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El agente confidencial
In a small continental country civil war is raging. Once a lecturer in medieval French, now a confidential agent, D is a scarred stranger in a seemingly casual England, sent on a mission to buy coal at any price. Initially, this seems to be a matter of straightforward negotiation, but soon, implicated in murder, accused of possessing false documents and theft, held responsible for the death of a young woman, D becomes a hunted man, tormented by allegiances, doubts and the love of others.
First published January 1, 1939
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About the author
Graham Greene
800 books6,114 followersHenry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 278 reviews
November 17, 2024
"The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust."
If this is one of Greene's "entertainments", what are his serious novels like? The Confidential Agent is a bleak, wistful and ruminative thriller set in the 1930s. It is a "man on the run" sort of novel with a secret agent from a foreign country arriving in England to secure a coal contract that might help avoid a war. The agent, who was formerly a university professor is a haunted man, his psyche infected by anomie from his experiences in the war, but he keeps going on due to some sense of justice.
The main character is the very opposite of hard-boiled. He is a literate gentleman who is pulled into the war. While he does get revengeful after the murder of a young girl who trusted him, D (that's the name of the main character) struggles to shoot an enemy responsible for the girl's murder when he has the chance.
D's secret agent foreigner experience is emphasized through the insertion of very "English" language of the streets, his amusement at British ways (as compared to the brutal ways of his home country, which is never named) and his acute awareness of the nature of every single voice of various characters that turn up before him.
The novel lost me a bit in the middle due to a rather ungainly and preposterous episode where D slips into a village and tries to inspire a workers strike. Greene compensates by writing a beautiful and atmospheric ending set on an island resort and a ship.
Some great lines from the book:
Far away to the right a rash of villas began; lights were coming out, and a pier crept out to sea like a centipede with an illuminated spine.
He felt an odd prick of jealousy because she had taken the trouble to defend Forbes. It was like sensation painfully returning to a frozen hand.
When war started the absolute moral code was abolished: you were allowed to do evil that good might come.
His territory was death: he could love the dead and the dying better than the living.
If this is one of Greene's "entertainments", what are his serious novels like? The Confidential Agent is a bleak, wistful and ruminative thriller set in the 1930s. It is a "man on the run" sort of novel with a secret agent from a foreign country arriving in England to secure a coal contract that might help avoid a war. The agent, who was formerly a university professor is a haunted man, his psyche infected by anomie from his experiences in the war, but he keeps going on due to some sense of justice.
The main character is the very opposite of hard-boiled. He is a literate gentleman who is pulled into the war. While he does get revengeful after the murder of a young girl who trusted him, D (that's the name of the main character) struggles to shoot an enemy responsible for the girl's murder when he has the chance.
D's secret agent foreigner experience is emphasized through the insertion of very "English" language of the streets, his amusement at British ways (as compared to the brutal ways of his home country, which is never named) and his acute awareness of the nature of every single voice of various characters that turn up before him.
The novel lost me a bit in the middle due to a rather ungainly and preposterous episode where D slips into a village and tries to inspire a workers strike. Greene compensates by writing a beautiful and atmospheric ending set on an island resort and a ship.
Some great lines from the book:
Far away to the right a rash of villas began; lights were coming out, and a pier crept out to sea like a centipede with an illuminated spine.
He felt an odd prick of jealousy because she had taken the trouble to defend Forbes. It was like sensation painfully returning to a frozen hand.
When war started the absolute moral code was abolished: you were allowed to do evil that good might come.
His territory was death: he could love the dead and the dying better than the living.
August 7, 2020
Greene wrote this story in six weeks. The main character D, is a rebel from a civil war who arrives in England on a secret mission to buy coal. From the start everything goes wrong. The other side is trying to stop him and his trauma from his experiences in the war such as his wife executed, buried alive in a bombing raid all make him paranoid.
He meets Rose the daughter of the industrialist he is to negotiate with and he is beaten up, shot at and set up for a murder. The story is exciting and was made into a movie with Lauren Bacall. Overall a good espionage story set in a foggy, grimy 1930s England.
He meets Rose the daughter of the industrialist he is to negotiate with and he is beaten up, shot at and set up for a murder. The story is exciting and was made into a movie with Lauren Bacall. Overall a good espionage story set in a foggy, grimy 1930s England.
January 14, 2024
In terms of composition, but especially in terms of style, much better than A Gun for Sale. Beautiful descriptions, although some characters are still too rudimentary. It's a little masterpiece in its genre, although this genre isn't my favorite. (2.5 stars)
June 21, 2020
It's not perfect, but even Greene knew that. He wrote it in six weeks and wanted to publish it under a pseudonym. Characters conveniently and coincidentally bump into one another, a love story in the time frame of a couple of days, etc. But that being said, it's still some damn fine writing. I look forward to reading some of his more important works.
March 1, 2016
Read by Patrick TullDescription: In a small continental country civil war is raging. Once a lecturer in medieval French, now a confidential agent, D is a scarred stranger in a seemingly casual England, sent on a mission to buy coal at any price. Initially, this seems to be a matter of straightforward negotiation, but soon, implicated in murder, accused of possessing false documents and theft, held responsible for the death of a young woman, D becomes a hunted man, tormented by allegiances, doubts and the love of others.
So, what we have here is a good old-fashioned pot-boiler:Fueled by Benzedrine, Greene wrote it in six weeks. To avoid distraction, he rented a room in Bloomsbury from a landlady who lived in an apartment below him. He used that apartment in the novel (it's where D. hides for a day) and had an affair with the landlady's daughter. He wrote the book for money and was so displeased with his work that he wanted it published under a pseudonym." -(wiki sourced)
It was an enjoyable listen, yet I would have to agree with Greene to some extent, it is a little 'odd'.
2* The Man Within (1929)
TR Stamboul Train
3* A Gun for Sale (1936)
4* Brighton Rock (1938)
3* The Confidential Agent (1939)
3* The Power and the Glory (1940)
4* The Ministry of Fear (1943)
2* The Heart of the Matter (1948)
3* The Third Man (1948)
4* The End of the Affair (1951)
TR Complete Short Stories (1954)
3* The Quiet American (1955)
3* Our Man in Havana (1958)
4* A Burnt Out Case (1960)
5* The Comedians (1965)
4* Travels With My Aunt (1969)
3* The Honorary Consul (1973)
4* The Human Factor (1978)
4* Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980)
4* Monsignor Quixote (1982)
WL The Tenth Man
3* The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
February 11, 2013
This is Greene at his best, providing a gnashing noir, a tale of chase and deception. The Confidential Agent distills the fears of the late 1930s, people are being driven to an almost post-human ignobility. Attempting to stay above the feral pragmatism, an agent known as D. makes his way to England. The timeframe and circumstances suggest The Spanish Civil War, but the details blur into a generic European nightmare. D. is a classics professor and the reader feels for his obsolescence in these dark times. The landscape, the weather and even radio advertisements conspire and haunt. Greene provides no relief and actually mocks the possibility of a sentimental response or conclusion. Highly recommended.
Read
March 16, 2017Many a long and weary year ago I read a fair few Greene books. This one has a nice grimy atmosphere and a very real uncertainty about who, if anyone, can be trusted. The Esperanto lesson always seemed like a nice touch, invented stories, pretended loyalties, unreal language, no end of deceptions.
September 25, 2023
Graham Greene wryly remarks in his introduction (in this lovely hardbound edition by Bodley Head which I found in an old bookshop, as a part of an eclectic collection donated by a lyric writer who lived nearby) as he did also in "Ways of Escape" that "The Confidential Agent" was not really one of his novels, having written it in a literal race against time to churn out a thriller that his publishers could find viable to stave off possible bankruptcy. It is indeed recklessly fast, audaciously orchestrated and paced as a thriller (not that we can ever accuse the author of lassitude) and yet his own assessment of this novel is a little too modest and self-deprecating. Written on the eve of the actual outbreak of the Second World War and inspired by the background of the ongoing revolution in Spain, it deserves to be read and appraised properly as a novel that remarkably, more than any present-day thriller, captured the feverish spirit of paranoia and peril astutely. Greene had dabbled skilfully in geopolitical intrigue before it, in the lean and mean "A Gun For Sale" in the form of a shadowy villain who engineered a political assassination to plunge Europe and even England into a war and thus drive the sales of his munitions works and thus this later novel is placed at the very brink of the war washing up on the shore of Britain from across the Channel, bringing along with it a flotsam of inconvenient truths in its bracing tide.
This puts the story of the novel - of an unnamed Continental agent dispatched on a desperate mission to buy coal from a relatively peaceful England to help his side win a losing civil war in his country - in its proper perspective: the story of an alien or outsider's experience of this mostly benign but sometimes quietly sinister place, an experience of being far from the violence and chaos of home. There's an element of existential suspense in the story as the said agent finds himself frequently thwarted, diverted, outsmarted and even defeated as much as by his own trials and errors as much as by the shapeshifting strangeness of this new country. England alternates between empathy and menace, between hostility and friendly camaraderie, danger and sympathy, all the while our agent tries in vain to succeed in a mission already doomed to failure by the self-defeating despair and distrust of his own people as well as his own incorruptible honesty that puts him in odds against the intelligence of his enemy.
And thus, in the skillful hands of Greene, the spy thriller undergoes a radical transformation. Even as it honours the tradition of Buchan with its keenly astute awareness and immediacy of political tumult, he recasts the sprightly and swashbuckling Richard Hannay into a mild-mannered, world-weary, soft-spoken teacher forced by the violent outbreak of civil strife and the loss of his wife to be sent on a mission without any of the shrewd, scheming cunning that it would need to succeed. Right from the moment when he lands in Dover, Greene keeps the suspense simmering and spurting fascinatingly with both menace and macabre irony. D. is almost thwarted, side-tracked, beaten, betrayed and nearly killed and thus the game of cloaks and daggers is stripped of its heroic glory as we see him as an utterly loyal patriot tossed and played around by even his own people unwilling to trust either his incapacity or honesty.
But Greene, unlike Le Carre, does not strip this thriller of stealthy suspense and edge-of-the-seat excitement laced with an acidic English wit enlivening the darkest proceedings. In a sense, too, perversely, "The Confidential Agent" also predates the breathless spy thriller that Ian Fleming would be known for (though Greene's sense of good and evil is more realistic in its ambivalence than that writer's Manicheanism). D., after all, is as loyal to his country and cause as Bond is to England and Her Majesty's Secret Service (also, almost as loyal as a Stalinist, as Kim Philby thought about it) and the second part of the novel, even more thrilling and suspenseful by each turn, sees this mild-mannered man transform into a bitter avenger, learning some of the alacrity of his foes. And lest we forget, there is an unexpected romance here too, with a flighty, frivolous, father-hating young woman, the daughter of a coal tycoon - a love story that too arrives at a sweetly unexpected denouement.
It is astonishing, however, to note how, even at its most audacious, Greene is so capable of steering the novel and this love story out of implausibility by his extraordinary storytelling abilities. It lies in the way in which he fleshes out this flippant young woman, Rose Cullen, realistically and empathetically - she is separated from her real country birth by only a generation and freewheeling through a world of falsity and corruption, she is nevertheless attracted to D., temporarily and impulsively, through his virtue of honesty. We can hardly blame her - in her as well as our eyes (not to forget, Greene's too), D. is a hero.
"The Confidential Agent" was written with the intention to create something "legendary" out of the contemporary thriller even as Greene had to resort to the fuel of Benzedrine at breakfast to keep the pace at writing what does amount to be a legendary thriller indeed. The Benzedrine did nothing to blot out Greene's instinctive brilliance - his peerless skill with a prose style, both elegant and economical, both precise and poetic, stirringly cinematic too. And while other spy thriller writers like Fleming, Eric Ambler and even Le Carre took us on whirlwind tours of many an exotic landscape, from Central Europe to West Indies, Greene focuses his roving, awe-struck gaze at the England of the 1930s on the cusp of social and cultural change, teeming with dance halls, road houses, seedy London lodgings, foreigners from the East, humdrum Continental language classes and even the impoverished wasteland of the Midlands. It is indeed an extraordinary novel in which Greene blends his picturesque portrait of his country with a serious and objective prescience of world affairs with such dexterity that has always distinguished him as the greatest chronicler of the twentieth century's political, spiritual and moral dilemmas.
This puts the story of the novel - of an unnamed Continental agent dispatched on a desperate mission to buy coal from a relatively peaceful England to help his side win a losing civil war in his country - in its proper perspective: the story of an alien or outsider's experience of this mostly benign but sometimes quietly sinister place, an experience of being far from the violence and chaos of home. There's an element of existential suspense in the story as the said agent finds himself frequently thwarted, diverted, outsmarted and even defeated as much as by his own trials and errors as much as by the shapeshifting strangeness of this new country. England alternates between empathy and menace, between hostility and friendly camaraderie, danger and sympathy, all the while our agent tries in vain to succeed in a mission already doomed to failure by the self-defeating despair and distrust of his own people as well as his own incorruptible honesty that puts him in odds against the intelligence of his enemy.
And thus, in the skillful hands of Greene, the spy thriller undergoes a radical transformation. Even as it honours the tradition of Buchan with its keenly astute awareness and immediacy of political tumult, he recasts the sprightly and swashbuckling Richard Hannay into a mild-mannered, world-weary, soft-spoken teacher forced by the violent outbreak of civil strife and the loss of his wife to be sent on a mission without any of the shrewd, scheming cunning that it would need to succeed. Right from the moment when he lands in Dover, Greene keeps the suspense simmering and spurting fascinatingly with both menace and macabre irony. D. is almost thwarted, side-tracked, beaten, betrayed and nearly killed and thus the game of cloaks and daggers is stripped of its heroic glory as we see him as an utterly loyal patriot tossed and played around by even his own people unwilling to trust either his incapacity or honesty.
But Greene, unlike Le Carre, does not strip this thriller of stealthy suspense and edge-of-the-seat excitement laced with an acidic English wit enlivening the darkest proceedings. In a sense, too, perversely, "The Confidential Agent" also predates the breathless spy thriller that Ian Fleming would be known for (though Greene's sense of good and evil is more realistic in its ambivalence than that writer's Manicheanism). D., after all, is as loyal to his country and cause as Bond is to England and Her Majesty's Secret Service (also, almost as loyal as a Stalinist, as Kim Philby thought about it) and the second part of the novel, even more thrilling and suspenseful by each turn, sees this mild-mannered man transform into a bitter avenger, learning some of the alacrity of his foes. And lest we forget, there is an unexpected romance here too, with a flighty, frivolous, father-hating young woman, the daughter of a coal tycoon - a love story that too arrives at a sweetly unexpected denouement.
It is astonishing, however, to note how, even at its most audacious, Greene is so capable of steering the novel and this love story out of implausibility by his extraordinary storytelling abilities. It lies in the way in which he fleshes out this flippant young woman, Rose Cullen, realistically and empathetically - she is separated from her real country birth by only a generation and freewheeling through a world of falsity and corruption, she is nevertheless attracted to D., temporarily and impulsively, through his virtue of honesty. We can hardly blame her - in her as well as our eyes (not to forget, Greene's too), D. is a hero.
"The Confidential Agent" was written with the intention to create something "legendary" out of the contemporary thriller even as Greene had to resort to the fuel of Benzedrine at breakfast to keep the pace at writing what does amount to be a legendary thriller indeed. The Benzedrine did nothing to blot out Greene's instinctive brilliance - his peerless skill with a prose style, both elegant and economical, both precise and poetic, stirringly cinematic too. And while other spy thriller writers like Fleming, Eric Ambler and even Le Carre took us on whirlwind tours of many an exotic landscape, from Central Europe to West Indies, Greene focuses his roving, awe-struck gaze at the England of the 1930s on the cusp of social and cultural change, teeming with dance halls, road houses, seedy London lodgings, foreigners from the East, humdrum Continental language classes and even the impoverished wasteland of the Midlands. It is indeed an extraordinary novel in which Greene blends his picturesque portrait of his country with a serious and objective prescience of world affairs with such dexterity that has always distinguished him as the greatest chronicler of the twentieth century's political, spiritual and moral dilemmas.
November 20, 2018
The Confidential Agent (1939) by Graham Greene is surprisingly good. I say surprisingly given that Graham Greene wanted it published under a pseudonym so I was expecting the worst.
It would make a good companion read to The Ministry of Fear (1943) which is another wonderful Graham Greene book written during the WW2 era. Click here to read my review of 'The Ministry of Fear'
Back to The Confidential Agent, a man, D, an ex-Medieval French lecturer, is unsuited to his role as the eponymous confidential agent. He is in London to try to buy coal whilst rivals try to foil his mission. His unnamed European country in in the midst of a civil war and he is on the Republican side. The unnamed war is clearly the Spanish Civil War however things are left oblique.
Where The Confidential Agent scores highly is in its sense of place. D grapples with class and culture in late 1930 England which is beguilingly evoked: grotty hotels, Mass Observation, dense chilly fog, the railways, roadhouse pubs, snobbery, suspicion of foreigners, smoggy London, Esperanto lessons, casual violence, pubs, the London underground, taxis, holiday camps, depression era northern pit towns, and much more.
Apparently Greene wrote The Confidential Agent in six weeks, fuelled by Benzedrine, which probably explains the book's powerful hallucinogenic, paranoid and nightmarish qualities. It's a pitch black noir which powerfully distills the mood of late 1930s Britain. I remained completely engrossed. The Confidential Agent is tense and exciting, but also weighty and provocative. Not a sentence is wasted. The Confidential Agent is one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”, and despite its twisty and somewhat implausible plot, it's more profound than many other writers’ more ambitious works.
Another five star read from Graham Greene - and highly recommended.
It would make a good companion read to The Ministry of Fear (1943) which is another wonderful Graham Greene book written during the WW2 era. Click here to read my review of 'The Ministry of Fear'
Back to The Confidential Agent, a man, D, an ex-Medieval French lecturer, is unsuited to his role as the eponymous confidential agent. He is in London to try to buy coal whilst rivals try to foil his mission. His unnamed European country in in the midst of a civil war and he is on the Republican side. The unnamed war is clearly the Spanish Civil War however things are left oblique.
Where The Confidential Agent scores highly is in its sense of place. D grapples with class and culture in late 1930 England which is beguilingly evoked: grotty hotels, Mass Observation, dense chilly fog, the railways, roadhouse pubs, snobbery, suspicion of foreigners, smoggy London, Esperanto lessons, casual violence, pubs, the London underground, taxis, holiday camps, depression era northern pit towns, and much more.
Apparently Greene wrote The Confidential Agent in six weeks, fuelled by Benzedrine, which probably explains the book's powerful hallucinogenic, paranoid and nightmarish qualities. It's a pitch black noir which powerfully distills the mood of late 1930s Britain. I remained completely engrossed. The Confidential Agent is tense and exciting, but also weighty and provocative. Not a sentence is wasted. The Confidential Agent is one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”, and despite its twisty and somewhat implausible plot, it's more profound than many other writers’ more ambitious works.
Another five star read from Graham Greene - and highly recommended.
September 15, 2023
از سری کتابهای شنیده شده در مسیر...
January 2, 2016
Graham Greene is one of my favourite authors, having started reading his novels when I was in my teens, many years ago, though I haven’t read one of his books for several years.
Now, on re-reading “The Confidential Agent”, I know why, I like him so much. He is a great storyteller and has a wonderful way of phrasing his sentences, in which not a single word is ever surplus to requirements. It is a joy and pleasure to read what he has written.
“The Confidential Agent” was written by Greene, as one of his entertainments, in the late 1930’s and gives a wonderful evocation of what London must have been like then with inclement weather, foreign intrigue and a sense of impending doom.
The story of D a confidential agent given the job of securing coal supplies for his government, as it battles a civil war, is intriguing from start to finish, with plot twists and turns throughout the story, which will have you absorbed until the end.
A great story by a master writer.
Now, on re-reading “The Confidential Agent”, I know why, I like him so much. He is a great storyteller and has a wonderful way of phrasing his sentences, in which not a single word is ever surplus to requirements. It is a joy and pleasure to read what he has written.
“The Confidential Agent” was written by Greene, as one of his entertainments, in the late 1930’s and gives a wonderful evocation of what London must have been like then with inclement weather, foreign intrigue and a sense of impending doom.
The story of D a confidential agent given the job of securing coal supplies for his government, as it battles a civil war, is intriguing from start to finish, with plot twists and turns throughout the story, which will have you absorbed until the end.
A great story by a master writer.
February 7, 2017
This is a lot of fun. A fuddy-duddy lecturer, D, comes to England as the confidential agent. Only he seems pretty incapable and scared of his own shadow. He befriends a young woman, and the pair grow humorously close as they face constant danger and espionage. D gradually finds the courage and conviction he needs.
A well-written thriller and on of my favourites out of Greene's "less serious" works.
A well-written thriller and on of my favourites out of Greene's "less serious" works.
October 29, 2016
Unabridged
Duration: 7h 30 min
Read by Patrick Tull
From BBC Radio 4 - Drama:
Graham Greene's masterful tale of suspense. When Edgar Dominguez is sent to England on a mission to arrange a supply of coal for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War it seems a straightforward business negotiation; but no sooner does he set foot on English soil than he finds himself a hunted man, with seemingly no one he can trust and implicated in murder.
Greene wrote The Confidential Agent at the same time as his masterpiece The Power and The Glory. It was written in six weeks in 1938 as England stood on the brink of war, and the story is suffused with paranoia, distrust and urgency. He wrote it as an 'Entertainment' with the hope of getting a film made of the book and therefore providing much needed income for his family, in which he succeeded. A tense thriller where the hero must avoid trap after trap that is set for him haunted by the memory of his dead wife and his own time in prison awaiting execution.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07x1rct
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037610/?...
Duration: 7h 30 min
Read by Patrick Tull
From BBC Radio 4 - Drama:
Graham Greene's masterful tale of suspense. When Edgar Dominguez is sent to England on a mission to arrange a supply of coal for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War it seems a straightforward business negotiation; but no sooner does he set foot on English soil than he finds himself a hunted man, with seemingly no one he can trust and implicated in murder.
Greene wrote The Confidential Agent at the same time as his masterpiece The Power and The Glory. It was written in six weeks in 1938 as England stood on the brink of war, and the story is suffused with paranoia, distrust and urgency. He wrote it as an 'Entertainment' with the hope of getting a film made of the book and therefore providing much needed income for his family, in which he succeeded. A tense thriller where the hero must avoid trap after trap that is set for him haunted by the memory of his dead wife and his own time in prison awaiting execution.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07x1rct
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037610/?...
November 18, 2014
Review first published on BookLikes: http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/...
"The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death?"
So begins the story of D.
D. is an agent - a confidential agent - who is sent to England on a mission. Having arrived in Dover, nothing goes to plan and D. is soon pitched against another agent (L.).
In this race to fulfill his task, D. is thrown into the centre of a time and place pulled into antagonising directions - there is a battle between the young and old, the aristocracy and the ordinary men, the natives and foreigners, the mad and the sane, the powerful and the helpless, the stupid and the enlightened, love and indifference - all elements which would come to define the somewhat harrowing place that is Greene-land.
"It was absurd, of course, to feel afraid, but watching the narrow stooping back in the restaurant he felt as exposed as if he were in a yard with a blank wall and a firing squad."
Graham Greene famously wrote The Confidential Agent, fueled by Benzedrine, in parallel to The Power and the Glory. In contrast to The Power and the Glory, he expected to earn money from the sales of this "entertainment". It is of no surprise then that The Confidential Agent does not dwell on morality or religion as much as some of Greene's other books. It does have elements of those deliberations - after all The Confidential Agent is based on and inspired by the Spanish Civil War - but it does not go into great depths.
And, this for me is where it falls down. What I love about Greene is that he commits his protagonists to something - an ideal, a cause, a situation, anything - and gives them depth. This is lacking a bit here. D. is portrayed well and we learn much of his back-story, but knowing D.'s past does not help much to figure out other characters in the book. So, despite a promising start and interesting plot, the story itself loses grip on a number of occasions because there is little chemistry, or tension, between the characters - not between D. and his nemesis, not between D. and his persecutors, and not even between D. and Rose.
The Confidential Agent was first published in 1939, ten years after his first novel The Man Within, and knowing of Greene's life and career, it is still an "early" work. It shows all the potential that would fully develop in his subsequent work, but it just isn't of the same quality. However, I do wonder...
I haven't read The Power and the Glory, yet, but I almost want to wager that Greene put in it what he held back on in The Confidential Agent - less aimless caper and more study of the human condition.
"The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death?"
So begins the story of D.
D. is an agent - a confidential agent - who is sent to England on a mission. Having arrived in Dover, nothing goes to plan and D. is soon pitched against another agent (L.).
In this race to fulfill his task, D. is thrown into the centre of a time and place pulled into antagonising directions - there is a battle between the young and old, the aristocracy and the ordinary men, the natives and foreigners, the mad and the sane, the powerful and the helpless, the stupid and the enlightened, love and indifference - all elements which would come to define the somewhat harrowing place that is Greene-land.
"It was absurd, of course, to feel afraid, but watching the narrow stooping back in the restaurant he felt as exposed as if he were in a yard with a blank wall and a firing squad."
Graham Greene famously wrote The Confidential Agent, fueled by Benzedrine, in parallel to The Power and the Glory. In contrast to The Power and the Glory, he expected to earn money from the sales of this "entertainment". It is of no surprise then that The Confidential Agent does not dwell on morality or religion as much as some of Greene's other books. It does have elements of those deliberations - after all The Confidential Agent is based on and inspired by the Spanish Civil War - but it does not go into great depths.
And, this for me is where it falls down. What I love about Greene is that he commits his protagonists to something - an ideal, a cause, a situation, anything - and gives them depth. This is lacking a bit here. D. is portrayed well and we learn much of his back-story, but knowing D.'s past does not help much to figure out other characters in the book. So, despite a promising start and interesting plot, the story itself loses grip on a number of occasions because there is little chemistry, or tension, between the characters - not between D. and his nemesis, not between D. and his persecutors, and not even between D. and Rose.
The Confidential Agent was first published in 1939, ten years after his first novel The Man Within, and knowing of Greene's life and career, it is still an "early" work. It shows all the potential that would fully develop in his subsequent work, but it just isn't of the same quality. However, I do wonder...
I haven't read The Power and the Glory, yet, but I almost want to wager that Greene put in it what he held back on in The Confidential Agent - less aimless caper and more study of the human condition.
October 26, 2013
In 1938, Graham Greene was busy writing two novels. The better-known book became his classic, The Power and the Glory, about the Mexican whiskey priest. But Greene feared that The Power and the Glory would not sell, and he needed money to support his family. Therefore, in the mornings, he wrote one of his “entertainments”, The Confidential Agent. As an entertainment, The Confidential Agent qualifies as a thriller. It has a fast-moving plot, reversals of fortune, and plenty of action. In this regard, Greene’s tale is like those of his contemporary, Eric Ambler, and later writers such as Alan Furst, who inhabit the same shady and treacherous underworld of pre-World War II Europe.
But this is Graham Greene. This is Greeneland.
So while The Confidential Agent meets all of the requirements of a thriller, nevertheless, it has that twinge of angst for which Graham Greene is famous. For instance, the protagonist is never given a name, only the initial “D.”. In this, we perceive shades of Kafka. Further, D. is haunted by the past. The civil war in his home country (the Spanish Civil War?) killed his wife and left him in prison, expecting execution. Having escaped captivity, D. is assigned a mission to England by his embattled government. But D’s past pulls at him all the while. His memories, his wounds, and the adversaries have traveled with him to try to thwart his mission to buy coal on behalf of his government. D. is not a James Bond or even a George Smiley. He’s an amateur, a scholar of the medieval French text The Song of Roland. He’s intimidated by the thought of personal violence even though he has suffered his share.
I don’t know if there’s any Graham Greene book that I wouldn’t recommend. Graham Greene’s “entertainments” are weightier than many other writers’ most ambitious works. Greene establishes characters quickly and deeply. Although one can describe the tale as “action-packed”, you are taken by fleeting and seemingly minor characters such as Else the cleaning girl at the hotel and the gang members of the mining town. Thus, if you’re looking for something both entertaining and more considerate, you will likely enjoy Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent.
P.S. If you happened to get the Vintage books edition, be sure and read the introduction by Scottish (crime) writer Ian Rankin. For a further appreciation of Greene, check out Pico Iyer’s The Man Inside My Head.
But this is Graham Greene. This is Greeneland.
So while The Confidential Agent meets all of the requirements of a thriller, nevertheless, it has that twinge of angst for which Graham Greene is famous. For instance, the protagonist is never given a name, only the initial “D.”. In this, we perceive shades of Kafka. Further, D. is haunted by the past. The civil war in his home country (the Spanish Civil War?) killed his wife and left him in prison, expecting execution. Having escaped captivity, D. is assigned a mission to England by his embattled government. But D’s past pulls at him all the while. His memories, his wounds, and the adversaries have traveled with him to try to thwart his mission to buy coal on behalf of his government. D. is not a James Bond or even a George Smiley. He’s an amateur, a scholar of the medieval French text The Song of Roland. He’s intimidated by the thought of personal violence even though he has suffered his share.
I don’t know if there’s any Graham Greene book that I wouldn’t recommend. Graham Greene’s “entertainments” are weightier than many other writers’ most ambitious works. Greene establishes characters quickly and deeply. Although one can describe the tale as “action-packed”, you are taken by fleeting and seemingly minor characters such as Else the cleaning girl at the hotel and the gang members of the mining town. Thus, if you’re looking for something both entertaining and more considerate, you will likely enjoy Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent.
P.S. If you happened to get the Vintage books edition, be sure and read the introduction by Scottish (crime) writer Ian Rankin. For a further appreciation of Greene, check out Pico Iyer’s The Man Inside My Head.
June 3, 2021
Softboiled noir, with a lots of pluses, including social commentary on England just before Word War II told from a point of view of a foreigner, one who is constantly reminded of being one. Early in the story, he is also .
When I looked for reviews of this rather obscure book, that even Greene seems to have wanted to dis-own, I found this this gem of a site called Greeneland. It quotes Greene as saying that with this book he had "certain vague ambition to create something legendary out of a contemporary thriller". I think he succeeded.
The Confidential Agent is grounded in the Spanish Civil War, but Greene chose to name his protagonist D. and the antagonist L. to make the novel "region independent". It is, in a way, also period independent. D. and L. are competing to ; today they could be agents competing for oil (or, needless to say, data) in another country. The titular agent is a most un-James-Bond like character, and one wonders if Greene's stimulant-powered writing was done to make the reader "root for the poor guy".
Greene's later "entertainments" may have been more sophisticated, but people who read this one with an open mind will find much to admire by way of characters, stand-out moments, atmosphere (lots of fog...), and plot turns. That there is about one unbelievable coincident per chapter is easily forgiven, provided one has that open mind.
When I looked for reviews of this rather obscure book, that even Greene seems to have wanted to dis-own, I found this this gem of a site called Greeneland. It quotes Greene as saying that with this book he had "certain vague ambition to create something legendary out of a contemporary thriller". I think he succeeded.
The Confidential Agent is grounded in the Spanish Civil War, but Greene chose to name his protagonist D. and the antagonist L. to make the novel "region independent". It is, in a way, also period independent. D. and L. are competing to ; today they could be agents competing for oil (or, needless to say, data) in another country. The titular agent is a most un-James-Bond like character, and one wonders if Greene's stimulant-powered writing was done to make the reader "root for the poor guy".
Greene's later "entertainments" may have been more sophisticated, but people who read this one with an open mind will find much to admire by way of characters, stand-out moments, atmosphere (lots of fog...), and plot turns. That there is about one unbelievable coincident per chapter is easily forgiven, provided one has that open mind.
April 17, 2021
https://youtu.be/ThYn8PlCjew
Una obra entretenida a pesar de no se tan contundente como otras del género. Sorprende la rapidez del autor en escribirla, lo que hace pensar en el mercado del arte. Es una obra que nos permitirá apreciar el valor de otras. En particular, creo que se pudo aprovechar más los personajes de los negocios internacionales o ahondar en el origen de D. como agente o una relación más clara con la canción de Rolando.
Compartamos impresiones.
Una obra entretenida a pesar de no se tan contundente como otras del género. Sorprende la rapidez del autor en escribirla, lo que hace pensar en el mercado del arte. Es una obra que nos permitirá apreciar el valor de otras. En particular, creo que se pudo aprovechar más los personajes de los negocios internacionales o ahondar en el origen de D. como agente o una relación más clara con la canción de Rolando.
Compartamos impresiones.
March 10, 2017
A 3.5-star book.
First published in 1939 (the first year of World War II) I found reading “The Confidential Agent” by Graham Greene relatively entertaining due to its seemingly remote setting which vaguely reminds its readers on the looming atmosphere of countries at war. However, we should read its Goodreads synopsis and introduction by Ian Rankin so that we get some background understanding, in other words, we have more light with essential information rather than keep reading like being in a dark tunnel and tediously reach nowhere.
I think it has an apt structure and I liked how the four-part story starts with ‘The Hunted,’ ‘The Hunter,’ ‘The Last Shot’ and ‘The End’ since each title obviously reveals the protagonist’s role and the heart of the matter. From this kind of structure, we can see that Mr Greene has designed something a bit more advanced and modern than others. I sometime read some spy novels by John le Carre and found his structure like this; however, I don’t know who first invented it in the writing world.
Incidentally, I would not try to tell you everything I think after reading this book, rather I would say something from what I scribbled in pencil of course on some pages with my remarks. For example, from this excerpts:
D. walked to the ditch where his coat lay; he couldn’t remember leaving it there near L.’s car – and his wallet too. He stooped and as he painfully straightened again he saw the girl – she had been sitting all the time in the back of L.’s Daimler. … She looked back at him through the glass with disgust; he realized that he was still bleeding heavily.
The manager said, ‘Leave Miss Cullen alone.’
He said gently, ‘It’s only a few teeth gone. A man of my age must expect to lose his teeth. Perhaps we shall meet at Gwyn Cottage.’ She looked hopelessly puzzled, staring back at him. … (pp. 38-39)
My point is that Mr Greene’s protagonist is quite different from Mr le Carre’s, I mean he seems timid, oldish and evasive (less action) but we have to be content with D., a former professor in medieval French, not a former soldier or secret agent. In the last sentence, it’s simply divine to find the adverb placed there like magic.
First published in 1939 (the first year of World War II) I found reading “The Confidential Agent” by Graham Greene relatively entertaining due to its seemingly remote setting which vaguely reminds its readers on the looming atmosphere of countries at war. However, we should read its Goodreads synopsis and introduction by Ian Rankin so that we get some background understanding, in other words, we have more light with essential information rather than keep reading like being in a dark tunnel and tediously reach nowhere.
I think it has an apt structure and I liked how the four-part story starts with ‘The Hunted,’ ‘The Hunter,’ ‘The Last Shot’ and ‘The End’ since each title obviously reveals the protagonist’s role and the heart of the matter. From this kind of structure, we can see that Mr Greene has designed something a bit more advanced and modern than others. I sometime read some spy novels by John le Carre and found his structure like this; however, I don’t know who first invented it in the writing world.
Incidentally, I would not try to tell you everything I think after reading this book, rather I would say something from what I scribbled in pencil of course on some pages with my remarks. For example, from this excerpts:
D. walked to the ditch where his coat lay; he couldn’t remember leaving it there near L.’s car – and his wallet too. He stooped and as he painfully straightened again he saw the girl – she had been sitting all the time in the back of L.’s Daimler. … She looked back at him through the glass with disgust; he realized that he was still bleeding heavily.
The manager said, ‘Leave Miss Cullen alone.’
He said gently, ‘It’s only a few teeth gone. A man of my age must expect to lose his teeth. Perhaps we shall meet at Gwyn Cottage.’ She looked hopelessly puzzled, staring back at him. … (pp. 38-39)
My point is that Mr Greene’s protagonist is quite different from Mr le Carre’s, I mean he seems timid, oldish and evasive (less action) but we have to be content with D., a former professor in medieval French, not a former soldier or secret agent. In the last sentence, it’s simply divine to find the adverb placed there like magic.
June 9, 2021
Earlier in the year, while traveling in Chiapas, Mexico, I read Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory—a deeply moving book, but also one of the most depressing I’d ever read. I said to myself, “Well—that’s enough Graham Greene.” Then I watched one of my favorite movies of all time, The Third Man, starring Orson Wells; the story was from a Graham Greene book and I decided to give the author another go. I noticed that he had written two kinds of books: those he called novels, and some he called “entertainments.” I understand that later he dropped these labels, but for my purposes, they are useful and separate the comedy from the tragedy.
Lest you think I am a totally shallow reader, Greene’s “entertainments” have plenty of serious backstory. In this case, the Spanish Civil War, a man grieving his wife, tension built by the situation back home—starving people, etc. At the center is D. a man on a mission to buy coal for his government, without which, the government might fall to the rebels. Sound like fun? Well, it is. Packed full of adventure and humor, much like what you find in WW2 British and American propaganda films (think Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent or Casablanca), or even later, films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (although without the sci-fi elements).
Basic plot: a man in a foreign land, fighting for a just cause against an evil enemy. Not that I know enough about the Spanish Civil War to say that D’s on the right side. With all these years between the book and its modern day readers, the backstory has little importance to the narrative—D. believes that his cause is a just one, and so will the reader. Picture Lauren Bacall as his love interest, Charles Boyer as D, and there you have it.
Two things stand out: The prose—like Hemingway on steroids. Greene is up there with the best of them. His insights into human nature are astounding. The writing is spare: Greene has removed every word that might slow down the story or bore. The dialogue is some of the best in literature. I’m not exaggerating. Then there’s the humor—take the sub-plot featuring a school whose founder has come up with a cockamamie mix of world languages, designed to bring understanding between nations and world peace. Now throw that kind of humor into a book written in 1939, and you have genius.
I’m about to read every book this author ever wrote. I’m in for a treat, I’m sure. And maybe at some point, I’ll steel myself and get to his “novels.”
Lest you think I am a totally shallow reader, Greene’s “entertainments” have plenty of serious backstory. In this case, the Spanish Civil War, a man grieving his wife, tension built by the situation back home—starving people, etc. At the center is D. a man on a mission to buy coal for his government, without which, the government might fall to the rebels. Sound like fun? Well, it is. Packed full of adventure and humor, much like what you find in WW2 British and American propaganda films (think Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent or Casablanca), or even later, films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (although without the sci-fi elements).
Basic plot: a man in a foreign land, fighting for a just cause against an evil enemy. Not that I know enough about the Spanish Civil War to say that D’s on the right side. With all these years between the book and its modern day readers, the backstory has little importance to the narrative—D. believes that his cause is a just one, and so will the reader. Picture Lauren Bacall as his love interest, Charles Boyer as D, and there you have it.
Two things stand out: The prose—like Hemingway on steroids. Greene is up there with the best of them. His insights into human nature are astounding. The writing is spare: Greene has removed every word that might slow down the story or bore. The dialogue is some of the best in literature. I’m not exaggerating. Then there’s the humor—take the sub-plot featuring a school whose founder has come up with a cockamamie mix of world languages, designed to bring understanding between nations and world peace. Now throw that kind of humor into a book written in 1939, and you have genius.
I’m about to read every book this author ever wrote. I’m in for a treat, I’m sure. And maybe at some point, I’ll steel myself and get to his “novels.”
August 19, 2014
In the introduction of this book Graham Greene confessed that the book was written as an entertainment designed to appeal to enough people to leave his family financially secure in case he died in WWII and secondly that to get the energy to push it out while writing the power and the glory he consumed large quantities of amphetimines. This last fact answers an idle curiosity I never knew I had, but which has now become rather all consuming. What would ones favourite authors produce if they ingested large quantities of recreational drugs and what would be the impact of trying differnt drugs have been. I can see Tolstoy consuming quantities of magic mushrooms and churning out Brothers Karamazov but what if he had used cocaine instead. PG Woodhouse on heroin? I feel like apart from the effect of drink and opiums effect on literature this is a sadly neglected field.
With that inane digression aside, The Confidential Agent follows a man sent by his government to secure essential resources from the UK while a civil war rages in his home country. Reading the book in the present day I was impressed by the broody atmosphere so expertly conjured by Graham Greene. The hero is an everyday man utterly unsuited to his task, morally conflicted, emotionally scarred, trying to do his duty to the very best of his limited abilities for a cause he can no longer really believe in. A character so widely copied by subsequent authors that the freshness it had on publication was lost me. A good and interesting read none the less. Particularly the Esperanto driven craziness rammed into the plot, the pathos of Elsa and the self righteousness of an outraged citizen versus constable plod.
With that inane digression aside, The Confidential Agent follows a man sent by his government to secure essential resources from the UK while a civil war rages in his home country. Reading the book in the present day I was impressed by the broody atmosphere so expertly conjured by Graham Greene. The hero is an everyday man utterly unsuited to his task, morally conflicted, emotionally scarred, trying to do his duty to the very best of his limited abilities for a cause he can no longer really believe in. A character so widely copied by subsequent authors that the freshness it had on publication was lost me. A good and interesting read none the less. Particularly the Esperanto driven craziness rammed into the plot, the pathos of Elsa and the self righteousness of an outraged citizen versus constable plod.
June 11, 2017
This is one of Graham Greene’s self-styled “entertainments”, a label I’ve always found slightly irritating because it seems to contain more than a little false modesty. In truth The Confidential Agent is, like pretty much everything else Greene wrote, very, very good. As an espionage thriller it is top notch, as tightly written as Eric Ambler’s best stuff and with the seedy, claustrophobic mood of John le Carre’s better Smiley novels. I thought there were also strong nods to Kafka, not just in the naming of the secret agents as “D”, “L” and “K” but also in the borderline surreal, waking nightmarish atmosphere and the way in which faceless bureaucracies exercise their power through a succession of seemingly benign or hapless individuals. So whilst undoubtedly entertaining there is as you would expect from Graham Greene a great deal else going on besides.
November 22, 2022
A short, compelling thriller novel, with numerous plot surprises. ‘D’ represents the official government supported by the workers, fighting against the upper class rebels. ‘D’ is in England to purchase coal for his government. He has trouble with an immigration officer, then meets Rose Cullen, daughter of Lord Braditch, from whom ‘D’ is to buy the coal. Rose gets drunk and ‘D’ borrows her car to drive to her father’s house, but is waylaid. ‘D’ is beaten up. In London his identification papers are stolen, he is shot at, and a murder occurs.
Graham Greene fans should find this novel a satisfying reading experience.
This book was first published in 1939.
Graham Greene fans should find this novel a satisfying reading experience.
This book was first published in 1939.
February 21, 2023
Не е от най-силните заглавия на Греъм, но безстрастната му, цинична яснота и съчувствие правят сюжета приятно преживяване.
Явна е референцията към Испанската гражданска война и двуличната роля на Англия в конфликта. Както и цялостното безразличие на доволните еснафи към всяко страдание и война, които са извън уютния им праг, и следователно не съществуват.
Звученето е изненадващо съвременно, като се има предвид, че заглавието е от 1939 г.
3,5⭐️
Явна е референцията към Испанската гражданска война и двуличната роля на Англия в конфликта. Както и цялостното безразличие на доволните еснафи към всяко страдание и война, които са извън уютния им праг, и следователно не съществуват.
Звученето е изненадващо съвременно, като се има предвид, че заглавието е от 1939 г.
3,5⭐️
November 11, 2019
یکی از لذت های بی بدیل زندگی، زمانیست که متوجه میشوی ساعت هاست در یکی از رمان های گراهام گرین غرق شده ای...
June 26, 2019
Κλασικό κι ατμοσφαιρικό μεν, βραδυφλεγές και παρωχημένο δε.
Βαθμολογία: 3,4/5 ή 6,8/10.
Θα γίνει και εκτενέστερη κριτική του βιβλίου.
Βαθμολογία: 3,4/5 ή 6,8/10.
Θα γίνει και εκτενέστερη κριτική του βιβλίου.
April 27, 2022
Just peeked at the Wikipedia article on this book, and it says the author wrote it in six weeks, fueled by speed, and was so unhappy with the result he wanted to publish under a pseudonym. But nobody agreed with him, and it was well received. I think it's brilliant. He called it "an entertainment," and it certainly did keep me engaged, but I'd give it much more credit than that. Apparently the NYT reviewer called it a "tour de force" and I would agree.
The plot and action are insane, so I can believe that the author was dissatisfied with it. Yet at the same time, the plot and action are insane in the way the world was (and is) insane, so even though it's one preposterous thing after another, it all works in a way that makes it feel absolutely true. Some of it is funny, which is another element that makes it seem true to life's absurdity. How can a thing be funny and tragic at the same time, and yet, there it is. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.
p.s. The protagonist's voice is the great strength of this book, and his commitment to doing the right thing even when his cause seems lost is powerfully contrasted with all the ugliness involved in trying to carry out his mission. So worth reading!
The plot and action are insane, so I can believe that the author was dissatisfied with it. Yet at the same time, the plot and action are insane in the way the world was (and is) insane, so even though it's one preposterous thing after another, it all works in a way that makes it feel absolutely true. Some of it is funny, which is another element that makes it seem true to life's absurdity. How can a thing be funny and tragic at the same time, and yet, there it is. Maybe that's why I liked it so much.
p.s. The protagonist's voice is the great strength of this book, and his commitment to doing the right thing even when his cause seems lost is powerfully contrasted with all the ugliness involved in trying to carry out his mission. So worth reading!
Read
May 6, 2024A few years ago I decided that I would try to read all of the books by Graham Greene. To that end, I have finished 10 of his books, well, now 11 with this non-completion of The Confidential Agent: An Entertainment, originally published in 1939. I'm sure if I'd plodded through, I would have enjoyed it. Greene is a unique writer and his stories are all different.
This story seems to follow D, an agent who is sent to England to buy coal to help fuel the fight of a dissident group in an unnamed country, I think in Africa. While in England, he is beaten up by a rival agent and meets a woman who may or may not help him. That's as far as I got. I keep picking up the book, reading a couple of pages, then putting it down.
Unfair of me to try and rate as I only completed 60 pages of it. So this is a non-rated (NR) book for me. I have 3 others on my bookshelf but, well, maybe I'm just not that interested in Greene anymore. We'll see. (DNF / NR)
This story seems to follow D, an agent who is sent to England to buy coal to help fuel the fight of a dissident group in an unnamed country, I think in Africa. While in England, he is beaten up by a rival agent and meets a woman who may or may not help him. That's as far as I got. I keep picking up the book, reading a couple of pages, then putting it down.
Unfair of me to try and rate as I only completed 60 pages of it. So this is a non-rated (NR) book for me. I have 3 others on my bookshelf but, well, maybe I'm just not that interested in Greene anymore. We'll see. (DNF / NR)
December 17, 2021
Graham Greene is probably the most erratic author I have read. Some of his stories are good, some are bad (very bad). I used to think that even the worst are redeemed by his descriptive writing, but I am now sadly disillusioned. The Confidential Agent is absolute rubbish. Apparently, he wrote it (in 1939) solely because he needed money, and knocked it off in six weeks under the influence of benzedrine. When he sobered up he was so unimpressed with what he had done that he asked his publisher to release it under a pseudonym, but they refused. He should have been listened to, and then it could have been forgotten. The opening passages (presumably written before the benzedrine kicked in) are atmospheric and intriguing. But it then goes downhill fast, with ludicrous coincidences and a leading character who keeps doing incredibly stupid things. Avoid.
July 5, 2022
The Confidential Agent
by Graham Greene
An early entertainment with many of the key Greene ingredients: a foreigner adrift in a strange land, skulduggery afoot where one can’t distinguish good from bad, the dull ache of lost love and guilt of a potential new flame.
Despite being first published in 1939, this thriller is new to me. I read that Greene wrote it with Benzedrine-fuelled haste, and it shows. This is a tightly-wound and paranoid novel. Incredibly dark but also surprisingly funny. The author seems to have disowned it, yet I found it a real page-turner. Not least, given the path that Europe was soon to take, the plotline is amazingly prescient.
The only thing that really felt dated was the casual ease of the English to throw in a sharply racist observation as if it were an astute bon mot. Plus ça change!
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ½
An early entertainment with many of the key Greene ingredients: a foreigner adrift in a strange land, skulduggery afoot where one can’t distinguish good from bad, the dull ache of lost love and guilt of a potential new flame.
Despite being first published in 1939, this thriller is new to me. I read that Greene wrote it with Benzedrine-fuelled haste, and it shows. This is a tightly-wound and paranoid novel. Incredibly dark but also surprisingly funny. The author seems to have disowned it, yet I found it a real page-turner. Not least, given the path that Europe was soon to take, the plotline is amazingly prescient.
The only thing that really felt dated was the casual ease of the English to throw in a sharply racist observation as if it were an astute bon mot. Plus ça change!
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ½
March 6, 2009
A friend of mine was being the "Christmas Culture Fairy" when she gave me this book for Christmas. Sadly I have never read Greene before and this book was written in the 30s. In my experience the language of many classics written pre 1950 has badly dated. However I am happy to report that in the case of 'The Confidential Agent' that is not the case.
This is an excellent book with a great plot that the narrative drives along at a wonderfully fast pace.It also has a rather nice twist at the end too.
It looks like I may be reading more Graham Greene sometime soon
This is an excellent book with a great plot that the narrative drives along at a wonderfully fast pace.It also has a rather nice twist at the end too.
It looks like I may be reading more Graham Greene sometime soon
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