A review by johnnyforeign
No Man's Land by David Lodge, Graham Greene, James Sexton

4.0

You wouldn't know from the description provided on this site that "No Man's Land" actually contains two stories, "No Man's Land" and "The Stranger's Hand." Each is a "treatment" for a proposed film. However, as is pointed out in the book's Forward, Greene's film treatments are, for all intents and purposes, fully fleshed out fictional stories that stand on their own. The first story, "No Man's Land," is a cold war thriller and is quite good. The second story, "The Stranger's Hand," is also a cold war thriller and, in my opinion, is the better of the two stories. However, it does have one major flaw. Apparently, Greene lost interest in the treatment and never finished it; so, what we are left with is 48 pages of Greene's work, which is superb, followed by a five-page "continuation" by a screenwriter named Guy Elmes. Unlike Greene's part of the story, Elmes's section is clearly not meant to be read as traditional fiction, but is rather a summary of the rest of the story's plot. (Elmes had Greene's blessing with respect to finishing the story.) "The Stranger's Hand" is the story of a young boy who travels to Venice to re-unite with his father, a police official, whom he hasn't seen for three years. I won't say any more about the plot, but the depiction of the boy is both masterful and very moving.