THE HEART OF THE FACTOR
Reedy, Gerard
BOOKS THE HEART OF THE FACTOR GERARD REEDY ?he N#ma# Faete~. GRAHAM GREENE Simon and Schuster, $9.95 [347 pp] "Aren't you ever sad," Sarah Castle asks her husband, the principal character of...
...others, fike the cool and evil Doctor Percival, who, Daintry knows, "was never lonely," lack pity and love...
...You've never betrayed that country, Maurice...
...It is a very bold thing to entitle one's set of narrative metaphors "the human factor...
...As in other Greene novels, emergence both ennobles and destroys, for it makes one vulnerable as it makes one human...
...This situation alone places Castle in far more felicitous circumstances than the Pinkies, Scobies, and Querries of past Greene novels were permitted to experience...
...One can stay in these boxes, like the men who run MI6, or one can emerge from them in acts of pity and love...
...In The Human Factor, and elsewhere, the vehicle exists for the tenor, the complication for the human ,revelation, and not the reverse...
...It is true that Castle learns at the end that the referral of information to his "control" has not been for the purpose he intended...
...However Commonweal: 279 Greene finally disrupts the romantic country of his own creation, its lovely geography considerably mellows the novel...
...wealth implies the absence of humanity...
...Sarah and Maurice speak tenderly to one another...
...Although Castle loves Sarah deeply, he replies that her son, Sam, is enough for him...
...Imagery of boxes also occurs again and again: the "watertight boxes" of the divisions of MI6, telephone booths, confessionals, the metaphorical boxes of human isolation, especially in the lesser characters of the novel...
...she loves him in return...
...In his spying, Castle tries to repay what he owes--not to a system, but to people in a system who have broken out of it to be human and kind...
...Sarah is Maurice Castle's second wife, a black woman who has had a child by a previous lover...
...His fault is trying to tell too much truth, not too little...
...when Castle discovers "Uncle Remus," an American-English-South African secret agreement, Moscow calls him in, knowing he cannot handle it...
...The Human Factor exhibits such a curious bifurcation of imaginative energy: of building up human happiness only to destroy it...
...The "heart of the matter," the "end of the affair," a "burnt-out case": Greene likes to entitle complex imaginative constructs with cliches...
...She tells him to "go on hoping," then realizes "that the line to Moscow was dead...
...Surely, as here, the author arranges things so that they have enough to be depressed about...
...Comparing Greene with them, we must make a simple value judgment...
...I want the buck to stop here," he answers...
...Even though life defeats Castle, he could not have lived it honestly in any other wayman uncomfortable Greenean paradox that at best may be called tragic, at worst misanthropic...
...These final words in the novel, again showing how Greene tampers with the human communications he himself engineers, do not outweigh, for me, the triumph of that communication...
...I think not...
...The "human factor" of the title principally signifies Castle's family life: it motivates his treason and makes his exile bard...
...If the relationship between Greene's incarnational love for his characters and predetermined vengeance upon them is indigestible here, he has still taken a very large bite out of the human condition...
...GRAHAM GREENE Simon and Schuster, $9.95 [347 pp] "Aren't you ever sad," Sarah Castle asks her husband, the principal character of The Human Factor, "that we haven't made a child...
...In The Human Factor, Greene complicates this movement by letting Castle say that he acts not out of pity, but "to right the balance...
...Greene so very nearly gets away with it...
...Although the penultimate episodes satirize the lack of creature-comforts in socialist Moscow, Greene integrates an anti-privilege bias into much of the novel...
...It has already been pointed out, elsewhere and prominently, that John LeCarr6 does this sort of spy novel better...
...At the end of the novel, exiled in Moscow, Castle manages to place a telephone call to his wife, still in Sussex and with no chance of immediately rejoining him...
...Greene's relation to socialism is interesting...
...Still, in The Human Factor, the good guys must scrape for a living, have to think twice about taking a taxi or dining out, and have sausage roll and a pint of Watney's for lunch...
...With such knowledge, why does Castle speak thus to his wife...
...When the author refrains from editorializing, his Manrice Castle has, in fact, much to be happy about...
...The information in itself has not been valuable...
...Success at getting the call through signifies a kind of triumph, however short-lived, over both Russian technology and English surveillance...
...Another character, Colonel Daintry, head of security at MI6, is also allowed to experience a similar humanization...
...In LeCarr~ do not such reversals stand mainly as symbols of a corrupting system...
...Imagery of disconnected telephone lines and solitary eavesdropping figures prominently here...
...He likes to make freshly human what we have long since used without thinking very much about...
...Heroes in Graham Greene novels routinely talk this way...
...Sixty-two, slightly alcoholic, bored with the reports that pass across his desk at MI6, always afraid that his role as a double agent will be discovered, Castle commutes from London to the suburbs with his love for Sarah and Sam providing the only meaning in his life and also its only vulnerability...
...When Castle finally tells his wife that he is a double agent, she says: "We have our own country...
...Why prolong one's own genes into the misery of another generation...
...We do not experience here the strident anti-capitalism of an earlier work like This Gun /or Hire...
...Other thriller writers like LeCarr~ and especially Geoffrey Household have long since run on this turf: using plots of international intrigue as metaphors for human growth and betrayal...
...The bad guys eat at their clubs, discuss troutfishing over the fish course, collect abstract art, and even promote, at one point, the value of carrying a gold toothpick from Cartier...
...His work for the Soviet begins in gratitude: seven years before the main action, an English Communist agent has smuggled Sarah out of South Africa...
...Castle is happily married to the woman he loves...
...28 April 1978:280...
...Yet Castle does not feel betrayed when he learns the truth...
...Pennypinching herein accompanies personal integrity...
...You and I and Sam...
...Unfortunately for the novel and the understanding of the above passage, Castle is also sterile and has known it for some years...
...I don't want to go on and on forever...
...Why does he make a groundless philosophical point instead of stating the obvious physiological fact...
...In the scale of values this novel sets up, Castle remains right in doing what he has done...
...In Greene the irony of the reversal points to unironic truth: ~however society, political or otherwise, qualifies or frustrates noble gestures, with whatever partial knowledge they have been made, their nobility yet remains...
...Only because his creator cannot resist the occasion for telling us all how miserable we all are, or should be...
...Greene's selfindulgence in this matter is so strong that he displays it even here, in the midst of this very fine new novel, at the risk of destroying its artistic integrity...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 9
