It's a Battlefield is an early novel by Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

, first published in the year 1934. Graham Greene later described it as his "first overtly political novel". Its theme, said Greene, is "the injustice of man's justice." Later in life, Greene classified his major books as "novels" and his lighter works as "entertainments"; he ranked It's a Battlefield as a novel and not a mere entertainment.

Plot Summary

Drover, a bus driver, stabs a man who is about to attack his wife. Unfortunately for him, the man is a policeman and Drover is a Communist, so he is sentenced to hang. The novel explores the intersecting lives of those close to Drover in the days before the hanging. His Communist colleagues want him to die because this will gain support for the party; his wife and brother begin an affair. There is no hero. With few exceptions, the characters are deliberately limned as, in one critic's view, "mediocre, bleak, uninspiring and at times perverted and stupid". Some of the characters seem only half complete. The resulting interplay of selfish, driven characters creates what Greene called "a panoramic novel of London". In this panorama, the traditional detective story is (sometimes using postmodern

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

 techniques) turned on its head.; the hidden villains, according to one critic, are class and capitalism.

Reviews

Though at first it sold few copies, the novel was praised by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 and Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

. (Later the book was to sell 120 thousand copies) Writing in the Spectator, V. S. Pritchett

V. S. Pritchett

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE , was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes...

 found great merit in what he called an adventurous, intelligent, "genuine modern novel". The New York Times thought it "engrossing, alive, and decidedly well worth reading" That reviewer praised Greene's "cinematographic" style, and Greene later said that the novel was "intentionally based on film technique" (Surprisingly, and to Greene's lasting amusement, it was one of the few novels he wrote that was never made into a film.) The novel's style is also influenced by Ulysses

Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

, The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

, Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels....

 and, as Greene admitted, Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

. He alludes to Conrad by naming Drover's brother after him.

Reception

A few months after publication, a grisly murder occurred in London strikingly similar to a fictional murder described in (but only tangential to the main plot of) the novel, and Greene feared the police would arrest him. Other similarities with real life were less accidental. The somewhat sleazy character named Surrogate was modeled after John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was prolific, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime...

. Lady Caroline Bury was inspired by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Lady Ottoline Morrell

The Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers such as Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H...

. And the Assistant Commissioner, perhaps the most vivid and humane character in the book, was in part based on Greene's uncle and perhaps also in part on a friend named Turner. As for settings, Greene visited a matchbook factory and Wandsworth Prison

Wandsworth (HM Prison)

HM Prison Wandsworth is a Category B men's prison at Wandsworth in the London Borough of Wandsworth, south west London, England. It is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service and is the largest prison in London and one of the largest in western Europe, with similar capacity to Liverpool...

 before writing about those locations in his novel. (Factory and prison are deliberately described using similar language.)

In 1948, Greene extensively revised the novel for the third edition and his changes were incorporated in future printings. Greene's handwritten revisions were offered for sale in 2010 for $40,000.

Malian writer Yambo Ouloguem was accused of plagiarism after he included passages from It's a Battlefield in a 1968 novel.