| Starflight Theme
On Graham Greene’s novel “Greene, always the master of economy, never wrote a tighter or more beautifully focused novel.” |
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“The main character is Maurice Castle, the head of the Africa station for a branch of British intelligence…. [the] writing is sparse and neat rather than languid or flowery….”
— Kevin Holtsberry
From Chapter I:
“Castle could see that telling the truth this time had been an error of judgement, yet, except on really important occasions, he always preferred the truth. The truth can be double-checked.”
On fiction and truth:
Here is a short story that is
tight, focused, sparse, and neat.
The story is also true.
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This problem embodies the “starflight” theme;
for details, see Tim Krabbé’s
Open Chess Diary, entry 9.
As the example of Nabokov shows, a taste for truth (as in chess or geometry) may accompany a taste for fiction. This applies also to Krabbé, as shown by the following reviews of his novel The Cave:
New York Times
“Krabbe’s carefully constructed narrative has a geometry so precise that the patterns buried under the surface emerge only in the final pages.”
Library Journal
“A diamond of a book- perfectly proportioned, multifaceted, and containing not one wasted word”