Graham Greene has been writing novels for half a century. His first novel, The Man Within, appeared in 1929, his … twentieth, The Human Factor, was published earlier this year. And as one reflects upon the impressive series of novels and stories which begin in pre-war England, travel during the next decades through areas of darkness over the world from Mexico and Africa to Haiti, Vietnam and Argentina, and finally return to the England of the 1970s, setting forward new intimations of trouble for the fragile, but still somehow surviving values of human love and pity, it seems extraordinary not to have seen earlier how arresting a product of the man and the moment this achievement really is….

Discussion frequently modulates into engagement with the hugely paradoxical question of his enormous success. No really good or serious writer, it has at times been felt, could possibly be as popular as that. (p. 9)

The prolonged co-existence of this popular interest with serious literary and scholarly attention, and the range and extent of both, must be regarded as something of a phenomenon…. Our last 'popular-and-serious' writer, it is said sufficiently often, was Dickens, who called out a response from a vast audience representing pretty well every area of the early Victorian and mid-Victorian reading public. If we set Greene beside Dickens for a moment, as a novelist reviving the breadth of appeal lamented for lost by James in the 1890s, it is easy to see that besides their capturing narrative verve the two novelists possess in common, on the one hand, an entirely individual tone of voice which makes it impossible to mistake their work for anyone else's (including that of even the best of their imitators and parodists) and, on the other, an uncanny, sensitised-plate responsiveness to the actualities of the world they inhabit, to how it looks and feels as they walk its streets, to the driving day-to-day preoccupations of its harrassed inhabitants as they make their way, solitary in crowds as often as not, through the discomforting maze of their life and times. (pp. 11-12)

In Greene the dual gifts promote the creation of an imaginative universe which is at once sharply individual ('Greeneland') and yet unquestionably of this time and of this place, with the definition of the 'time' and the 'place' informed by an acute and active social, political and religious sense. In creating this universe, Greene's individual beliefs and attitudes, his private 'imagination of disaster', exact allegiances, release insights and heighten the drama of his characters' inner life in a way resembling as much as anything the pressures exerted in their novels by George Eliot's devout scepticism or—perhaps more clearly apparent to the general reader—Conrad's pessimism and Hardy's 'crass casualty'…. The uncanny topicality which I referred to just now has to do in Greene's case with the diagnostic skills which these intellectual and emotional commitments remarkably serve to heighten, sometimes to the point where the work appears to forecast with alarming clairvoyance, rather than report with dazzling up-to-the-minute flair, matters which are to become a familiar part of everyday consciousness. Painfully, one has to recognise, time has again and again proved him right. (p. 12)

[The Human Factor] is about the way we live now. It is no coincidence—on the contrary it is a characteristically funny and sad piece of irony, lightly but firmly situated in the narrative structure—that Trollope's The Way We Live Now is read by the head of the Foreign Office, an elderly spy working for Communist Russia, and the double agent Maurice Castle…. He tries to read it in the garish hotel, one of the steps in his escape route to what Mr Halliday calls 'home', but finds that 'it was not a book which could distract him from the way we lived now'. Nor does it calm the Foreign Office man Sir John Hargreaves, who usually finds Trollope reassuring: 'the sense of a calm Victorian world, where good was good and bad was bad and one could distinguish clearly between them'. Trollope's Melmotte, 'the swindler as his fellow-member in the House judged him', confuses the issue by arousing pity—'Poor devil, he thought, one has to grant him courage'—and disturbingly recalls the harmless and still more pitiable Davis, whom Hargreaves has permitted himself to label, too readily, 'the traitor' and has allowed to be 'eliminated' by his colleague Doctor Percival, who poisons him in efficient up-to-date style…. The alarming frisson generated by this portent of everyday things to come is reinforced by 'Uncle Remus', the projected nuclear pact between Britain, South Africa and America designed to preserve Western mineral interests (and consequently apartheid along with them), and which, in a matter of months after the book's publication, is only too easily seen to have its bearing on the politics behind recent events in Zaire. These, and not the familiar Le Carré-Deighton spy-story components (which belong to an already familiar literary tradition, helped on long ago by Greene's own The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear of 1939 and 1943), are to The Human Factor what the blatent hideousnesses of Haiti and Vietnam are to The Comedians and The Quiet American. They form part of how things are carried on now. (pp. 13-14)

But within this dehumanised public and political world are seen the outlines of another, private, world which is obedient to a different order of being. The 'human factor' is found in Maurice's love for his wife Sarah, her child Sam, whose natural father is dead, and their friend and rescuer, the Communist Carson, 'eliminated' in a South African gaol. For these Maurice becomes what he is, a self-limited double agent acting for Communism against apartheid but without sympathy for the activities of Communist Russia anywhere else. 'Hungary' and 'Prague' haunt his memory and it is Dubcek's 'Socialism with a human face' (and behind that again, perhaps, Blake's 'Pity has a human face') which Greene recalls to us in the apologia which Maurice addresses to Sarah. (pp. 14-15)

Is the 'human factor', then, the irreducible surd element in the mathematics of things entire? The book's epigraph from Conrad, 'I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul', might be to the taste of Muller and Percival, for whom the 'factor' constitutes a threat to the mathematical purity of their designs…. The ironies surrounding the theme of longed-for but unattainable separation from the need to feel pity and pain are hinted at in Greene's choice of title. The 'human factor' may be seen bitterly as no more than an element to be reckoned with in the public and political programming which governs 'the way we live now'; or it can direct attention to a vaster mystery in which Muller and Percival—like Victory's Mr Jones and Ricardo—represent factors of quite another kind, to be 'computed' in a pattern of good and evil beyond the reach of their own or any other order of human comprehension. It is no surprise to learn that Greene in these years has been particularly drawn to Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor legend…. The legend's creative temper reminds us that the morality pattern has always been apparent in Greene's novels and this interest in Dostoevsky's fable, together with the obvious feeling throughout for Conrad's Victory (whose allegorical effects are largely centred in Jones and Ricardo), may account in part for the figures in this late novel being even more than formerly kinds of people—basically humane or inhumane—rather than the bundles of idiosyncrasy and circumstantial detail associated with the 'round' characters of a different novelistic tradition. Descriptive detail in the drawing of even the central figures, whether Sarah, Davis or Maurice himself, is noticeably sparse, though the particulars of the London and Berkhamsted 'here and now', while still economical, are attractively familiar and concrete…. (pp. 15-16)

The economy is in keeping with the novel's entire procedure, which reworks, though with renewed stringency, methods familiar since It's a Battlefield (1934) when Greene finally broke away from the 'historical' settings of his first three romantic novels (The Man Within, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, published respectively in 1929, 1930 and 1931). The Human Factor reaches towards its universal themes through a studied poetic structure, into which are built the particulars of 'here' and 'now'. Its action, moving between the African department of the Foreign Office in the West End of London and Maurice Castle's Berkhamsted home, is set out in six parts, each with a closing cadence which helps to dance out the novel's meanings. These take us from the chilling remarks of Doctor Percival—to whom Greene assigns what are in more than one sense the curtain speeches at the end of parts I and II—to the dying fall of Maurice's reflections at the close of parts III, IV and V, and his final phone call to Sarah from Moscow which closes the book: 'She said, "Maurice, Maurice, please go on hoping", but in the long unbroken silence which followed she realised that the line to Moscow was dead'. To this choreographical scheme also belongs the characters' troubled dreams; the book's contrasts of light and dark; the telephone ringing intermittently, its messages in code addressed to unknown listeners or perhaps sounding uselessly in empty rooms; and the sortes Virgilianae from War and Peace used by Maurice for what he hopes will be the last of his coded messages to Moscow. (pp. 16-17)

The present closes in even as Maurice Castle reads to Sam the lines from Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (another of Greene's childhood recollections) about the lawless crossing of borders, an obsessive theme for both the hero and his creator which has gathered through the postwar years something more than a private significance. Childish memories of a 'pleasing terror' generated in the poem about the mysterious horseman, with its unanswered questions ('Why does he gallop and gallop about?'), are transformed into something more sinister. The small boy imagines the horseman 'black, black as my hat, black as my cat'. (pp. 17-18)

I find that much of what I have said in this short essay underscores, and to some degree extends, ideas expressed long ago in The Art of Graham Greene…. [The chapter headings] 'The terror of life', 'The divided mind', 'The fallen world' and 'The universe of pity' do, after all, still stand up pretty well as indications of stages in the development of a creative imagination which has preserved unity in difference and created a mythology through which a series of obsessional preoccupations are expressed and universalized. The 'terror of life', Greene's preoccupation with what life can do to the young, the loving, the trustful and the innocent, still haunts about the child Sam and his gentle-natured mother. Her husband inhabits the 'universe of pity', the 'horrible and horrifying emotion' which we saw developing into an obsessional preoccupation in the novels of the 1940s…. Castle is one of Greene's non-Catholic heroes who nevertheless assumes the same burden of responsibility towards those whom he loves and, in a similar way and for comparable reasons, is at once drawn to and held away from commitment to that which is not human. 'Perhaps I was born to be a half-believer' he says, and Christ for him is 'that legendary figure he would have liked to believe in'…. [He] won't have it that it is pity which he feels: 'It wasn't pity … when he fell in love with Sarah pregnant by another man. He was there to right the balance. That was all.' Refracted as it is through this kind of sensibility, which resorts to whatever distancing devices it can find to render bearable feelings of pity, pain and love, the conception of a 'fallen' world is perhaps still more important than it was even in earlier novels…. 'The divided mind' is another conception which seems still more crucial than before. Graham Greene used the phrase at a Catholic conference, where he appeared in 1947 on the same platform as François Mauriac…. Thirty years later, in Maurice's uncertainties, Hargreaves's troubled conscience and Daintry's solitary anxiety, Greene once again sets forward this tentative conception, associating it clearly enough with the 'human factors' of pain, pity and love. But he does so now with the utmost circumspection, as if carrying with painful care a vessel containing the few remaining drops of a liquid as precious as it is volatile. This sense of the precarious, together with the ominous public and political events which have helped to foster it, suggest that—if one were to devise a sequel for that early study—'The way we live now' might be as good a title as any for a discussion of the tragi-comic austerities of 'late Greene'. (pp. 18-20)