I don't remember now whether The Power And The Glory was the first Greene novel I read - it might have been The Third Man or Our Man in Havana. I mention this because The Confidential Agent was written in parallel with The Power And The Glory, working on one each morning, and switching to the other in the afternoon. An unusual writing regime. One might have expected that the novels would turn out to be very similar, but had I not known the publication dates and read Greene's Introduction where he explains the process, I should have imagined them to be from quite different periods of his career.That might be because the purposes driving each are also very different. The Power And The Glory was a deliberate exercise in exploring religion and morality, and Greene did not expect it to sell very well. He undertook The Confidential Agent as a more commercial enterprise - it was what he called an "entertainment", more of a light thriller.It's certainly light in the sense of being quick and easy to read, yet the story is anything but. The book was written in 1939, and Greene has said that he had both the Spanish Civil War and the Munich Agreement in mind.The result is a dark story of politics and betrayal, set against a cold, gray background. The Agent of the title, D., from a country embroiled in a bloody and drawn out civil war, becomes a hunted man as his simple but desperate mission to England is thwarted by a complex series of mischances and deliberate sabotages. In the process, Greene shines a harsh light on the seamier side of pre-war Britain, and along the way touches on the eternal themes of love, honour, greed, and betrayal. He also has some interesting things to say about ideology and politics. Fascism is not directly mentioned, although some of D.'s pursuers are very much from the pre-war Fascist mould, but D., once a bourgeois academic, is an agent for a Communist government. Asked why he fights for a cause which is so destructive he says that he knows his own leaders are at least as corrupt and morally bankrupt as their opponents, but sides with them because the ordinary people of his country do. Like Orwell, Greene can see the evil in both popular ideologies of the time. D., forced into choosing one over the other, will not demean himself with the rationalisation that one side is morally superior, claiming only that it is no worse.The edition I picked up has an introduction by Ian Rankin, in which he compares D. to Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps. There are certainly similarities - espionage, men on the run hunted for crimes they didn't commit - but I find the points of difference more interesting. Hannay is a very British hero, hunted by the British authorities only because they have been misdirected - in the end Hannay is embraced by British Intelligence and together they hunt down the foreign agents. D. on the other hand is a foreigner, whose cause most of his British pursuers would reject even if they knew him to be innocent of the crimes he is accused of. The futility of D.'s position has a kind of Kafkaesque quality, and there are some dreamlike, absurdist moments that might have come straight from The Trial.D. can expect no help from officialdom, and must find his allies in unexpected places - the young hotel maid who falls in love with him, the gang of youths who flirt with Anarchism because they're bored. His enemies are everywhere - agents of the other side, agents of his own side who may have been suborned, the police, and many of the ordinary English men and women D. encounters. Unlike Hannay, D. can expect no respite even should he succeed - he will be hunted while he remains in England, and quite possibly he will be executed should he return home. In the end, acceptance of this infuses him with a kind of reckless power that enables him to take the initiative - for a little while at least.The most Hannay-like character in The Confidential Agent is arguably not D. at all, but Captain Currie, the bumptious middle class fool set on D. by an enemy agent. For Buchan, Hannay presuambly represented the best of the British officer class, and Currie is Greene's unflattering caricature of a lesser member of it, contemptuous of foreigners and social inferiors, anxiously obsequious toward his betters, unequipped for serious thought and reliant upon a narrow but extensive set of rules to guide his actions. At first appearance Currie is merely amusing, then contemptible, but by the end of the story he is perhaps more a figure to be pitied. Apart from D. himself, he is probably the most fully drawn character in the book, and I wonder whether that was Greene's intention. Currie personifies a darker view of a complacent and comfortable middle class England, blind and indifferent to the horrors taking place on the continent.Overall this is a good period thriller, wonderfully atmospheric, but I did find the bleakness of Greene's England unsettling.
Review first published on BookLikes: http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/..."The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death?"So begins the story of D. D. is an agent - a confidential agent - who is sent to England on a mission. Having arrived in Dover, nothing goes to plan and D. is soon pitched against another agent (L.).In this race to fulfill his task, D. is thrown into the centre of a time and place pulled into antagonising directions - there is a battle between the young and old, the aristocracy and the ordinary men, the natives and foreigners, the mad and the sane, the powerful and the helpless, the stupid and the enlightened, love and indifference - all elements which would come to define the somewhat harrowing place that is Greene-land. "It was absurd, of course, to feel afraid, but watching the narrow stooping back in the restaurant he felt as exposed as if he were in a yard with a blank wall and a firing squad."Graham Greene famously wrote The Confidential Agent, fueled by Benzedrine, in parallel to The Power and the Glory. In contrast to The Power and the Glory, he expected to earn money from the sales of this "entertainment". It is of no surprise then that The Confidential Agent does not dwell on morality or religion as much as some of Greene's other books. It does have elements of those deliberations - after all The Confidential Agent is based on and inspired by the Spanish Civil War - but it does not go into great depths.And, this for me is where it falls down. What I love about Greene is that he commits his protagonists to something - an ideal, a cause, a situation, anything - and gives them depth. This is lacking a bit here. D. is portrayed well and we learn much of his back-story, but knowing D.'s past does not help much to figure out other characters in the book. So, despite a promising start and interesting plot, the story itself loses grip on a number of occasions because there is little chemistry, or tension, between the characters - not between D. and his nemesis, not between D. and his persecutors, and not even between D. and Rose. The Confidential Agent was first published in 1939, ten years after his first novel The Man Within, and knowing of Greene's life and career, it is still an "early" work. It shows all the potential that would fully develop in his subsequent work, but it just isn't of the same quality. However, I do wonder... I haven't read The Power and the Glory, yet, but I almost want to wager that Greene put in it what he held back on in The Confidential Agent - less aimless caper and more study of the human condition.
What do You think about The Confidential Agent (2001)?
A friend of mine was being the "Christmas Culture Fairy" when she gave me this book for Christmas. Sadly I have never read Greene before and this book was written in the 30s. In my experience the language of many classics written pre 1950 has badly dated. However I am happy to report that in the case of 'The Confidential Agent' that is not the case.This is an excellent book with a great plot that the narrative drives along at a wonderfully fast pace.It also has a rather nice twist at the end too.It looks like I may be reading more Graham Greene sometime soon
—Bill
* * 1/2This is probably my least favourite of Greene's "entertainments", but I'm not sure how much of it can be chalked up to the book and how much of it is a lack of engagement on my part. The plot is promising: a university lecturer from a civil-war-torn country is sent to England to negotiate a coal deal, but along the way he becomes a wanted man, racking up charges that include the possession of a false passport, theft, and even murder. However, I felt rather detached from the proceedings, perhaps because the protagonist is never referred to by an actual name, only by an initial. Of course the detachment may have been the effect Greene was going for, but it didn't really work for me.One thing I did find amusing was the artificial language "Entrenationo", which I took to be a play on Esperanto. The writing itself is also very good, but the story just kind of chugs along. You definitely need to give it your full attention and be in the right mood for it.
—rabbitprincess
Read this because I heard the protagonist is supposed to be a professor concerned with The Song of Roland, one of my favourites. There's not much of it in the book, though. There's an interesting premise and I like that the spy is permanently broke and is always looked down on by the snooty British as a foreigner. Makes for a contrast to the sort of thing you expect from a spy novel after Ian Fleming. On the other hand, the action is boring and none of the secondary characters feel real enough for you to care about them.
—Adam McPhee
