A Separate Disloyalty

THE HUMAN FACTOR by Graham Greene; Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $9.95

Novelist Granam Greene, 73, is entering the 50th year of a charmed career. Since publication of The Man Within in 1929, he has achieved critical and popular success. Among the English writers of Greene’s generation, only Evelyn Waugh was more skillful at moving a narrative with brief, dramatic scenes. Yet Greene’s contributions have had a wider influence. He administered to the spy thriller its most potent dose of modern disillusionment. As a Roman Catholic convert with an unblinking eye for guilt and evil, he gave the bulky 19th century Russian soul opera a fresh English tailoring. The trials of a “whisky priest” in The Power and the Glory are, perhaps, the prime example of such styling.

The Human Factor, Greene’s 22nd novel, combines the shadow world of spies and the games they play with a pervasive spiritual malaise. Secret codes and assassination by peanut-mold toxin entice the reader into the author’s gloomy inner sanctum. As usual, the workmanship is superb—almost too good. At times the novel reads as if Greene had entered a Graham Greene write-alike contest. The principal character is British Intelligence Agent Maurice Castle—a surname that pointedly suggests the guarded and lonely aspects of both the man’s profession and character. The settings include the nondescript corridors and offices of “the firm,” interiors of London gentlemen’s clubs, a richly cluttered bookshop and the drab comforts of Castle’s semidetached house in suburban Berkhamsted. It is the town where Greene himself grew up, a schoolteacher’s son so bored that he played Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver.

Castle is one of Greene’s patented Manichaean depressives, those saintly sinners whose jobs (crime, the priest hood, spying) allow the author to compose variations on his favorite themes: the pervasiveness of evil and the saving graces of kindness, love and even disloyalty. For Greene, disloyalty to institutions that threaten his ideals of individualism and humanism is a privilege, if not a right.

This position has sometimes caused him trouble with his church. In The Human Factor, a similar commitment to make one’s separate war has catastrophic consequences for Maurice Castle. Outwardly, he is shades of gray: a man of regular habits, careful with money and drink, competent at the office, where he specializes in Africa. The only striking thing about Castle is his wife Sarah. She is a black South African with a young son by a previous encounter. Castle met her while on assignment in the Republic, fell in love and promptly broke the Race Relations Act. With the help of a Communist friend, Castle and Sarah escaped the South African security police, fled to a nearby Portuguese colony and eventually to England.

Years later in London, Castle finds himself privy to “Uncle Remus,” a secret plan whereby the U.S., Great Britain, France and West Germany would aid South Africa in suppressing any revolution by the black majority. In a classic bit of Greenery, Castle and Sarah play suburban dinner hosts to their former hunter, Cornelius Muller, a high South African security official and liaison for Uncle Remus. Muller is a courteous, unflappable professional who leads Castle to recall the warning of an old South African friend: “Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel, our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt.”

From behind his moat of respectability and silence, Castle has already launched his personal crusade against apartheid and the Western governments that would preserve it for economic and political reasons. He has leaked Uncle Remus to the Russians, but, as he tells his contact, “I’ll fight beside you in Africa, Boris — not in Europe.” Castle does not have to fight at all. He simply goes too far and winds up in a typical Graham Greene purgatory.

The plaintive zither of The Third Man gives way to a sorrowful silence in The Human Factor. The development of Castle’s motivation is a little thin; his fleeting interest in religious faith seems like a crack in the sidewalk that Greene is compelled to step on. Despite the title, compassion is not the novel’s strong point. It is rather the author’s bitterness and sense of inevitability about “the intelligent and the corrupt,” the Mullers who talk calmly about final solutions and the agents who plan the murder of a colleague between mouthfuls of smoked trout. This may be familiar stuff, but after half a century of providing his special style of morose entertainment, Greene remains working proof that for writers, unlike athletes, the reflexes are the last to go.