The Basement Room by Graham Greene, 1936
The magic trick:
Two brief ‘zoom outs’ that provide context on how the story’s events still haunt the young protagonist decades later
I love this story and the Carol Reed film it became, Fallen Idol.
There are many, many things to recommend the story. It’s Graham Greene after all. These are deep characters. We get insightful social commentary. And of course we get a thrilling plot worthy of a cinematic masterpiece.
There is a small element of the story I want to highlight. It’s not crucial to the success of the story, but I think it greatly expands the story’s impact.
We get two very brief “zoom outs” in the story that indicate the young boy’s eventual life. He’s 7 years old during the events told in the story, but these moments point toward what his life is like in his 60s. They show how earth-shaking this story’s narrative turn out to be in his life – and, chillingly, not for the better.
And that’s quite a trick on Greene’s part.
The selection:
He was inquisitive and he didn’t understand and he wanted to know. He went and stood in the doorway to see better, he was less sheltered than he had ever been; other people’s lives for the first time touched and pressed and molded. He would never escape that scene. In a week he had forgotten it, but it conditioned his career, the long austerity of his life; when he was dying, rich and alone, it was said that he asked: “Who is she?”
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