Review: The Human Factor, by Graham Greene

The Human Factor (1978) is one of Greene’s last novels. He was a prolific writer of plays, screenplays, stories, novels, reviews, travel books, and even children’s books. Prior to reading The Human Factor, I knew Greene’s work only from film adaptations such as Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), with Orson Welles, and Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair (1999), with Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea.

Greene is known as a writer who managed to garner both literary acclaim and popular appeal, elevating genres like the thriller and the espionage novel with meditations on morality, the meaning of life, and salvation (Greene himself converted to Catholicism as an adult). He divided his own work into two categories: serious fiction (The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American) and “entertainments” (Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana).

Greene was a fascinating person, and if I’m not careful, this review will turn into a mini bio. But two biographical items that are relevant to a review of The Human Factor are that Greene traveled constantly and widely — often to war torn areas — and that he worked for British Secret Service during World War II in Sierra Leone, maintaining lifelong contacts with the outfit. Greene worked under Kim Philby in the MI6, who turned out to be a communist and double agent who eventually defected to the Soviet Union in 1963.

The Human Factor is the story of a 62 year old British intelligence agent, Maurice Castle, who looks forward to retirement and a quite life with his wife, Sarah, a black South African woman whom he met while on assignment, and her son, Sam. Complicating this plan is an investigation of a leak in Castle’s section. Of the book, Greene wrote:

My ambition after the war was to write a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service. I wanted to present the Service unromantically as a way of life, men going daily to their office to earn their pensions, the background much like that of any other profession — whether the bank clerk or the business director — an undangerous routine, and within each character the more important private life. When I had spent a few years in the Service during the war, first in West Africa and then in London, I had certainly found little excitement or melodrama coming my way.

Castle’s home in the suburbs where he was raised is his refuge. There he has his wife, his child, his dog, and his memories of a childhood fighting pretend guerrilla wars in the Common. It says something about life in the secret service that Castle’s attachment to all of this has to be kept as secret as the “quadruple measure” of whisky he drinks each evening: “to speak of it to others would be to invite danger. Love was a total risk. Literature had always proclaimed it.”

Literature turns out to be very important to this book. We discover relatively early on that it is Castle himself who is the double agent, and he uses books to communicate with the Communists to whom he provides information.  As he notes when reading War and Peace on the train, “It was a breach of security, even a small act of defiance, to read this book publicly, for pleasure.”

Later, when Castle is reading to Sam, he thinks:

Even a book could be a bridge. He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps. He had read this one to Sam several times during the last two years, but the footprints of his own childhood had dug deeper and the book opened on a poem he had never read aloud before. After a line or two he realized he knew the verses almost by heart. There are verses in childhood, he thought, which shape one’s life more than any of the scriptures.

Although someone is killed, and there is a hectic climax, I wouldn’t read The Human Factor in the hopes of an exciting plot driven spy thriller. The strength of this book is in the writing, and the way Greene portrays the stifling nature of life for men like Castle. His desk job brings him nothing but drudgery, yet, like everyone in the office, he lives on edge. You might think that it’s Castle’s double agency that makes his life so tense, but in fact, it’s the attempt to live a human life while working in an inhuman environment, in which people are mere pawns in irrational and headless games of statesmanship. As Dr. Percival, an agency guy who doesn’t take the Hippocratic Oath very seriously, puts it, “we all live in boxes”.

“The human factor” is love, especially Castle’s love for his wife Sarah. Again and again, love is portrayed as the real danger in life:

“Daintry writes that here that you had some private trouble in Pretoria.”

“I wouldn’t call it trouble. I fell I love.”

“You’d do better to employ a man who doesn’t hate, Boris. Hate’s liable to make mistakes. It’s as dangerous as love.”

A man in love walks through the world like an anarchist, carrying a time bomb.

So, it’s a little disappointing that the object of Castle’s love, Sarah, remains a vague, ill defined presence throughout the book. Being a black African and being a mother are her main features, and, obviously, those qualities are more place markers for character than character. At one point she says, “sometimes I wonder if you love me only because of my colour”, and as a reader I wondered the same thing. Sarah represents an ideal of innocent suffering, to which Castle, who feels the guilt of years of service to a corrupt, relativistic, and opportunistic government, is drawn.

Despite a scathing review in the New York Times when it was published (“It doesn’t work. Mr. Greene, I am sorry to say, has done a lazy job.”) I think The Human Factor is well worth reading, not just for the dread and tenseness it so convincingly communicates, but for Greene’s “coolly cinematic style” (as Evelyn Waugh described it), and for the way it portrays cold war political games and the men who played them.

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