The Destructors

“Who cares?”

Blackie’s indifference to who designed Old Misery’s house shows indifference both to culture and to religion. He is suspicious of all things beautiful and doesn’t care about architects, whether they design houses or cathedrals. As a personification of an evolving secular society, Blackie’s apathy is what Greene might identify as humanity’s greatest destructive threat.

“It was the word ‘beautiful’ that worried him—that belonged to a class world that you could still see parodied at the Wormsley Common Empire by a man wearing a top hat and monocle, with a haw-haw accent.”

One cause of Blackie’s suspicion of beauty is the tension between working-class and upper-class people in postwar England. Working-class people—many of them now unhoused and bereaved—needed practical solutions to material problems, such as the scarcity of shelter, food, water, and plumbing. The immaterial concerns of art, culture, and religion were beside the point, and Blackie—and the audiences at the Wormsley Common Empire—considered something as inessential as “beauty” to be worthy of mockery.

“We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple. When we came out again there’d be nothing there, no staircase, no panels, nothing but just walls, and then we’d make the walls fall down.”

The reference to worms in an apple is likely an allusion to the apple in the Garden of Eden. The forbidden apple in Genesis comes from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In “The Destructors,” the knowledge that is so threatening is scientific and technological. If secular thinking were to take over, it could destroy morality and religion, much in the way the boys intend to destroy