The Confidential Agent

Rating:
Summary: THE USUAL GRAHAM GREEN ATMOSPHERE
Review: Good book in line with other Graham's ones as The Third Man or Our Man in Havana. Nevertheless not so bright, intelligent and fun as Our Man in Havana.

Rating:
Summary: romantic thriller
Review: I liked the book a lot because it is a very interesting story. At the beginning it is a little bit hard to understand the plot because there are so many characters, which you do not know. I did not really understand either what D was supposed to do. I realized it after a while and there it became really fascinating. You can feel for D and you do understand his fears and thoughts.
I only did not like the ending. I guess it is too simple. Not everything should come out this perfectly. That makes the story less dramatic and somehow untrustworthy. But I would recommend the book to anybody who likes agent stories with a romantic happy ending.

Rating:
Summary: Surprise-filled tale of a mission
Review: This quirky thriller begins in bleakness and continues through a trail of failures and deaths in a very foggy England, culminating in a parody happy ending. D., a former professor who specialized in _The Song of Roland_ and has survived imprisonment, the death of his beloved wife, and years of civil war, has been sent to contract coal by a government that is not specifially identified as the Spanish Republic beset by a civil war in which the anti-government side has the support of what is not specifically identified as Nazi Germany. He runs into L., the rebel forces' agent many times. He inspires fierce loyalty from two Englishwomen, and dodges bullets, double-crosses, a major explosion, the police, and trumped-up murder charges. There are farcical interludes at an Entrenationo (Esperanto) school and dangerous whiffs of precocious female sexuality (something of a Greene leitmotif). It is an odd book, with the multiple failures of D's mission oddly exhilirating. Some have read it as anti-Semitic. I don't think that it is, but a charge of derogating Asians could more convincingly be made.