This diary explores The Ministry of Fear, a well-written spy-thriller with a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and one grand enchantment. I also consider Graham Greene's career, guess at his 10 best novels, and look at how he wrote highbrow, lowbrow, and several other kinds of book as well.
I don't usually put spoilers in my reviews; this review has some big ones. I explain my reasons, and warn you before we get to them. If you have strong opinions about spoilers, please vent them in your comments.
When I was a lad, living in Kent and mingling with the respectable English who send their kids to boarding schools, Graham Greene dwelt on all their bookshelves. He was a safe and estimable choice, nestled cozily between literature, readability and Englishness: like E.M. Forster and W. Somerset Maugham, but more popular and up to date. Which makes him very 20th Century now, so he's falling out of favor. That's a shame, I think, as he wrote well on many levels.
Graham Greene
By rights, Greene should have failed at both Englishness and respectability. His protagonists (you can hardly call them heroes) usually stretch between squalor and grace. But that sweet grace eludes them, while the devil keeps breathing down their necks. Greene's novels are set in Gangsterland, the Third World, and the broken hearts of men. Luckily, Greene is a brilliant storyteller who winds his plots tightly so, despite their dark and heavy aspects, Greene's books don't drag.
Or perhaps they do. The Ministry of Fear is the third Greene I've read - except that I never finished The Power and the Glory, often called his greatest. I tried it when I was too young and impatient. I found far more squalor then grace, and not enough crackling action, in its opening chapters. We are dropped into a sweltering Mexico, where Catholicism has been banned. We meet a "whisky priest", the last of his kind, who's riddled with cowardice, sin and self-loathing, and is on the run from the police. I know there's more to the book, but I never got there.
On the other hand, I also read Brighton Rock as a lad, which gripped me and stays with me. It had the sin and brokenness, the Catholicism of The Power and the Glory; but they were in the background, illuminating a gritty tale of turf wars and twisted romance. The anti-hero Pinkie is a gangster and a wannabe. Long ago a priest explained to him the mercy and magic of divine grace - but Pinkie was so ruthless and selfish, he took this moral of mercy, and twisted it into a stiletto to live by.
The priest said that Grace, God's Love, holds enormous redemptive power. If the worst sinner were galloping along, and got thrown from his horse - but the sinner repented and prayed to God before he hit the ground and died - then God could forgive all his sins, and raise him to Heaven. Since that day, Pinkie has sinned hard and frequently. Religion, to Pinkie, means keeping one scared eye watching for the killing ground, so he can repent just before he hits it. There's Greene storytelling and psychologizing: a wry, colorful tale that perfectly nails Pinkie's moral calculus.
In defense of The Power and the Glory, I'm sure it deepens and accelerates as it goes, and that I'll be dazzled when I try it again. But then, I'm a stronger reader than I was. Brighton Rock remains a better book for reading on the beach or a train. Greene made that same distinction, separating his earlier books into "literature" and "entertainments". Green had the skills to write thought-provoking highbrow or sizzling lowbrow, and he deliberately applied himself along both paths. Later he combined those styles, and took to calling all his books "novels".
Graham Greene wrote 26 novels, and about 40 other books. I thoroughly enjoyed The Ministry of Fear; but if you've never read Greene, here are 10 other novels that are more widely read and praised, in chronological order.
Brighton Rock; The Power and the Glory; The Heart of the Matter; The Third Man; The End of the Affair; The Quiet American; Our Man in Havana; The Comedians; Travels with My Aunt; The Human Factor
The earlier ones tend to be rated higher by critics.
The Third Man, Greene also helped make the film of. Greene worked for MI6, and
The Human Factor goes deeper into his spy craft than his other books - it's more like le Carré. Many readers love
Travels with My Aunt, which is completely anomalous, a humorous globetrotting romp.
With all these novels to choose from, you'll probably never read The Ministry of Fear. Life is so short, and the TBR shelf so long. In case you do intend to read this very book, my review will contain spoilers - but not the central plot surprises. The Ministry of Fear is like The Thirty-Nine Steps, or those Hitchcock movies about WWII espionage. Arthur Rowe, in blitz-torn London, stumbles into spy-games. The book is taut with suspense: who can he trust? what twist in the game will happen next?
I'll leave all that alone. I particularly enjoyed Greene's construction of Arthur's heart and mind, and I will explore some life crises that make Arthur who he is. I will reveal elements of the plot, which Greene wove more skillfully than my telling. If you have opinions on spoilers in reviews, please share them in your comments.
The Ministry of Fear
Graham Greene wrote other novels that were more coherent and better polished than this one. But Greene is playing many games here, and his turbulence kept me interested. Firstly, this works as an espionage cat-and-mouse set in the Blitz. Greene vividly realizes this world and atmosphere, and the story rattles along through all its twists and traps. Secondly, Greene had read hundreds of thrillers, and he's playing with the genre, finding new ways to surprise us or make us think again. He set out to write a "funny and fantastic thriller", and he succeeded. Thirdly, Greene's a fine writer; but, since his main business here is to write a page-turner, he carefully prunes back his own indulgence. He paints war-torn London, sets moods, explores psychology, and waxes poetic - usually in brief splashes of color, while his noir plot flickers on.
Here is the opening of the novel. We meet Arthur Rowe, in partly ruined London, yearning for the lost innocence of his youth:
There was something about a fête which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly, bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band and the knock-knock of wooden balls against coconuts. Of course this year there were no coconuts because there was a war on: you could tell that too from the untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses―a flat fireplace half-way up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap dolls' house, and lots of mirrors and green wall-papers, and from round a corner of the sunny afternoon the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingled beach. Otherwise the square was doing its very best with the flags of the free nations and a mass of bunting which had obviously been preserved by somebody ever since the Jubilee.
Arthur Rowe looked wistfully over the railings―there were still railings. The fête called him like innocence: it was entangled in childhood, with vicarage gardens and girls in white summer frocks and the smell of herbaceous borders and security . . . Arthur Rowe came along the railings, hesitantly, like an intruder, or an exile who has returned home after many years and is uncertain of his welcome.
He was a tall stooping lean man with black hair going grey and a sharp narrow face, nose a little twisted out of straight and a too sensitive mouth. His clothes were good but gave the impression of being uncared for; you would have said a bachelor if it had not been for an indefinable married look . . .
A few pages later Arthur Rowe's troubled life goes off its rails. He gets caught up in plots and counterplots, and becomes a fugitive trying to solve his mysteries before the traps close on him. Those are the main sinews of
The Ministry of Fear, and Greene weaves them deftly. The character of Arthur Rowe was my favorite aspect of the book, and we'll look at that next. But isolating it removes all the layers of plot built around it, with many elements of the cat-and-mouse game reflecting and confounding all the mystery and moral chiaroscuro in Arthur's inner experience, surrounding Arthur with hints and doubts and ironies. Even though I'm revealing in advance some of the puzzle and development within Arthur Rowe, you will find much fresh and surprising if you do go on to read
The Ministry of Fear.
If you hate spoilers, stop here.
Arthur Rowe, a troubled monster with a child's heart
Here is the heart of Arthur's mystery, which arrives a third of the way into the book, and reveals why he has been so haunted with guilt, and sometimes throwing conscience to the winds. For he already sees himself as a criminal.
It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
Arthur Rowe was monstrous. His early childhood had been passed before the first world war, and the impressions of childhood are ineffaceable. He was brought up to believe that it was wrong to inflict pain, but he was often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered agonies from an inefficient dentist he knew as Mr. Griggs. He learned before he was seven what pain was like―he wouldn't willingly allow even a rat to suffer it. In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality―heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood―for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories . . . we cannot recognize the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place. The two great popular statements of faith are 'What a small place the world is' and 'I'm a stranger here myself.'
But Rowe was a murderer―as other men are poets. The statues still stood. He was prepared to do anything to save the innocent or to punish the guilty. He believed against all the experience of life that somewhere there was justice, and justice condemned him. He analyzed his motives minutely and always summed up against himself. He told himself, leaning over the wall, as he had told himself a hundred times, that it was he who had not been able to bear his wife's pain―and not she. Once, it was true, in the early days of the disease, she had broken down, said she wanted to die, not to wait: that was hysteria. Later it was her endurance and her patience which he had found most unbearable. He was trying to escape his own pain, not hers, and at the end she had guessed or half-guessed what it was he was offering her. She was scared and afraid to ask. How could you go on living with a man if you had once asked him whether he had put poison into your evening drink? Far easier when you love him and are tired of pain just to take the hot milk and sleep. But he could never know whether the fear had been worse than the pain, and he could never tell whether she might not have preferred any sort of life to death. He had taken the stick and killed the rat, and saved himself the agony of watching. . . . He had gone over the same questions and the same answers daily, ever since the moment when she took the milk from him and said, 'How queer it tastes,' and lay back and tried to smile. He would have liked to stay beside her till she slept, but that would have been unusual, and he must avoid anything unusual, so he had to leave her to die alone. And she would have liked him to stay―he was sure of that―but that would have been unusual too. After all, in an hour he would be coming up to bed. Convention held them at the moment of death.
It's more harsh and horrifying this way, when I dump you right into the crime unprepared. Any book suffers, when we pick it apart like this. My favorite approach is to find a really good book, then dive in and read it all, without knowing one fact until I open the covers. But if we only did that, we'd be reduced to talking about books everyone in the room had already read.
When you reach this reveal in Greene's telling, you've already seen so many intimations, and you've grown sympathetic to Arthur, bearing so much guilt and pain. Long ago he had married happily, his wife declined into sickness, he spent many years caring and worrying, and then he did something he never imagined he could do. He was worn down, then murdering his wife snapped him in two. He's lost friends, and his whole life splintered after his mercy/selfish poisoning. No wonder a threadbare attempt at a church fête, arousing memories of childhood, feels like a lost Eden to Arthur. For he endures every day in perdition.
So Greene has his spy thriller, which is better written and more original than most of the genre. Arthur Rowe at the center, with his depth and contradictions, imbues the game around him with richer hues and higher stakes: we're so drawn into Arthur's moves that the whole game matters more to us. Nevertheless, we're crawling through a waste land, a bedraggled life which is ready to topple at any instant. Until we reach my favorite twist in the whole puzzle.
Greene's Grand Enchantment
Shortly after the passage I just quoted, The Ministry of Fear turns sideways. Arthur Rowe is in some catastrophe - we don't know precisely what happened. He wakes up in a sanatorium in the country, with no memory of the last 20 years. He doesn't know there's a war on, or that evil spies are after him, or that he was ever married. The staff call him Richard Digby, from the identity card he was found with. All the games are still going on in the background - but Richard doesn't know it. Some people want him in the sanatorium to keep him safe, others to keep him harmless. Some are protecting him from all his memories and guilt, while others threaten to tell him the whole truth.
Richard himself is a brand new man, with 20 years of suffering and self-loathing lifted from his shoulders. He reacts differently to problems, he draws from a new emotional palette. But sometimes he accidentally thinks of something too close to his lost memories, and feels dizzy or dispirited. Greene explores the new world Richard lives in, intrigue gradually reaches into the sanatorium, this idyllic retreat grows more precarious. But as the game picks up speed again, Richard is living more fully and happily than he has in years. He feels like a youth full of spring. We now have a new set of stakes: will Richard's new vigor and hope allow him to grow into a stronger maturity or, when he does learn more of his own secrets, will the shock undo him again?
When he gets out of the sanatorium, hunting down a mystery he's still missing several pieces of, Arthur sees a ruined London that he'd forgotten. The last war he recalls is WWI; the wasteland he sees from his taxi is an alien landscape.
'This is so strange to me. I didn't imagine war was this,' staring out at desolation. Jerusalem must have looked something like this in the mind's eye of Christ when he wept.
I like the image, and the insight: that Jerusalem was intact but, since Christ dwelt on the moral and spiritual plane, he saw the city as a moral desolation. Greene can really write. If you want a book that's literary but readable, that cherishes English respectability but tests that fragile code in foreign lands and hearts of darkness, then pick up one of those 10 novels I recommended earlier. He was very popular a few decades ago, so your library's sure to have some Graham Greene on their shelves.