joint honours degree. His fiction fed my suspicion that what I wanted to do with my life was write novels. It wasn’t until 1990, the year of my first novel, and the paperback publication of Volume 1 of Norman Sherry’s Life of Graham Greene when I realised the author had lived, briefly, in Nottingham. Moreover, this city, where I’ve lived for nearly fifty years, played a crucial role in Greene’s development.
That’s the opening paragraph of my introduction to Greeneland, a project I’ve been working on for six years, including trips to archives in Austin, Texas and London. I’ve written several drafts of the novel. It chronicles what I argue are the four most consequential months of Graham Greene’s live, during which he courted the woman who would become his wife, trained for the only job he ever had, looked after a puppy, saw countless movies and… oh yes, converted to Catholicism.
For reasons explained at some length in the introduction, I’ve decided to publish Greeneland as a serial novel on Substack. Each chapter will appear a hundred years to the day after the day on which it’s set. The introduction will be published tomorrow and the prologue in a month’s time. Then the novel proper begins on November 1st, because Sunday November 1st, 1925 was when Greene arrived in the city where I’ve lived since 1977. He was 21 years old.
In a sense, this is a coming of age novel like The Pretender (where I first fictionalised Greene) or Student. But it’s also a documentary novel of a kind I haven’t written before, and making it into a series has been and remains a consuming challenge. I’ll be interested to get feedback as the novel progresses, especially as I’ll still be working on each entry until just before publication.
There is a paid subscription option because that’s how Substack works, but every chapter will be available by free subscription and delivered by email – reading the book the way it’s meant to be read should be easy and hassle free. Thanks for reading. If you’re interested, please subscribe at https://davidbelbin.substack.com/
