Authors explore the 'spiritual desolation' that is Greeneland

The Graham Greene centenary dominated the first weekend of the 54th Cheltenham Literary Festival, as novelists, film buffs, academics and non-denominational fans took it in turns to anatomise the great man, and discuss his influence on their creative works.

For Jake Arnott, the achingly fashionable crime writer: "What Greene pinned down was English noir. That seedy, melancholic atmosphere is something I aspire to capture, that gloomy climate that inhabits our culture. He sees something nasty and brutish beneath the calm veneer of Englishness - the reason why there have been outbreaks of violence in seaside towns. But his books also derive from modernism. There are echoes of T S Eliot's The Waste Land in the pub scenes in Brighton Rock. What's become known as 'Greeneland' is a place of spiritual desolation".

Fay Weldon admired the solidity of his descriptions and his scene-making. "Lots of writers now don't bother with scene-setting, as though there's a designer and a director out there who will do it for them. But Greene describes things so well, in A Burnt-Out Case - the deep, glossy green water and the things lurking beneath - that you long to know what happens next. You're aware of this extraordinary intelligence with not enough space on the page for him to get everything in."

Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland (a novel set in Idi Amin's Uganda) and Zanzibar, read The Heart of the Matter as a teenager in Africa, and found it gave a shape to the life his family were living. He wrote his debut book with Greene's novel and Madame Bovary on his desk, "like talismans". He was intrigued by Greene's heroes and their search for "some kind of faith in an age when faith had been eroded, and looking for it in a via negativa rather than looking for God as a positive force".

Inevitably, Greene's baroque sex life surfaced in the discussions, and his supposed hopelessness at writing strong female characters. Remarkably, Weldon came to his defence. "He wrote about so many of these unintellectual daft girls. He saw them entirely from the outside, as foolish, weak creatures; but then a lot of women are foolish, weak creatures". She blinked. "Only a woman could say that, of course".

Everyone admired Greene's uncanny ability to be in the right part of the world, just before it blew up, politically: Havana, Haiti, Vietnam. "They were filming Our Man in Havana just as the revolution was happening," said Arnott admiringly. "The Quiet American anticipated the whole fate of Indochina for the next 20 years".

Greene's chequered relationship with the movies was inspected at length. Christopher Hampton, the playwright, revealed that he'd seen a "bootleg" interview in which Greene airily slagged off the great directors, including Fritz Lang, John Ford, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, bitched about all the adaptations that had been made of his work and, when asked his opinion of The Honorary Consul (adapted by Hampton) claimed not to have seen it, despite having penned a page-long denunciation of the film in a national paper one week earlier.

His perverseness was emphasised, rather than denied, by his official biographer, Norman Sherry. When Greene was on his deathbed, Sherry informed him that was about to become the father of a baby. "Illegitimate, I hope!" said Greene. "No? I'm very disappointed with my biographer."

When Sherry laid out the original plan of the Life, Greene remarked: "I will be alive for the first volume, not alive for the second - and Norman will not be alive to finish the third." The first two predictions came true; the third, happily, did not. "I thought that was damn bad show of Greene to frighten me like that," said Sherry, one of the more eccentric figures in the biography world.

By the end, Greene fans were left bewildered by the multiplicity of personalities revealed as co-habiting inside this 6ft 2in, blue-eyed, opium-smoking, whoring enigma. He was shy, he was egomaniacal, he was grim, he was incurably facetious, he was crazily right wing, he was a communist fellow traveller. Really, it was a relief to abandon the flow of debate and bask in the movie of Brighton Rock for a couple of hours.