The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

Charlot stared back at him with horror. The fleshy and porky figure of the actor momentarily was transformed into his own ideal--the carnal and the proud, leaning negligently there on the axis of the globe offering him all the kingdoms of the world in the form of six freehold acres and a house. He could have everything--or his three hundred francs miraculously renewed. It was as if all that morning he had moved close to the supernatural: an old woman was dying and the supernatural closed in. God came to the house in an attaché case, and when God came the Enemy was always present. He was God's shadow: he was the bitter proof of God. The actor's silly laugh tinkled again, but he heard the ideal laughter swinging behind, a proud and comradely sound, welcoming him to the company of the Devil.

A German prison camp in France. The prisoners are told that one out of ten of them will be liquidated in the morning, and they may choose among themselves. Thinking it fairest, they draw lots; among those marked to die is Chavel, a wealthy man. Chavel desperately offers all his fortune and estate to anyone who will take his place. Janvier, a man dying of tuberculosis, takes him up on the offer, which will provide for his mother and sister. Later, when Chavel is released, he travels back to his country estate. Under the name Charlot, he takes a job as a servant in the household and falls in love with Janvier's beautiful and bitter sister, who waits for the "real" Chavel every day so that she may spit in his face, and then shoot him. 

In many ways, The Tenth Man reminded me of Daphne du Maurier's incredible novel The Scapegoat, but reversed: in Du Maurier's novel, the protagonist is mistaken for a rich man who may have been a Nazi collaborationist, and must play the part in order to be accepted by his "family." Greene's Chavel/Charlot must deny his identity and his connection to the estate; of course, it's no surprise that the subterfuge transforms him into a real servant, a humbler and more generous man. It's a great premise--Greene wrote it as a treatment for a film that was never released, although after its publication as a novella, they did make a movie of it with Anthony Hopkins--but to Greene's credit, he recognizes that the premise needs a wrinkle, a turn. He introduces the character of Carosse, a malicious professional actor who recognizes that, in the wake of the war's end, he can use his actorly skills to transform himself into whoever he wants. Hearing second-hand the story of Chavel, he shows up at the estate claiming to be Chavel, and even schemes to "re"-possess it using a law that invalidates property transfers during the war. Carosse is Chavel's true doppelganger, a man who delights in subterfuge instead of living by it by necessity, and who takes up the identity that Chavel has cowardly forsaken. It's Carosse who, of course, will provide Chavel the opportunity to make good on his cowardice in the prison yard, and offer himself up for sacrifice for a greater good.

The Tenth Man is subtitled "a novel," but it's really a novella, unmistakably a minor work, though it has all the hallmarks of a great Greene story. The prose is so effortless and smooth that it reads to me like a man in the self-assured late stages of his career. (Certainly it is more classically "Greene" than his other late works, like Doctor Fischer of Geneva or Monsignor Quixote, which have a kind of strangeness that reads like boredom with his familiar topics.) It's packaged with a couple other treatments for movies that were never made, one of which, "Jim Braddon and the War Criminal," sounds like a kind of twin to The Tenth Man: Braddon, who bears a striking resemblance to an escaped Nazi, crash lands in the South American jungle where said Nazi is said to be on the lam. Having contracted amnesia, Braddon is captured and must face his "identity" as the Nazi, until the look of self-sacrifice and remorse on his face convinces a court psychologist of the mix-up. It's a fun little idea, over the top even for Greene, but it resonates in an interesting way with the doppelgangers and identity swaps of The Tenth Man.