The Human Factor (Everyman's Library)

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Summary: Bygones Are Never Bygones.
Review: Graham Greene makes good use of his keen eye for human foibles in ``The Human Factor.'' Greene and John Le Carre are the masters of telling stories of intelligence agencies where intelligence is the thing usually most lacking.
This compelling tale centers on Maurice Castle and his black African wife, Sarah. Castle, an aging Briton, fell in love with Sarah, one of his agents in South Africa. Maurice helps Sarah evade capture by the apartheid-era South African police. Sarah and her son are smuggled to England where she sets up house with Maurice, who pretends to be the child's father.
Maurice continues working in the British Foreign Office. He hopes being a continent removed will mean safety and security for his family. But, as with many of Greene's superbly drawn characters, the past continues its encroachment on the present.
Human bungling and caprice causes a wrongful death. Maurice's serene journey to his pension is interrupted and he must act again to save his family.
The plot takes a few surprise turns (including a startling revelation by a communist agent and the reason why the seemingly useless information from Africa was important after all) before Maurice has to confront the most implacable foe of a man of secrets -- loneliness.
Published in 1978, ``The Human Factor'' is for spy readers who are interested in more than an Ian Fleming trollop. The book is an intelligent meditation on love and secrecy and the sacrifices demanded by both.

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Summary: Not bad, but not great
Review: Greene divided his novels into serious works such as The Power And The Glory and "entertainments" such as This Gun For Hire or The Confidential Agent written for popular audiences. The Human Factor belongs in the second category. Fans of Le Carre and Frederic Forsyth will enjoy it as much as I did, but someone who has never read Greene before should not expect anything more than a well-written airport bookstore novel.

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Summary: The commie good guys
Review: It is a shame that great writers like Greene just can't seem to give up on their Marxist sympathies. The main character in this book resist actually becoming a communist, but by the end of this book Greene removes any doubt that he is one of the unfortunate, naive leftist writers who was still holding out hope for the communists to get it right. Greene knew about the horrors of communism but in this book the good guys are all Soviets and, of course, the bad guys are all those callous, racists, greedy capitalists. Perhaps he never learned what an unbelievable racist Marx (not to mention Lenin and Stalin)actually was? I picked this book up at a used book store because I had read so many other spy writers compared to Greene. To ensure no one else will make the same mistake I did, I am throwing it away.

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Summary: good story but too long
Review: Like John Fowles, Greene writes extremely readable and compelling yet deep novels. I'm impressed by his ear for conversation in The Human Factor and his comic observation of the way the profound and the banal mix themselves up in our lives. It's good that someone wrote great literature in a popular genre... these things shouldn't all be left to the Sidney Sheldons in our midst.

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Summary: A terrific ending
Review: Maurice Castle is working for the Secret Service. In this bizarre profession, he has to deal with leaks, security checks, tensions and suspicions. As Maurice approaches retirement, he realises that some of the decisions he made in the past are now having very serious consequences. In this beautiful novel, the reader discovers what the life of a secret agent is like: he is lonely, isolated and becomes almost neurotic. Greene lays bare a machine, the Secret Service, which overlooks Maurice's subtle and secret motivations that impel him. The characters are beautiful, full of tenderness, excitement and doubt.
Mr Tim Pigott-Smith's performance as a reader of Graham Greene's "The Human Factor" in this audiobook is truly stunning. His voice is very pleasant and his vivid reading adds a further dimension to this already excellent novel.

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Summary: "I sent...the book to Moscow, to my friend Kim Philby..."
Review: Publishing this novel in 1978, Greene says in his autobiography (Ways of Escape, pp. 256 - 257) that he had actually started it ten years earlier, abandoning it when his friend and former colleague, Kim Philby, defected to Russia. He did not want this book to be considered a roman a clef. Like Philby, Maurice Castle, the main character in this novel, is a double agent, and Greene goes to great pains to bring him to life and try to make his inevitable defection to Russia believable. Having earlier lived in South Africa, Castle had fallen in love with Sarah, an African woman. Another double agent had helped her escape from South Africa so she and Castle could be married. Now living in England with Sarah and their son, Castle continues to provide information to the Russians as payback for the help he received years before.

The cloak-and-dagger intrigue here is rooted in the Cold War, and Greene's own sympathies with the Communists, well known, are noticeable throughout the novel. When a leak is suspected in Castle's section of British intelligence, a secret plan is devised to eliminate the culprit quietly to avoid another Philby-type embarrassment to the government. It's of only minor consequence to the higher-ups that they kill Davis, an innocent man. The Russians' rush to "save" Castle, whose work for them has really been of only minor importance, seems more like wishful thinking than reality. Codes created from duplicate copies of old books, messages left in a hollow tree, and warning signals made with rings of the telephone now seem to belong to an age much earlier than the mere 24 years which have evolved since the book's publication.

Castle is well drawn, for the most part, though he seems a rather clumsy agent-about-to-defect, someone who, though supposedly devoted to his wife and child, has not thought far enough ahead to guarantee their ultimate safety and happiness. Sarah, unfortunately, is an undifferentiated, flat character, and Castle's devotion to her must be accepted, rather than felt, thereby limiting the impact of the ending. Parts of the book are very moving, and Castle is often a sympathetic character, but I thought the book lacked the philosophical and structural tightness of his earlier, more famous novels. Mary Whipple

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Summary: Spy Story Masterpiece
Review: The New York Times called this the best espionage novel ever. I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, this is one of the best novels I've ever read, period. A great strength of this book is that you really care about the protaganist. He's very much your average, decent guy with a wife, step-kid and dog. He puts in his hours at the office each day, then goes home to them every night, just as millions of us do. There are no fancy gadgets or outlandish threats to the solar system in this story. Thus, the drama, centering on believable characters, is all the more palpable. Once the story takes off you can feel the tension and anticipation buidling up all around you.

The plot is both simple and ingenious. British intelligence suspects a mole is passing info on sourthern Africa to the Soviets and moves to eliminate the suspect, leading to a great plot twist. Throw in what is for my money some of the best dialogue ever put on paper (e.g. the hilarious conversation about malteazers candy) and the result is an absolute classic. I've read several of Greene's novels including the renowned The Heart of the Matter, and The Human Factor tops my list. If you crave a novel that you just can't put down, this is surely it.

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Summary: A terrific ending
Review: The story culminates at the very last word. The ominous sound symbolizes the fate of the naive, manipulated but idealistic character. Graham Greene tops John Le Carre in this best cold-war spy thrillier.

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Summary: Think you want to be a spy? Read this first.
Review: This book presents a very believable portrait of espionage during the cold war. No guns, no gadgets, no glamour. Just a drab monotonous life infused with constant paranoia and ending in tragedy. Quite a contrast to Our Man In Havana, although the main characters share much of the same insecurities (as most Greene characters seem to). The hero is a completely sympathetic character who loves his wife and child and hates the cruelty that the world has shown his wife and will surely show his child. And although he has become jaded and old he idealistically decides to punish the West for its racism by spying for the East (ironic considering the level of racism in the East). In the end he looses what he had, he looses what he loved, and he gains nothing. This was the first Graham Greene novel that I read, in high school, 15 years ago. It hooked me and I have read most of his other works since then. Many other authors have created stupid banal characters living the seedy life, but only Greene (in my limited reading) has created human, complex, intelligent characters.....living the seedy life.

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Summary: Limbaugh-brand "patrriot"? If so, this one's not for you.
Review: This is NOT about democracy vs communism, it is a love story and a beautiful one. There's enough espionage-counter-espionage here to please LeCarre us fans, but this really is not a spy story in the true sense of that genre.

This is a literary masterpiece. I first read it when it came out and just finished reading it again (though re-reading a story is rare for me) and appreciate it even more this time. I will ordere a copy and include this book among a collection to leave for my grandson.