In this new collection of short fiction [A Sense of Reality] Graham Greene does something he has not done before. In his previous work Greene has treated the world, if not his people and themes, naturalistically; his heroes have generally been morality-play figures, but his settings and plots have been matter-of-fact, circumstantially realistic. In fact, one of the most characteristic notes in Greene's serious fiction (melodrama and whimsy have always had some place in his "entertainments") has been the contrast between the sense of circumambient grace and the ridiculously shabby world in which grace operates. This literal-minded concern with dreary, commonplace reality, on which Greene seems to have hung the sign "Out of Order," has been important for him, since through the literal shabbiness of the world he has been able to attack the illusion of material well-being which men use in order to conceal from themselves the fact that they live in a fallen, evil world.

In A Sense of Reality, however, two, perhaps three, of the stories lean heavily on myth, fantasy, or other forms of narrative mannerism. (The very appropriate title, incidentally, is a general one and not borrowed from one of the individual stories.) In many other authors these currently fashionable techniques might seem to have been dictated by fad or to be stridently arty. They do not seem so in this book. This is true partly because Greene does not simply translate traditional themes into contemporary terms; he takes elements from such widely varied sources as the Bible, classical mythology, psychology, and (one is tempted to suggest) personal dreams and combines them into an original, dream-like pattern. That is, the myth itself is Greene's invention, not just its application. Furthermore, Greene imprints his mythos with the familiar stamp of his own sensibility; in his myths we find the familiar broken-down, pain-filled world with which he has made us familiar: twisted bodies, obscenity, old toilet bowls.

"Under the Garden" is the longest and best of the stories. In it Greene explores once more his old theme of the "lost childhood." Wilditch, the protagonist, under a medical death sentence, returns to his early home to exorcise a haunting childhood memory, part fact and part dream, which has dominated his life. The memory concerns a sojourn in the underworld wherein he had learned about life from a subterranean dweller named Javitt (Jahweh?), seen a wondrous treasure, and been inspired with love for Javitt's elusive and sensually beautiful daughter, whom Wilditch decides to seek in the world.

At first it seems that the old memory can be easily exorcised, for the "lake" and "island" which had been the setting for the remembered experience turn out to be little more than a puddle with a few bushes in the middle of it. But the strange discovery on the "island" of a chamber-pot which had figured in the "dream" experience convinces Wilditch that he cannot rid himself of the dream and that "there was a decision he had to make all over again." Life (or the after-life?) may have meaning after all; perhaps, after all, "Absolute reality belongs to dreams and not to life."

One cannot so briefly do justice to this complex and thematically rich story, which in ideas and techniques has a specific gravity much greater than one has learned to expect from Greene. The story is moving and acutely painful, especially in those parts which convey the adult's grotesquely shrunken world now void of the mystery of childhood wonder. And a good deal of its emotional power arises from the obscure but eerily convincing psychological myth which takes up about half its length.

The last piece in the volume, 'À Discovery in the Woods," is even more macabre; in it Greene takes the story of Noah and the Ark and relates it to the discovery of a wrecked transatlantic steamship high on a wooded mountainside by four stunted, pitiable children in a post-atomic age. The story can be read on a number of levels; for example, it is not only an imaginative rendering on the aftermath of atomic war, but also a kind of commentary on the Biblical story and its message.

The brief story called "A Visit to Morin" will undoubtedly be read as a comment by Greene on his own career and reputation. Morin is a novelist who was once in vogue because of his daring treatment of religious themes. This story is so much in Greene's familiar vein that, in its present company, one almost suspects it of being sardonic self-parody or some similar literary joke—especially when one hears Morin say, "Long after I ceased to believe myself I was a carrier of belief, as a man can be a carrier of disease without being sick." Could parody of Greene go further than that?