Loser Takes All

Published 1955

This book reads like the treatment for a mediocre movie. I’m not sure why Graham Greene wrote it. Unlike his other less-serious novels, this book is not entertaining. I have sometimes heard a joke that I could recognize was a joke: it followed the format of a joke and it ended with something that I know was supposed to be the punchline, but nothing about it was funny. This book is similar. It has a plot, a build up of a problem, a crisis, and a resolution to that crisis. You can’t say it isn’t a novel…

A couple are planning to get married. Shortly before the wedding, the man, who works as an accountant, gets called to talk to the company owner about some thorny accounting question. He answers well and impresses the owner. Hearing of his upcoming marriage, the owner insists the man and his fiancée accompany him to Monaco and get married there. Then they can honey-moon in his yacht, tooling around the Mediterranean.

But the company owner is late in getting to Monaco. The couple get married, can’t afford the hotel and run out of money, but the man works on a system for winning at roulette and wins a bunch of money with their last 200 francs. After some boring hi-jinks, the man throws away the money in order to save the marriage and the couple sails off on the yacht of the owner who did finally show up.

As in a bad movie, these characters seem to have sprung into existence on the first page of the book and they are so dull that we are grateful to know that the last page will send them back to oblivion.