[Note: numerous other posts on Graham Greene and his novels here.]
Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene skips right over The Confidential Agent as if it were never written. But in fact this thriller cropped up in between Greene’s nonfiction account of his travels in Mexico, The Lawless Roads, and his masterpiece, also set in Mexico, The Power and the Glory. Apparently Greene was knee-deep in writing The Power and the Glory but he’d hit a wall (not sure if it was creatively or financially). By then he’d either been in Mexico, writing about Mexico, or thinking about Mexico for couple years straight. So he took six weeks off and did up his second “entertainment” (the first being the far superior A Gun for Sale). The novel follows D., a foreigner from a country somewhere in Europe mired in a civil war, who has come to London to purchase coal from an English businessman, Lord Benditch; if D.’s side can get this coal, then they might finally be able to quash the rebels. The problem is that there are other agents, representing both sides of the war, competing with D. for Benditch’s business. Before he even sets foot on English soil, D. is being observed or hunted by enemies and distrustful allies alike.
Knowing that the book was, in Greene’s mind, not meant to be “literary” (that’s how he distinguished his novels from his entertainments), and that it was to some degree a distraction from what was really occupying his creative mind, you can feel that the book was a sort of rush job. What struck me as immediately strange, decidedly un-Greenean, was the lack of detail in this book. Greene had dedicated so much effort in each of his other novels to getting the facts straight, believable, real. If Pinkie was walking down a street in Brighton, then by golly Greene had been to that street himself; the shops being described were there, the intersections were real. Hell, Greene had just spent two months in southern Mexico, where the government conducted anti-Catholic purges, in part so he could write his next novel. The man does not shirk the responsibility of detail.
In The Confidential Agent, on the other hand, we are presented with characters without real names—D., L., Mr. K.—and while the action takes place in London, these characters are concerned with a civil war happening in their home country of… somewhere in Europe. It is never specified. In the movie adaptation, it’s Spain, which would make sense given the book was written in the late 1930s; perhaps, if read at the time it was published, the country would have obviously been Spain, though Greene makes absolutely no allusions to the culture of the country, or of how the two sides of the battle differ politically. But I think, cynically, that Greene left D.’s homeland vague so that Greene would not be obligated to provide the small details that color all of his other novels—one of the very qualities of his writing that cause people to lump his novels into that category, “Greeneland.”
The result is that nearly every character and situation is two-dimensional, and the stakes don’t feel palpable. When, at the end, D. and Rose (Benditch’s daughter) are returning to his home country, it feels unreal. They are traveling to more danger. Rose, honestly, has made perhaps the most idiotic decision of her life by joining D. on the boat out of England and into a civil war—for love!, or whatever. What’s more, the pacing of this novel is not as taut as Greene is capable of. A Gun for Sale also follows a hunted man, Raven, through England as he tries to stop a war breaking out, and every element of that plot is better rendered—Raven’s motivation, his previous life, the adrenaline running through him as he is chased—all keep the energy of the plot high. (By the way, there’s more fog and another shed in The Confidential Agent, though not used to the same effect.) We run with Raven through every page. D., on the other hand, seems resigned to the chase. He would be caught, tried, and killed numerous times if it weren’t for other people, coincidentally or intentionally, intervening on his behalf. His success, at the end of the novel, is ambiguous—other than getting the girl, which seems slight, forced, and frankly unimportant in the bigger picture of his situation.
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