The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

During the War, with London threatened nightly by German bombers, a lonely man, Arthur Rowe, went to a small festival. He went into the fortune-teller’s tent and the turbaned lady gave him a winning tip on the wonderful homemade cake, a cake made with eggs. Thus begins what seems like a mundane tale. Of course, this is Graham Greene, and the main character Arthur Rowe isn’t just a lonely man, he’s a man with a past. Rowe awakens from his ongoing lethargy when someone later tries to get the cake away from him.

Greene wrote what he called “entertainments” as opposed to what he considered his more serious novels. The distinction that Greene makes about his works seems too abrupt. While The Ministry of Fear isn’t as weighty as its immediate predecessor, The Power & the Glory, or the book that follows it, The Heart of the Matter (considered two of Greene’s finest works), but it nevertheless has plenty of depth along with intrigue and thrills. Even in a mere “entertainment”, Greene touches upon love, pity, fear, and guilt. Greene provides quick but definitive sketches of the characters that play a minor role, while his main characters receive the depth of treatment of which he is capable.

When reading this book, I thought that it would have made a perfect Hitchcock movie. (Hitchcock and Greene were roughly peers, although I don’t know of Hitchcock ever making a movie from a Greene book or script.) Upon investigating, I did learn that Fritz Lang did make a movie of the book starring Ray Milland, released in 1944. (I could see Ralph Fiennes playing the lead today.) Greene’s novels work scene by scene and are so well etched that they do convert effectively to screenplays. (Two excellent Greene stories turned to screenplays—done by Greene himself—are The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, both directed by Carol Reed.) I couldn’t find a copy to download, but the reviews of the film seemed good, and I suspect it would convert well.

If you’re looking for a thriller-plus, you’d be hard pressed to find a better book. The Ministry of Fear strikes the right balance between intrigue and deeper themes. It’s another excellent adventure in Greeneland.

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.