Books

Spinning the chamber

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The Human Factor Graham Greene (Bodley Head £4.50) Mr Greene used to divide his fiction into 'novels' and 'entertainments'. The distinction has been dropped. It was always rather artificial isn't Brighton Rock a 'novel'? even if it had for the author an economic meaning: The Confidential Agent paid for The Power and the Glory to be written. It was Mr Greene who showed, at much the same time as Chandler, that the thriller could be more than frivolous amusement, and then that the spy novel could be more than a sub-genre of the thriller.

The Human Factor is a novel about spies. The scene is London, the St James's office of the secret intelligence service. Southern Africa is covered by department 6A, headed by Maurice Castle. The higher authorities in the service have discovered a leak within the department, but not as yet identified it. Castle himself is interviewed, as is his subordinate Davis. When the leak is traced appropriate measures will be taken. taken.

So far we seem nearer county Carre than Greeneland. But this is a novel about spies, rather than a spy novel; certainly not a whodunnit. It gives nothing away to say that less than a quarter of the way through the book we learn that Castle is the -torpid and unenthusiastic mole (he is using a book code to communicate, like Wormold with his Tales from Shakespeare). However, ihe high-ups Daintry and the sinister Dr Percival suspect Davis, a raffish, convivial but sad young man. And rather than the bad publicity of an espionage trial Percival disposes of him with poison.

Castle's work obliges him to deal with his South African counterpart, Muller of BOSS. They had met before in very disagreeable circumstances in South Africa. When en poste there Castle had fallen in love with a black girl, Sarah, who was involved in dissident political activity. She fled; he followed after interrogation by Muller; they are now married. The double irony of the new encounter with Muller is • that it was the South African episode that had led Castle into the arms of the Communists. Liaison work with Muller, dealing with Western combined intelligence operations, provides Castle with a coup for the Russians: his last one, as he has decided to sign off. But, by an accident, he is potentially incriminated. He must escape. He finally tells Sarah all, and promises that they will be reunited. It is a promise he is unable to keep. The sombre and magnificent end of the book finds Castle in a Moscow flat, a KGB pensioner, alone, perhaps never to see Sarah again: 'in the long unbroken silence that followed she realised that the line to Moscow was dead.'

It need not be said that this summary does little justice to the book. Nor that it is enthralling and, yes, entertaining. The clichés used for cheap fiction apply more aptly to Mr Greene. You cannot put the book down; he is a born story-teller. Castle's flight to the East is brilliantly narrated. The author is not never has been an elegant stylist. Words are as functional as bricks, used to build a ground-plan of plot, an elevation of characters. Those characters are mostly as good as ever; much of the dialogue is very funny.

There are some incidental weaknesses. It is a long time since Mr Greene has set a novel in England, longer since he lived here, and it shows, mainly in trivial ways. The London topography is faulty; there is no longer an ABC in the Strand; and I never expected to hear anyone, even in a novel, describe the Reform Club's food as the best in London. Castle's way of life, commuting to a little house in Berkhamsted, is unnecessarily shabby. Nowadays spies, like other civil servants, have enviable salaries with index-linked pensions. More important, it seems unlikely that Castle would have remained in 6A after the scrape in South Africa; and unlikely that even our own secret service would so incompetently bump off one of its own men the wrong one on such flimsy evidence.

But Davis's death is very like Mr Greene; and so is the central character of Castle. We have met him before: middle-aged, middle-class, second-rate, defeated. He 'likes' his wife, is all he will say; does not appear to like his job much. Apparently an ordinary official, unimaginative, conscientious, loyal: except that loyal is precisely what he is not.

Castle's defection is coloured in in detail. In South Africa he met an old Communist called Carson who saved Sarah and 'made me think better of the party'. Working for the KGB is depicted as the repayment of a debt of gratitude. There is besides some stock political justification. Mr Greene has asked elsewhere, 'who can accept the sur vival of Western capitalism as a great cause?' Western capitalism is here represented by the beastliness of South Africa which Caste has discovered in a direct and personal way (incidentally the South African law against inter-racial sexual relations isn't the 'Race Relations' Act but the Immorality Act, which ought to have appealed to Mr Greene's sense of irony). Muller is a monster, a subtle and convincing

one. In the name of realpolitik he is pre' pared for the use of a `few atomic bombs small tactical ones, of course' (though he doesn't show much realism, or at least prescience, when he says a propos of Angola that 'Cuba won't seriously interfere in Africa again').

All this is in a sense beside the point. This is not a political novel. In fact Castle is a thoroughly unideological figure, so much so that in the hands of any other writer his behaviour would seem unconvincing. But he is not in the hands of another writer. Like so many of Mr Greene's characters, he inhabits a special world of inexplicable motivation.

This has been spotted, and puzzled over', before. Thirty years ago when The Heart of the Matter was published two of Mr Greene's contemporaries reviewed it more or less critically. Evelyn .Waugh's objection was theological: 'the idea of willing my owa damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy'. Orwell was more sweeping; 'Even when [the plot is] dressed up in details, it is just as ridiculous as I have hull' cated'. Where the two agreed, from almost diametrically opposed points of view, was in finding Scobie's action implausible. As Orwell put it, 'the two halves of him do not go together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he could have got into it years earlier.' But even if it is agreed that The Heart a the Matter is more than usually difficult tO take, both critics missed the point. This is precisely what gives Mr Greene's novels their unique flavour -not the external tral? pings that arc usually dwelt on, seedy aut.' roundings, pall of depression, lovinglY observed middle-class snobberies. It is the way the characters behave. Mr Greene has said, again, that 'A writer who is a Catholic cannot help feeling a certain sympathy for any faith which is sincerely held.' Castle does not, as far as olle can see, hold any faith sincerely or deeplY when he decides to switch his allegiance; nor, to return to him, does the murderous Dr Percival. In different ways each takes his vital decision as though it scarcely mattered.

And here is the only writer who can bring this off. As a schoolboy Mr Greene plaYeg Russian roulette with a gun he had founu. Ever since, his characters have been spiry, ning the chambers of their emotional an" moral revolvers. They become spies, betray

their countries, kill others, kill themselves, commit adultery, destroy their lives, darn"

themselves eternally, all in singularly car

ricious fashion. The surprising thing is that this author -though he may be a 'writer who is a Catholic' should ever have bee° thought a Catholic writer. There has solve" times been a flavour of orthodox apologe.

tics about his books, but it has not been a

convincing one. For the presentation of the subjects of free will and, it must be assumed' predestination gives Mr Greene a better title to be the last Jansenist. Entertaining he may always be; comforting, never.