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The Tenth Man (Vintage Classics)
 
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The Tenth Man (Vintage Classics) (Paperback)

by Graham Greene (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £6.99
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Frequently Bought Together

The Tenth Man (Vintage Classics) + A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment (Vintage classics) + The Man within (Vintage classics)
Price For All Three: £14.47

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Product details

  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New Ed edition (1 Jun 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099284146
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099284147
  • Product Dimensions: 20 x 13 x 1.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 280,232 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #63 in  Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Greene, Graham

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Product Description

Review

Greene was a past master of the psychological thriller and this was no exception Observer Typically full of psychological obsession and tricks of perspective, this short story plays games with the concepts of identity and freedom. Threaded through with paranoiac attempts to be sure of time, life, and death, the story ends with impenetrable paradox; with a tragedy and a travesty, a revenge and a redressal, truth and the ultimate lie The Times All of the Greene hallmarks are there: pace, ingenuity, a sense of profundities suggested but never insisted upon Sunday Telegraph


Product Description

In a prison in Occupied France one in every ten men is to be shot. The prisoners draw lots among themselves - and for rich lawyer Louis Chavel it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonizing and crucial failure of nerve. Hysterical with panic, fear, and a sense of injustice, he offers to barter everything he owns for someone to take his place. Graham Greene wrote "The Tenth Man" in 1944, when he was under a two-year contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the manuscript lay forgotten in MGM's archives until 1983. It was published two years later with an introduction by the author.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars "The story of a man who bought his life, the tenth man.", 30 Jan 2005
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
One of Greene's "entertainments," this short novel written in 1944 was hidden away for nearly forty years before being discovered in the MGM files. Written as the idea for a film, the novella is a fine example of Greene's style, as finished and polished as any of his more complex novels.

Set in France during the war, the story concerns a group of thirty Frenchmen imprisoned by their German occupiers and then told that they must decide for themselves which three of the thirty men will be executed. One of the men who draws a marked ballot for his own death is a wealthy lawyer with considerable property who offers his entire fortune to any man who will take his place. One young man accepts, drawing up legal papers which give his newly acquired property to his sister and mother before he is executed.

The remaining three parts of the novel deal with the return of the now-penniless former owner to "his" house after the war, where the meets the dead man's sister and works as a servant under a new name; the arrival of an imposter who claims to be the former owner; and the showdown between the former owner and the imposter.

As is always the case with Greene, the dialogue is taut, revealing character and plot simultaneously, with no extraneous chat. The main character, like so many others Greene depicts, is a weak man whose bad choices, in this case his decision to buy his own life, have led to the complications which become the story. Living a lie, Chavel/Charlot faces a crisis of morality in which he must decide what, if anything, he can do to redeem himself to atone for the life-or-death decision he forced upon another man. The imposter who arrives at the house claiming to be the former owner is described as resembling a devil, and the showdown between him and the real former owner is seen as the struggle between goodness and evil.

Filled with ironies and absurdities, the novel maintains considerable suspense until the dramatic, tour de force of an ending. Too short to allow for much character development, the novella conveys a strong message within an exciting little morality tale filled with sharply observed details--simple without being simplistic.

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