An Entertaining Visit to Greeneland: Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent

In 1938, Graham Greene was busy writing two novels. The better-known book became his classic, The Power and the Glory, about the Mexican whiskey priest. But Greene feared that The Power and the Glory would not sell, and he needed money to support his family. Therefore, in the mornings, he wrote one of his “entertainments”, The Confidential Agent. As an entertainment, The Confidential Agent qualifies as a thriller. It has a fast-moving plot, reversals of fortune, and plenty of action. In this regard, Greene’s tale is like those of his contemporary, Eric Ambler, and later writers such as Alan Furst, who inhabit the same shady and treacherous underworld of pre-World War II Europe.

But this is Graham Greene. This is Greeneland.

So while The Confidential Agent meets all of the requirements of a thriller, nevertheless, it has that twinge of angst for which Graham Greene is famous. For instance, the protagonist is never given a name, only the initial “D.”. In this, we perceive shades of Kafka. Further, D. is haunted by the past. The civil war in his home country (the Spanish Civil War?) killed his wife and left him in prison, expecting execution. Having escaped captivity, D. is assigned a mission to England by his embattled government. But D’s past pulls at him all the while. His memories, his wounds, and the adversaries have traveled with him to try to thwart his mission to buy coal on behalf of his government. D. is not a James Bond or even a George Smiley. He’s an amateur, a scholar of the medieval French text The Song of Roland. He’s intimidated by the thought of personal violence even though he has suffered his share.

I don’t know if there’s any Graham Greene book that I wouldn’t recommend. Graham Greene’s “entertainments” are weightier than many other writers’ most ambitious works. Greene establishes characters quickly and deeply. Although one can describe the tale as “action-packed”,   you  are taken by fleeting and seemingly minor characters such as Else the cleaning girl at the hotel and the gang members of the mining town. Thus, if you’re looking for something both entertaining and more considerate, you will likely enjoy Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. 

P.S. If you happened to get the Vintage books edition, be sure and read the introduction by Scottish (crime) writer Ian Rankin. For a further appreciation of Greene, check out Pico Iyer’s The Man Inside My Head.

Pico Iyer, The Man Inside My Head

Pico Iyer’s book is difficult to review because it’s difficult to classify. It’s part memoir, part literary biography and criticism, and part travel book. Indeed, there seems to be two men inside Iyer’s head, the novelist Graham Greene and Iyer’s father. The book traces its course through various episodes of Iyer’s diverse life. Iyer is the son of Indians who emigrated to the U.K. and then, in the 1960s, to southern California. Iyer returned to England for schooling while his parents remained in California, thus requiring Iyer to ferry back and forth across the continents to experience both school and family. This type of background, along with the fact that his father was an academic and one well-versed and enthusiastic about the classics, made for an interesting background for young Pico (named, by the way, after the great Italian humanist, Pico della Mirandola). 

But during all of this, and well into the present, the singular figure of Graham Greene, the novelist and the man, became the “man within my head”. Perhaps their shared travels and uncertainties lead to this attraction, although as someone who’s been quite rooted his whole life, I, too, find Greene’s work quite fascinating. Greene, if you’re not acquainted with him, is the British novelist who often sets his novels in far-off locales, such as Haiti, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and the like, and then populates the novel with complex, often quite psychologically tortured characters. Greene was not afraid to delve into issues of God, belief, and guilt, as well as all manner of sin and betrayal. And Greene himself proves quite a convoluted and complex character, at once cold and kind, approachable and lonely. 

I recommend this book to anyone who’s read Greene’s work or whose seen the movies that do some justice to his work, like The Third Man (a great film starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton—and did you know that in the short story, Harry Lime was a Catholic?), The Fallen Idol (another Carol Reed film), and The Comedians (Liz and Dick at their best along with a fine cast). For established Greene fans, this would prove a worthwhile read. As Iyer has written a lot of other work that I’ve not read, I can’t say how this fits, but it’s interesting, instructive, and like all of the characters in the book, very elusive.