El arte, cuando es verdaderamente grande, nos permite asomarnos a las emociones y pensamientos de hombres y mujeres de otros lugares y tiempos y hacer que los sintamos como propios, familiares, próximos. Siempre digo que para comprender la psicología prevaleciente en la República de Weimar lo mejor es ver el cine expresionista alemán, por ejemplo. De la misma forma, esta notable novela constituye una ventana a la mentalidad de los hombres y mujeres que, contra toda esperanza y siendo conscientes del fracaso de sus ideales , en un mundo que parecía derrumbarse bajo la amenaza del fascismo y la guerra, en una situación en la que resultaba imposible confiar incluso en el propio bando y en el que la sospecha es la norma, sin embargo decidieron permanecer firmes en su compromiso por la libertad. Porque no conocían otra forma de vida ni podían renegar de esa ética.

No es una novela perfecta, está muy lejos de serlo. Es áspera, oscura, desesperada por momentos. Da quizá más vueltas de las aconsejables y es muy posible que le sobren páginas. Pero es tan humana, tan honda, tan necesaria en estos tiempos que, ay, parecen querer imitar a aquellos, que uno no puede más que recomendarla con entusiasmo.

A solid early work by Greene, but I certainly wouldn't put it up there with other favorites of mine, namely The Quiet American or The Power and the Glory.

This book certainly contains the elements that make Greene's later, more controlled works as great as they are: a very human, very thoughtful protagonist; an engaging tale of intrigue and adventure; and more than a little humor mixed in for seasoning. Still, the whole doesn't come together quite a strongly as what Greene would write afterwards.

The tale of D, whose home country you never actually learn, though you can simply assume that it is any one of several unstable continental European countries, is one of a fish out of water. He is a former college professor of French literature, but his sense of obligation to his fellow rebels in his home country has turned him into an undercover broker for coal, which they desperately need. The details unfold at a good pace, leaving you wondering about this quiet, intelligent, older man who seems to have a certain amount of savvy, but is clearly not used to the world of subterfuge.

As D moves through England, where he hopes to secretly procure the needed fuel, he goes through various odd scenes and meets more than a few strange characters, few of whom the reader can be sure of. The quirks are charming in doses, but I found there to be a touch too much of it, leading to a slight feeling of disjointedness by the end.

Like the other Greene novels that I've read, this is a story told with efficiency, so it is not tremendously demanding of one's time. Anyone who's read and enjoyed some of Green's more famous works and is curious about some of his lesser-knowns would do well to pick this one up. I wouldn't, however, recommend it as a good introduction to an author who would later write some of the best novels of the 20th century.

n  The Confidential Agentn 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

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 this because I heard the protagonist is supposed to be a professor concerned with The Song of Roland, one of my favourites. There's not much of it in the book, though. There's an interesting premise and I like that the spy is permanently broke and is always looked down on by the snooty British as a foreigner. Makes for a contrast to the sort of thing you expect from a spy novel after Ian Fleming. On the other hand, the action is boring and none of the secondary characters feel real enough for you to care about them.

I liked this book but not as much as I enjoyed Greene's later book, "The End of the Affair." Both books are set in worn-torn Europe with a bit of a "Casablanca" feeling to them, and I LOVED Casablanca. But this book is sort of challenged by its thin macguffin. When finally revealed, it's a coal contract. The unnamed country where "D" is from is in need of coal, possibly because we are talking about Spain, Spanish Civil War, when Franco controlled the coal mines, although Greene never gives name to the country our foreigner is from. I find the macguffin thin. In one of the false endings it is revealed that even though D was unsuccessful, so was L, which means what? All of the poor people that D sought to help are still going to suffer - but then in one of those all's fair in love and war, final ending, D gets the girl and I dunno, their relationship, while storybook, lacked the depth and poignancy depicted in The End of the Affair. Still, it was an interesting book and I appreciated the sense of urgency and the sense of despair mingled with hope that threads the book

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.

The languid Wodhousian pace of the Agent’s quixotic journey speeds up in the second chapter. The Agent blunders from one Kafkaesque fiasco to another and just gets buffeted around by situations beyond his control. The use of initials instead of names is very irritating; one cannot put a face on a person called D. or L. or K. However, poignant gems like this keep the narrative going

He felt homesick for the dust after the explosion. The noise of engines in the sky. You have to love your home for something – if only for its pain and violence.

There is an improbable love story, quite unlike the amorous exploits of Ian Fleming's 007. The Agent is a tortured soul trying to reconcile to his personal losses and to his country torn apart by civil-war

his territory was death: he could love the dead and the dying better than the living.

A sarcastic take on the fad of Esperanto was a needless diversion.

I am really quite astounded, now that I have finished reading this book, that Graham Greene became a celebrated author at all. This is truly a bad book. It doesn’t seem to have one redeeming quality. If anything, it is probably a throw-away by him to make some quick money. That I can understand. The premise of the plot is that “the confidential agent” of an endangered foreign power, named “D” (for some inexplicable reason) has arrived in England with credentials to purchase the coal that is necessary to keep his country running and his “rebel” government in power. But he is perpetually stymied by “L,” the representative of the competing “establishment” party in his country. There are endless twists and turns that are supposed to keep you on the edge of your seat, but only make you shake your head in total disbelief. This keeps up right to the end, right to the last page, when you throw down the book in disgust. Pure trash. But don’t forget, the bad “Jew” again. Who knew that not only was Greene a bad writer, he was also a verified anti-Semite.

God it's good to read Greene again. One of his books that he dismissively referred to as 'entertainments', but he was incapable of writing without giving it his all. There are spies and plots and guns going off, but really the main thing is the internal factor, what Greene's always so good at. The guilt, the fear, the belief and the doubt, the panicked grasping for someone to connect with and trust, in the face of all the emptiness of the world.

The mood here, with its shabby hotel rooms and offices, the constant aura of schemes just out of view, of small disappointing men deciding the fate of the world, with the English friendliness concealing a immense void beneath, feels at times like an early prototype of le Carré. Incredible stuff.

4.5 stars. Greene may very well be the most appropriate author to read during this long summer of quarantine. This is a novel of darkness, dense fog, deep shadows, alienated lives, loneliness, and unrequited love. The protagonist is a “foreigner” in every sense of the word, as he arrives in England on a spy mission to prevent a coal deal that would decimate his own people back home in their civil war. His own embassy disowns him, everyone he meets is a potential threat, and he has no sense of ever returning to normalcy, even if he is successful. Indeed, “success” seems almost undefinable. He brings with him so much baggage and personal strife that he describes himself as “infecting” others with whom he comes into contact. As with most Greene novels, this is also a story of impossible love, with the protagonist’s struggle standing as a metaphor for an inability to find unity or salvation in any relationship (romantic or otherwise) in an unforgiving world that places cavernous distances between us all. It also contains an ending that is about as happy as one can find in a Greene novel -- but it’s a conditional happiness, one fraught not with the perils of the unknown, but with the always-impending known: death.

Although often not discussed alongside his more famous titles, this one is top-tier. Highly recommended for those who enjoy noir and existential fiction.

گراهام گرین یکی از نویسندگانی ست که در زبان فارسی از لحاظ شرایط و مترجم گرفتار بدشانسی شده و آن گونه که شایسته اش بوده، به خواننده ی فارسی زبان معرفی نشده. به عنوان مثال دو اثرش "مرد دهم" و "وزارت ترس" با نثر سنگین مترجم صاحب نامی چون پرویز داریوش به فارسی برگردانده شده که از زبان گراهام گرین فاصله ی بسیار دارد. برای شناخت شخصیت و آثار گراهام گرین، "مردی دیگر" اثر "ماری فرانسواز آلن"، توصیفی ست چند بعدی و گویا؛ مصاحبه ای روان شناختی در شناساندن نویسنده ای پیچیده و افسونگر. گویا این کتاب را خانم فرزانه ی طاهری به فارسی برگردانده. این برگردان را ندیده ام اما خواندن توام با دقت کتاب را به علاقمندان توصیه می کنم.