- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Classics; New Ed edition (1 Jun 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099283840
- ISBN-13: 978-0099283843
- Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.3 x 19.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 851,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
May We Borrow Your Husband? (Vintage Classics)
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Review
"Wit, humour and irony...deployed with a light touch, and...a wicked sense of fun." - "Sunday Times"
Product Description
Author William Harris is spending the fag-end of the season at Antibes finishing his first attempt at historical biography, but he becomes more and more interested and involved in the antics of two homosexual interior decorators intent on stealing Poopy Travis's honeymoon husband. Which leaves him free to fall in love with Poopy himself. A widow and a divorcee tipsily discuss the inadequacy of men, deciding that women have much more to offer each other by way of variety in sexual love. A wife holidays alone in Jamaica's cheap season idly hoping for excitement but finding the only man she can have an affair with is far too old and frightened of the dark.. Affairs, obsessions, grand passions and tiny ardours this collection contains some of Greene's saddest observations on the hilarity of sex.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Kindle Edition
This collection of a dozen stories which focuses on relationships between couples was first published in 1967 and is a mixed bag that highlights Greene's strengths and weaknesses as a writer.
The best stories - May We Borrow Your Husband, Mortmain, Two Gentle People -combine the light touch of books like Travels With My Aunt with the darker side seen in Greene's novella Dr Fischer of Geneva.
The title story foreshadows Dr Fischer, published in 1980, and is a narrative by an older man who falls for a woman who is much younger than him.
In Dr Fischer, the narrator marries the girl but she conveniently dies leaving him to melancholy and sad musings.
In May We Borrow Your Husband, the narrator "loses" the girl he barely knows as she heads off to a life of domestic misery with a husband she does not realize is a homosexual.
The story is set in a hotel in Antibes and Greene skillfully portrays the cast of English characters - the plodding narrator whose own marriages have failed, the predatory caricature homosexual interior designers stalking the young man and the innocent lovebirds on their honeymoon.
Greene resists the temptation to turn the situation into a farce and the ending is abrupt and unsentimental.
The final story - Two Gentle People - is even bleaker. It also features a woman whose husband is a homosexual and a man whose wife is a drug addict. The couple meet, are attracted to each other but in the end know they must resist the temptation to start an affair and return to their partners and their loveless domestic lives.
Unfortunately, about half the stories are second rate farcical attempts at humor - The Over-Night Bag, A Shocking Accident, The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen. I am surprised that Greene even allowed them to be published.
The best stories - May We Borrow Your Husband, Mortmain, Two Gentle People -combine the light touch of books like Travels With My Aunt with the darker side seen in Greene's novella Dr Fischer of Geneva.
The title story foreshadows Dr Fischer, published in 1980, and is a narrative by an older man who falls for a woman who is much younger than him.
In Dr Fischer, the narrator marries the girl but she conveniently dies leaving him to melancholy and sad musings.
In May We Borrow Your Husband, the narrator "loses" the girl he barely knows as she heads off to a life of domestic misery with a husband she does not realize is a homosexual.
The story is set in a hotel in Antibes and Greene skillfully portrays the cast of English characters - the plodding narrator whose own marriages have failed, the predatory caricature homosexual interior designers stalking the young man and the innocent lovebirds on their honeymoon.
Greene resists the temptation to turn the situation into a farce and the ending is abrupt and unsentimental.
The final story - Two Gentle People - is even bleaker. It also features a woman whose husband is a homosexual and a man whose wife is a drug addict. The couple meet, are attracted to each other but in the end know they must resist the temptation to start an affair and return to their partners and their loveless domestic lives.
Unfortunately, about half the stories are second rate farcical attempts at humor - The Over-Night Bag, A Shocking Accident, The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen. I am surprised that Greene even allowed them to be published.
Format:Paperback
A collection of 12 stories, mainly set on the continent and mostly in Antibes or Paris, but concerning English or Americans abroad for the season. It is a particular class, upper-middle, often with pretensions, who have found a place in society, but are not usually insensitive or crass, that is depicted here. These are people with money and the leisure to travel on it, but not to sufficiently or always to enjoy it. All of the stories concern sexual love in one way or another, but there is nothing prurient here.
The title story involves Graham Greene's typical narrator, someone within the story but outside of most of the action, watching in this case as a pair of gay men set out to entrap a young man on his honeymoon whom, they have somehow sensed, is open to their own persuasion. The narrator is overcome with pity for the young wife, who obviously suspects nothing. I found this the least enjoyable story in the collection, mainly because of the stereotype of predatory and vicious gays. I suppose this nasty edge is due to the cultural background of the time that Greene was writing, but such a story might take a very different line today, not least because the innocence of the young couple would be impossible to credit or at least to portray in the way managed here.
Other stories concern other holiday-makers - Cheap in August, with a sad wittiness that entirely works. Some, such as The Over-night Bag, have an oddity that almost belies their competence.
That this is a late work of Greene's is evident, with themes of regretful old-age or of lost chances running through them. These stories are all beautifully written, with the melancholy but sensitive tone of a man of the world that so often epitomises Greene's later work.
The title story involves Graham Greene's typical narrator, someone within the story but outside of most of the action, watching in this case as a pair of gay men set out to entrap a young man on his honeymoon whom, they have somehow sensed, is open to their own persuasion. The narrator is overcome with pity for the young wife, who obviously suspects nothing. I found this the least enjoyable story in the collection, mainly because of the stereotype of predatory and vicious gays. I suppose this nasty edge is due to the cultural background of the time that Greene was writing, but such a story might take a very different line today, not least because the innocence of the young couple would be impossible to credit or at least to portray in the way managed here.
Other stories concern other holiday-makers - Cheap in August, with a sad wittiness that entirely works. Some, such as The Over-night Bag, have an oddity that almost belies their competence.
That this is a late work of Greene's is evident, with themes of regretful old-age or of lost chances running through them. These stories are all beautifully written, with the melancholy but sensitive tone of a man of the world that so often epitomises Greene's later work.
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