SOURCE: "Stories by Greene," in The Commonweal, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 6, July 12, 1963, pp. 432, 434.

Below, Wilkie presents a positive assessmenet of A Sense of Reality, discussing Greene's use of myth, fantasy, and psychology in the work.

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...