"The Confidential Agent" by Graham Greene

 

The Confidential Agent recounts the struggle of a man dispatched in the very late 1930s from an unnamed European country (Spain) to England to complete a mission for his side in a civil war. Things don’t go well for this guy, identified only as D. His passport photo is a few years old, and he’s aged a lot; the enemy tries to buy him off and his refusal ends in a beating; he is shot at in London, and even his bosses don’t trust him. At the climactic meeting where he will complete his mission, he finds that his credentials, proving he is who he says he is, have been stolen.

Greene tries for realism, certainly, and, with moderate success, achieves it. More important to the author, though, is the sinking spiral in which his hero falls for the first half of the book. D. lives in fear, the only possible outcome for someone who has been imprisoned by the Spanish fascist rebels. He cannot get past the accidental death of his wife; he can’t stand physical confrontation because he has no idea how to defend himself. He is constantly on his guard about his person and his documentation. Rare indeed is the character he feels he can trust.

A series of reversals would likely have been fatal, at least for his mission, if it weren’t for Rose, a woman he meets on his first night in England. An attractive blonde who cannot resist what she calls “melodrama”—which is what she calls D.’s predicament after she begins to believe him—Rose as a surprising knack for knowing what to say to whom in any given situation, and rescues D. on several occasions. D.’s and Rose’s developing love didn’t convince me; it could be Greene was too British to do any more than suggest and imply on that aspect.

The Confidential Agent charges along at a good pace. It has enough plot twists to satisfy anyone, but don’t expect a lot of physical action. Having accompanied a man to the man’s apartment building, D. shoots at him but misses, although the man does die of heart failure a few minutes later. Only a few times do we encounter any sense of real physical danger for the hero; no, what endangers his life is going back home and joining in the actual war itself.

This book entertains in the skulduggery genre, but its strengths lie is its treatment of the larger questions of life, loyalty, betrayal, wartime morality, and the shifting ideologies of a fraught moment in history.