I recall from my teenage years that when the noted novelist and writer of other things Graham Greene passed away in 1991, there was some idle discussion of whether he had been, as everyone had assumed, a best-selling and celebrated author who occasion concerned himself with the workings of the espionage services, or if this had been a clever ruse and he had in fact spent many years as an MI6 operative with the audacious cover of being a best-selling and celebrated author.
Well, it’s an interesting notion but my feeling about this sort of question is that being a great writer – which was what Greene surely was – is a bit like juggling or exotic dancing, one of those things that it’s impossible to fake (or was until the deepfake age came upon us, anyway). Somebody had to write The Power and the Glory and Our Man in Havana and The Heart of the Matter, and that person is, by any sane metric, a great writer, regardless of the degree of spookery they were mixed up in.
My parents had a few Greene novels on the shelf when I was young but the first time I encountered him in earnest was in an A-level exam, either mock or real, where an excerpt from A Gun For Sale turned up as a text. The circumstances obliged me to look properly at the thing and I was duly impressed, eventually picking up a copy of the whole thing when I came across it and embarking on a sort of spasm of reading Greene’s novels more-or-less at random, which if nothing else had an odd effect on my own prose style at the time. Something similar happened many years later while I was living in Kyrgyzstan when my new flatmate arrived with a suitcase full of books – he’d been warned that Central Asia can be culturally challenging – including several of Greene’s.
The one that really impressed me during my Kyrgyz sojourn was The Human Factor, a late novel (published in 1978) and one which sounds like it’s one of the writer’s more lightweight productions – a spy thriller sort of in the Le Carre vein. The setting is contemporary with the time it was published; the story mostly takes place in and around London.
Much of the plot concerns the inner workings of MI6 and the realities of a career within the organisation. The main character is Maurice Castle, a long-serving analyst in the African section. He gets little real satisfaction from the work but can’t quite afford to retire yet; he is a safe pair of hands without vice or vulnerability, unless one counts his wife Sarah and stepson – Sarah is from South Africa, and the nature of their relationship caused some serious difficulties with the regime there (this is still deep in the brutal apartheid era). Castle’s profound hatred of the regime is something he generally manages to conceal, until the service engages in a joint operation with the CIA and the South African intelligence service, BOSS, to ensure the survival of the South African government by acting in concert against Communist-backed insurgency.
Complicating all this is growing evidence that there is a leak somewhere in MI6 – someone is passing information on the Russians. C, the head of the service, assigns this problem to a security officer named Daintry and a doctor named Percival. All the evidence points to the mole being somewhere in the African section – but even if they manage to identify the traitor, the question is one of what to do about it? A high-profile arrest and trial would be a severe embarrassment to the government and damage its standing with its partners, so perhaps a quieter resolution is in order? To his mounting distaste, the strait-laced Daintry realises that Percival is much more ruthless and pragmatic than he, willing to take terminal action based simply on circumstantial evidence. But how can they be sure they will get the right man…?
This is a tense and subtle book, which Greene later said was written out of a desire to produce an espionage novel without the pervasive violence found in (for example) the Bond books, which was alien to his own experience of the field. He certainly achieves this, though there are a couple of executions in the course of the story (one of them botched). The life of an MI6 officer seems intrinsically quite shabby and humdrum, the men all trapped in their own little boxes, struggling to meaningfully communicate even with their loved ones. It’s striking how little significant communication actually happens in the novel – people spend most of their time deliberately obscuring the truth, or affecting attitudes they don’t sincerely hold. This creates an atmosphere of droll melancholy which Greene sustains very effectively.
What’s also very telling is the extent to which it seems that almost no-one in the novel seems to have any idea about why what they’re doing actually matters. None of the British characters seem to be motivated by patriotism or any kind of ideology – Castle is primarily driven by his love for his wife and stepson, Daintry by a sense of fair play, others for more obscure and perhaps less laudable motivations. The demi-monde of the spies is as shabby and lacking in certainties as anywhere else, and the novel is in part an exploration of the psychological price members of the espionage services inevitably end up paying for their involvement in it.
The human factor is there in their reasons for acting, the mistakes (clumsy and not so clumsy) that they make, the guilt they feel, their dissatisfaction and despair. I expect I am making this sound rather bleak, to say the least, and there is, as noted, a distinct air of melancholy throughout, much as you often find with Greene. But it’s also a moment shot through with moments of unexpected wit and absurd comedy – there’s a running joke about the consequences of Daintry, who’s been badly advised, turning up for a shooting weekend with a load of Maltesers as a gift for his hosts – and a deep sympathy for the main characters. Greene’s own supervisor and friend at MI6 was Kim Philby, later himself exposed as a Russian mole, and it’s impossible not to see this as an influence on the story.
This isn’t a political book but a humanist one, and extremely well written – the plot is clear, the imagery surprising, and every now and then Greene comes up with a line which is so well-turned it stops you in your tracks, figuratively speaking. In the end this is a downbeat book, but with a story that is so well-told it remains immensely satisfying and enjoyable to read. This was one of my favourite Greene books when I first read it and it remains one today.
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