Product Description

A leak is traced to a small sub-section of SIS, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his African wife, Sarah. To the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the Secret Service, Graham Greene brings his brilliance and perception, laying bare a machine that sometimes overlooks the subtle and secret motivations that impel us.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30697 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'As fine a novel as he has ever written...funny, shocking, above all compassionate' Anthony Burgess, Observer

From the Publisher
With a new introduction by Colm Toibin

About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and a critic, and was later employed by the Foreign Office. He died in April 1991.

Customer Reviews

"I sent...the book to Moscow, to my friend Kim Philby..."
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

Greene's best spy novel- James Bond eat your heart out
The Human Factor is a rare thing, a novel about spies and spying that reveals the humanity beneath the actions of spies and (double) agents. Castle has to work with his former enemy, the BOSS agent who killed his friend and plotted against his now-wife Sara in the old apartheid South Africa. Castle is also working for the Russians. To say more would be to spoil the suspense of the book, but the more revelations that come out of the real-life espionage world of that era (1960's and 1970's), the more authentic the spying parts of this book seem. Sit back and enjoy it.

Perhaps Greene's Best Novel
This book turned me into a Greene afficionado and I read his books whenever I could find them. But after reading nearly his entire life's output, I came to realize that this book is the best of them all. It is the work of a mature mind and it nearly broke my heart. I could say more, but I will leave it at this: If you want to know Greene at the height of his talent and skill, this is the book you must read. If you want to convince a friend to read Greene, this is the novel you should give that person. It succeeds on every level--a true thriller, a love story, a character study of a man divided against himself.