Pico Iyer’s Kinship With Graham Greene

By LIESL SCHILLINGER - New York Times -  December 30, 2011

THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD - By Pico Iyer - 

242 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

Left - Kurt Hutton/Getty Images - Graham Greene

“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.” Those who love Graham Greene — and their numbers are legion — will recognize this sentence, the first line of his quietly devastating novel “The Heart of the Matter,” published in 1948.

Why didn’t Wilson deserve an honorific? What terseness, scorn or unceremoniousness did the omission of “Mr.” imply? Why was a grown man wearing shorts, and why were his knees pink? Where was the Bedford Hotel and where, to be precise, was Wilson? Was he in England, the country of Greene’s birth? Hardly. Like the author, Wilson was spending a stretch of World War II in West Africa. And who was Wilson? That would take longer to answer. This same aura of enigma-disguised-as-directness hovers over the meditation Pico Iyer has written about his lifelong obsession with Graham Greene, numinously titled “The Man Within My Head” — a nod to Greene’s first novel, “The Man Within.”

Iyer, a journalist and world traveler, the author of seven books of nonfiction and two novels, begins his own memoir this way: “I was standing by the window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out.” Where is this Plaza Hotel? In New York? Hardly. It’s in La Paz, Bolivia, a country where Iyer and a friend nearly died in a car crash on a mountain road one New Year’s Day. And who is Iyer? The answer to that question unfolds in the ensuing pages, emerging from behind a scrim of other characters — not only Greene, but the author’s philosopher father, Raghavan Iyer, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as Iyer’s old traveling companions and school friends and the women he has encountered along the way.
Iyer is far from the first Greenite to write about this prolific figure, whose long and illustrious career encompassed scores of novels, essays, short stories and plays. Greene’s official biographer, Norman Sherry, devoted more than 2,000 pages, gathered in three volumes, to an exploration of the author’s boyhood and manhood, his conflicted Roman Catholicism, his love affairs and friendships, his devious psychology.
Full review at the New York Times.