The Human Factor

...To be sure, the contemporary psychological/moral "thriller" is not much given to the slam-bang action and intricate plotting we associate with such earlier masters as John Buchan or Eric Ambler, or Greene himself...

...And yet it has received tumultuous applause from a large segment of the American news media...

...In our own era, for example, one thinks of that half-mad fascist Louis-Ferdinand Celine or of Ezra Pound in his Pisan days...

...Something morally congruent to that may have been Greene's intention in the present case (as indeed the epigraph suggests...

...There is scarcely any suspense, and the only few pulse-quickening pages occur near the end when we watch Castle's efforts to escape from England...

...My condemnation of The Human Factor is by no means simply a product of political revulsion...

...There is its moral center...

...Nor is the plot much help...

...Castle is a traitor, yes, but it is love that has made him so...

...One cannot help thinking that it is precisely its politics, not its literary quality, that accounts for this egregious misjudg-ment...

...He has evidently lost his earlier profound sense of moral complexity and become incapable of making any moral judgment except in the crudest ideological terms...

...It is worth noting that this subplot is by no means essential to the main story...

...and having dutifully waited for the paperback edition, I concluded that my money would not have been misspent had I bought it in hardback...

...We are asked to believe that the head of Britain's Secret Service authorizes the poisoning of this otherwise inoffensive fourth-rank intelligence analyst on the suspicion that he might have been passing rather trivial information to the Russians...

...The earlier, less ideologically fixated Graham Greene would have understood that...

...nor does it add much by way of suspense-Greene disposes of it quickly and anyway Castle's guilt is revealed to us midway through the book...

...Temptation was only slightly less intense for the new Graham Greene novel, The Human Factor: temptation compounded, moreover, by the assurances of reviewers that it was more than an "entertainment" (Greene's preferred term for this kind of fiction), that it was a major literary achievement...

...I had done well to wait...

...One, scarcely credible, is gratitude...

...Curiously, Greene gives us no reason to believe that Carson was acting out of anything but professional self-interest-which makes Castle's decision to turn traitor even more improbable as an act of gratitude...

...The germ of corruption has entered into his soul...

...If so, he has utterly failed to carry it off...

...Who at the same time shows the Soviet Union as at worst politically self-interested but unequivocally on the side of racial justice and humanity...

...Yet somehow we find ourselves gripped and shaken by the best works of, say, Geoffrey Household or Julian Symons, not to mention Le Carre...

...The rationale is that the exposure and trial of the suspected mole would be a great embarrassment to the Secret Service, especially in the cold eyes of the CIA, and must therefore be avoided...

...Thus apartheid is irredeemably evil...

...For all I know there are Russian or Polish authors turning out anti-Western spy novels that are brilliantly plotted and wonderfully exciting, and never mind the politics...

...Imagine, then, my delight when the $2.50 Avon edition finally arrived on the locd paperback racks...

...The woman, a black African named Sarah, had been Castle's unwitting assistant in his espionage activities in South Africa, and he fell in love with her...

...One can only assume that Greene inserted it in order to show us the savage immorality of British Intelligence...

...What does any of it have to do with a tie introducing corruption into his soul...

...Can Greene really not know that...

...And if there is anything like a CIA-inspired "Operation Uncle Remus," we may be sure that it is designed to overthrow, not support, the white regime in South Africa (and no doubt the multi-racial regime in Salisbury as well...

...Castle is bitterly opposed to the racist regime in South Africa and therefore appalled to discover his own government collaborating with that nation and the United States in a plot to suppress and destroy any black African uprising...

...By contrast, the worst he shows us of the KGB is a certain very human spiteful-ness and jealousy on the part of a minor functionary...

...At remains to be said that some splendid works of art have been created by some politically misguided, perhaps even personally wicked, people...

...Castle is profoundly grateful to a Russian spy, Carson, for his risky help in smuggling Castle's future wife and her child out of South Africa...

...For a tale of espionage, the book is remarkably unexciting...

...By contrast, The Human Factor is merely leaden, with an atmosphere as heavy and depressing as a London fog...

...But it is also portrayed as wondrously efficient and- more important by far-firmly on the side of racial justice in Africa...

...THE HUMAN FACTOR Graham Greene Avon Books / $2.50 Karl O 'Lessker Fiscal prudence dictates that the purchase of some books we want to read be delayed till they appear in mass-market paperback edition...

...He would point to the book's epigraph, a quotation from Joseph Conrad: ' "I only know that he who forms a tie is lost...

...For he has so loaded the moral dice against the South African/ British/American side of the conflict that Castle's treason looks explicable even if there had been no black Sarah for him to love...

...and how inflamed my appetite became when I read emblazoned across the front cover the cool judgment of United Press International: "Probably the best espionage novel ever written...

...For me, at least, that has been an inflexible rule in regard to "thrillers"- detective stories, spy novels, and the like-which I enjoy immensely but which I feel no need to have in hardcover for my permanent library...

...or, on the Communist side, of Bertolt Brecht and Mikhail Sholokhov, whose plays and novels, for all their tenden-tiousness and propagandizing, are artistically successful...

...Only a massive exercise of will kept me from buying John Le Carre's latest, The Honourable Schoolboy, as soon as it was published...

...Two motives are given...

...It centers on, or derives from, the motives of Maurice Castle in becoming a Soviet double agent...

...A weightier, if ultimately more perplexing, motive has to do with politics...

...Another plot absurdity involves the murder of a subsidiary character, Arthur Davis, who is suspected by his superiors of the double-agentry of which Castle is in fact guilty...

...In a sort of prescript to the novel he writes: "Operation Uncle Remus is purely a product of the author's imagination (and I trust it will always remain so...

...What is most dismayingly wrong with Graham Greene's latest "entertainment" is not its pro-Communist bias but its failure to entertain-its inept plotting and general dullness...

...and all those who consciously support it to any degree are damned, while all who oppose it-for whatever reason-are on the path to salvation...

...What then is the dramatic and moral force of his love for Sarah...

...It is his story that we follow to its dreary end in Moscow...

...Greene himself would very likely deny that those related propositions form the moral center of his novel...

...All the same, to quote Hans Andersen,...'out of reality are our tales of imagination fashioned/ " But if it is an author's perception of reality that shapes his imaginary universe, then what can we infer about a novelist who "imagines" the United States and Britain collaborating in a brutal scheme of repression in South Africa...

...One thinks back to his magnificent The Heart of the Matter, in which the Roman Catholic protagonist, Scobie, commits suicide, choosing the imperatives of human love over the commands of his Church...

...At this point the reader may be wondering in what part of the solar system Greene has set his political fantasy, because in this part the British and Americans, far from conniving with the racists in Pretoria to keep blacks in bondage, have for many years done exactly the opposite...

...That is what the novel is about, Greene would say...

...It is not always an easy rule to follow...

...Far from being the best anything ever written, The Human Factor is as narrative a mediocre spy story and as morality play a piece of world-weary spine-lessness, in which the only hero is a (never seen) Communist spy and the only villains a British intelligence bureaucrat and his South African counterpart...

...And who among us dares condemn him...

...What has happened to Graham Greene...

...I suggest that Castle's anguish would have been far more compelling, morally as well as dramatically, if his love for Sarah had led him to act against, rather than with, his deepest political convictions...

...The protagonist, Maurice Castle, is neither hero nor villain but only a despondent, late-middle-aged Englishman who has become a Soviet mole inside the British Secret Service...

...Well, that is very Greenean, to be sure...

...Given the political center of the novel-Operation Uncle Remus-and given the further fact that the nature of Castle's double-agentry was designed solely to help the Soviet Union's South African policy and not to injure British interests in any other respect, most readers would doubtless regard his activities as very noble indeed...

...And Greene, himself a Roman Catholic convert, speaking through the gentle priest, Father Rank, cautions us against supposing that God's mercy is defined and limited by the teachings of the Church...

...So murder, on very slender evidence, becomes the accepted option...