Novelist Paul Vidich explores Graham Greene’s The Human Factor—a haunting story of loyalty, betrayal, and the human costs of espionage.
‘Bleak' indeed. I finished Graham Greene's The Human Factor (my second reading) and pondered the one-word assessment of fellow Spybrarian Matthew Bradford. Trying to think what about the novel left me downlifted (if that is a word) instead of uplifted. Many of Graham Greene’s other novels in the spy genre are more hopeful. There is humor in the book, as there is in Greene’s other novels, and the characters can be irreverent.
SPOILER WARNING
This opinion article reveals the book's ending, so you may wish to read The Human Factor first before reading. (Shane)
“Matthews’s assessment stuck with me. I thought of the book’s humor, of which there is plenty. There is the line at the end of the wedding scene, where Daintry, at his daughter’s wedding, breaks a ceramic owl, and his estranged wife says, “It’s irreplaceable,” and Daintry says of his murdered colleague, “He’s irreplaceable too.” And there is this clever bit: Daintry meeting his daughter’s fiancé for the first time at the wedding and mispronouncing his name as Clutters instead of Clough (which recalls a similar moment in The Third Man, when Rollo Martins addresses the English officer as Callaghan and he is corrected, “Calloway. I’m English, not Irish.”). The funeral scene is also darkly funny.
So why the feeling of bleakness?”
It’s not just that the story is grim. Castle is a traitor who leaks secrets to the Soviets and is forced to flee England when his betrayal is discovered. Part of the feeling of bleakness, I believe, comes from Greene’s relationship to the story, which is based in part on Kim Philby, who was Greene’s long-time acquaintance and friend. Greene worked closely with Philby in SIS, in the same building and on the same floor, both as spies, and in Greene’s foreword to Kim Philby’s memoir My Silent War, he remembers with pleasure their lunches “at St. Albans when the whole section relaxed under his [Philby’s] leadership for a few hours of heavy drinking.”
There are parallels to Castle’s treachery and to Philby’s. Both men work in MI6, both men sell secrets to the Soviets, and both men escape England and go to Moscow. Greene was adamant that the novel wasn’t a roman à clef, but Philby’s treasonable activity was clearly in his mind when he created Maurice Castle. Norman Sherry makes this point in the third volume of his biography of Greene. Castle, like Philby, is a spy living with a dark secret that separates him from the people closest to him—a man who keeps his secret from his wife, his children, and his friends. A lonely man alone with his secret.
Loneliness and the poison of secrecy are explored by Greene, and while the story is ostensibly about treason, I suspect that it isn’t treason that gives the story its bleakness. It’s Castle’s spiral down into despair and loneliness.
Greene himself never particularly reproached Philby for treason. In the foreword to Philby’s memoir, he wrote: “‘He betrayed his country’—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?” He says this of Philby, and the same sentiment appears at the end of The Human Factor, when Sarah is speaking to Castle’s mother, who has learned of her son’s treason. It’s worth quoting the dialogue here:
“A traitor,” his mother says.
“All right—a traitor then. A traitor to whom? To Muller and his friends? To the Security Force?”
“He’s a traitor to his country.”
“Oh, his country,” she said in despair at all the easy clichés which go to form a judgment. “He said once I was his country—and Sam.”
What makes the novel bleak isn’t Castle’s treason or his betrayal, but the loneliness and despair from which Castle can’t escape once he’s burdened himself with his secret. Loneliness is a theme that Greene explores in many of his novels, but never as profoundly as he does in The Human Factor.
The novel ends with Castle’s escape from London to a spare, two-room apartment in Moscow. The last paragraph of the novel has Castle in the apartment on a short call with Sarah, who is in London, and in the midst of the conversation, as Castle is describing his Moscow life and trying to communicate, the telephone line suddenly goes dead. The last word of the last paragraph of the novel is “dead.” It’s a grim ending that doesn’t leave the reader with hopefulness as the covers of the book are closed.
I have gone on at greater length than I intended, and I may have strayed from the original question, but I wanted to understand for myself why this well-written and important work left me feeling that the novel was, as you said, “bleak.”
Nick Jones, who writes the UK-based online newsletter Existential Ennui, sums up the novel well:
“Graham Greene's stated aim with The Human Factor ‘was to write a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service. I wanted to present the Service unromantically as a way of life, men going daily to their office to earn their pensions, the background much like that of any other profession—whether the bank clerk or the business director—an undangerous routine, and within each character the more important private life.’ In that, he succeeds admirably. But like John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, it's in that “private life” that the key to the novel's success resides: those abiding, universal concerns of loneliness, love, race, family, and mortality which impact us all. An espionage novel, then, but so much more besides.”
Paul Vidich is the author of several acclaimed espionage novels, including Beirut Station, The Mercenary, The Matchmaker, and The Good Assassin. His work explores the moral ambiguities and emotional costs of spycraft in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré.
Where to start with Graham Greene's books. Check out our Spybrary Graham Greene guide.
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