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A review by odin45mp
The Third Man by Graham Greene
2.0
I was excited to read this book for book club. I like a good spy/thriller. This was a fast read. The setting was real - Vienna during the early cold war. It involves British, American, and Russian authorities. A friend reaches Vienna just too late to meet his friend, but in time for his friend's funeral. But there seems to be a question as to exactly what happened at the accident scene, and our protagonist decides to investigate on his own.
The characters are all fairly thin, and what took me out of this book is that the dialogue rarely has markers as to who was talking, so little that there were times I had to read a passage multiple times to follow who was saying what in the conversation. The descriptions were also light, so I had a hard time getting a feel for the city itself, which was disappointing. As problematic as the Fleming Bond novels are in representation, we at least got a colonial British sense of each place that Bond visits, through his eyes. I don't get a good sense for Greene's Vienna. Without a good sense of the place or the people, I am left underwhelmed by this story, even though the plot itself was GOOD and has been retold in several other stories. We will see where our group discussion leads us this Thursday.
The characters are all fairly thin, and what took me out of this book is that the dialogue rarely has markers as to who was talking, so little that there were times I had to read a passage multiple times to follow who was saying what in the conversation. The descriptions were also light, so I had a hard time getting a feel for the city itself, which was disappointing. As problematic as the Fleming Bond novels are in representation, we at least got a colonial British sense of each place that Bond visits, through his eyes. I don't get a good sense for Greene's Vienna. Without a good sense of the place or the people, I am left underwhelmed by this story, even though the plot itself was GOOD and has been retold in several other stories. We will see where our group discussion leads us this Thursday.