D., en hemlig agent vars dagjobb är att vara docent i fornfranska, skickas till England från sitt namnlösa inbördeskrigshärjade hemland för att genomföra en stor kolaffär som ska avgöra kriget för den sida som får den. Redan vid landstigningen i Dover stöter han på sin rival och företrädare för den andra sidan, L. Det finns förvisso en måttlig ömsesidig respekt för deras respektive kulturgärningar men i övrigt föraktar de varandra. Likt Hektor och Akilles har de sänts ut från stadens murar för att avgöra kriget med ett enda hugg, och de får också personifiera de två sidorna i konflikten; meritokraten D. vs aristokraten L. Ständigt kämpar D. mot såväl en överlägsen motståndare som en sviktande egen förmåga.

”Hemlig Agent” är en spänningsroman men samtidigt mytologisk spionhistoria, huvudpersonens akademiska arbete om Rolandsssången kommer igen i handlingen. När ska han blåsa i hornet?
Greenes typiskt religiösa eller moraliska teman hålls i bakgrunden här, och boken är ovanligt handlingsdriven. Historiens många vändningar, finurliga och oväntade, kombinerat med den i detta fallet mer bara antydda moraliska frågeställningarna, gör den mycket defintivt läsvärd!

It is tough to rate this. By modern standards it's slow-moving and the characters are quaint. There's unusual emphasis on the protagonist's motives, and a great effort is made to contrast his loyalty to the duplicity of all the other characters who are his countrymen. England seems safe to the foreign protagonist, but is in fact always dangerous.
I think I may not be bright enough to appreciate this novel, or any of Greene's books, for that matter. Still, I had a good time reading it. After all, it's a mystery.

The "agent" of this tale, known only as "D", is from a country torn by civil war. This place is never named, although it's implied to be an Eastern European state. (The circumstances, however, suggest Spain, which was, indeed, experiencing civil war at the time the novel was written.)

D is hardly a glamorous figure, suffering from the traumas of war and grieving for his wife, who was executed by mistake by the opposing side. His mission is to acquire coal for his side in the war. This humble middle-aged man, a former lecturer on Romance languages, must contact Lord Benditch, a high mucky-muck in the coal business, and do so before the opposing side can make a better offer.

Along the way he meets hostility from his supposed allies, violence from his enemies, and a possible love interest -- not to mention a teenage girl who meets with a violent end. The atmosphere is grim; D has no idea who to trust and whether or not it's all worth it, but doggedly pursues his task.

Not one of Greene's best, but worth a read. A film adaptation was produced in 1945, which is pretty faithful to the novel.

یکی از لذت های بی بدیل زندگی، زمانیست که متوجه میشوی ساعت هاست در یکی از رمان های گراهام گرین غرق شده ای...

A taut, gripping story of a man from an undisclosed country that is caught in a tussle between factions, visiting the UK to try and get a deal that will help bankroll his side. He gets tangled with a wealthy heiress, who happens to be the daughter of the man he is to deal with, and is trailed by a counteragent.

Even more than the espionage plot, Greene's insight into the mind of a man who has lost it all and is still somehow an idealist is fascinating. The main concession to this being one of his 'entertainments' is that the hero gets the girl. In all, a mature, psychologically rich thriller that may belong in the second tier of Greene's work but is withal a superior novel.

In many ways, the Confidential Agent is a better version of Greene’s earlier novel, A Gun for Sale. We have a relatively old, unhappy man who has not quite given up on his ideals, but living in a world which is full of double-crossing, selfish and au fonds, rather base people all trying to survive. Here “D” is sent to England in the 1930s on behalf of some unnamed European country on a mission to secure coal from some shadowy British industrialist.

On the way, he meets Rose--the industrialist’s daughter. Rose is a somewhat cynical yet still somehow positive/saving person—sophisticated yet still somehow (not entirely convincingly) innocent. D follows his assignment but soon finds that other agents in London are seeking to undermine or preempt him—whether because D’s own country does not trust him, or whether they are just trying to gain some selfish advantage. Throughout a series of events which D only partially understands, D fails in his mission and is instead now fleeing for his life---at times without great conviction. There is an interesting analogy to alternative interpretations of the Song of Roland, as D is or was a professor of Medieval Literature in his country. Was Roland intentionally betrayed or a hero?

Thanks in the end to a somewhat improbable end, D is saved—and one feels that Greene is trying to say that it is possible to be a hero after all, and that one need not be cynically betrayed. In this way, albeit with a wistful bit of a Hollywood ending, Greene may have been trying to convince himself on the eve of WWII (the book was published 1939) that there is a reason to live and be open to the saving grace of good individuals.

Historically, Greene flirted with Communism and Catholicism. Perhaps as with others (pace Orwell) his initial sympathy with the Spanish republican against Franco’s nationalists. The betrayals there between the various socialist and communist “fronts” seem to have been behind the catharsis playing out in The Confidential Agent. It is as if the love of a good woman has saved Greene from the viciousness of brutal egoists who seek to be masked by their ideologies. But I get the feeling that writing the book for Greene may have been more important for him than enjoyable for the reader!

Some good parts nevertheless:

“You—you were a prejudiced party: the ideology was a complex affair: heresies crept in…He wasn’t certain that he wasn’t watched at this moment. After all, there were aspects of economic materialism which, if he searched his heart, he did not accept…He was haunted for a moment by the vision of endless distrust. In an inner pocket, a bulge over the breast, he carried what were called credentials, but credence no longer meant belief.”

Describing one agent on the other side: “He switched on a smile as he would a cigarette lighter…he represented, after all, the aristocracy—the marquises and generals and bishops—who lived in a curious formal world of their own jingling with medals that they awarded to each other: like fishes in a tank, perpetually stared at through the glass, and confined to a particular element of their physiological needs…It was wrong to underestimate the ignorance of the ruling class…”

Describing the head of an institute teaching “Entrenationo”—a not so veiled reference to Esperanto—who worked as an agent from D’s faction in the civil war: “His underpaid jumpy Entrenationo eyes gave away unguardedly secrets of greed and envy…What could you expect on that salary? How much treachery is always nourished in little overworked centres of somebody else’s idealism…”

It turns out that this mediocre “head” is bribed to betray D, not by money, but by the offer of a university faculty position, of which he is proud to disclose, to which: “D. laughed, he couldn’t help it; but there was disgust behind the laughter. This was to be the civilization of the future, the scholarship of the future…He had a hideous vision of a whole world of poets, musicians, scholars, artists—in steel-rimmed spectacles with pink eyes and old treacherous brains—the survivals of an antique worn-out world teaching the young the useful lessons of treachery and dependence.”

And perhaps tying up the moral ambiguity Greene was at least at this stage of his life plagued with:
“When war started the absolute moral code was abolished: you were allowed to do evil that good might come.”

While Greene spins a readable tale, the presence of ambiguity, loneliness and even at the end, almost a perfunctory hope left me with a respectful frustration of having been led on to what is a less than convincing end—or if convincing, then of a reality which is less than satisfactory.

This a well-plotted thriller with Greene in very good form. In fact, the most exciting quality about reading this "entertainment" is that this is the VERY point in which Greene, who doubted his writing ability very much at the time, learned how to be far more taut and controlled in his writing than the previous novels, which are, of course, all over the place and, in some cases, quite angst-ridden and strange. We have espionage, death, and the beginnings of Greene's investigation into what being an expatriate in another nation really means. There's also the creepy subplot involving a fourteen-year-old girl named Else as well as a quirky language institute. So there's still a bit of the gonzo in youngish Graham here. It all ends quite suddenly but far more satisfactorily than the earlier Greene novels.

(Book 346 from 1001 books) - The Confidential Agent, Graham Greene

The Confidential Agent (1939) is a thriller novel by British author Graham Greene. 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.

Plot: D, a former university professor speaking perfect English, is sent by his government, two years into a vicious civil war, on a secret mission to buy coal in England. Traumatized by the war, in which his wife was executed in error and he was buried alive in an air raid, England to him is a place of peace and happy memories. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و یکم ماه ژوئن سال2012میلادی

عنوان: مامور معتمد، همراه مقاله تنهایی، عشق، مرگ؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: تورج یاراحمدی؛ تهران، نیلوفر، سال1380؛ در317ص؛ شابک9644481631؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، کتابسرای نیک؛ سال1395؛ در284ص؛ شابک9786009582488؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده ی20م

داستان در كشور «انگلستان» می‌گذرد؛ قهرمان داستان، مردی میانسال، با عنوان «د» و او عاشق زنان کم سن و سال است؛ سر آنها را میان دستهایش میگیرد، و میگوید: «از من هم یک مامور معتمد خوب درمیآید اینطور نیست؟»؛ تا ایشان نیز در پاسخ بگویند: «تو، بهتر از آن هستی، که یک مامور معتمد باشی؛ هیچکس، به ماموران معتمد اعتماد نمیکند»؛ «د» برای نجات کشورش، که غرق در جنگ داخلی است، به «انگلستان» می‌رود، تا زغال‌ سنگ را، که به دلیل نیاز شدید، از الماس هم قیمتی تر شده، خریداری کند؛ همزمان از سوی شورشیان «ل» نیز، مأمور می‌شود، در رقابتی تنگاتنگ، مانع مأموریت «د» شود، و خود قرارداد خریدی با صاحبان معدن زغال‌ سنگ به دست میآورد؛ «د» که روزهای تلخ و سختی را در جنگ با شورشیان، پشت سر گذاشته، در جوی از بدگمانی، نسبت به هموطنانش، در حالیکه نمی‌داند، برای پیشبرد ماموریتش، به چه کسی اعتماد کند، با دختر زیبا و جوانی، به نام «رز کالن» آشنا می‌شود، که می‌تواند برگ برنده ی او، در بازی زندگی باشد

نقل نمونه هایی از متن: (قبلاً تصور می‌کرد، بی‌اعتمادی‌ ای که زندگیش را، در برگرفته بود، ناشی از جنگ داخلی است، ولی حالا دیگر باورش می‌شد، که بی‌اعتمادی، در همه جا وجود دارد: پاره‌ ای از زندگی انسان بود؛ مردم را عادات بدشان به هم پیوند می‌داد: زانی‌ها و دزدها هم، در میان خود به همدیگر حرمت می‌گذاشتند؛ صفحهٔ یکصد و و یکصد و یک)؛ (آدم به نحوی گریز ناپذیر، وطن خود را به هر دلیل دوست دارد - حالا به خاطر مصایب و خشونت آن هم که شده باشد؛ صفحهٔ یکصد و نود و هفت)؛ (آدم باید به مرده‌ ها حسادت کند؛ آدم‌های زنده از تنهایی و بی‌اعتمادی رنج می‌بردند؛ صفحهٔ سیصد و شانزده)؛ پایان نقلها

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی27/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 09/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

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.

This thriller story was a rare Greene that I really enjoyed how he dealt with the characters. His use of one letter initial for these people is carried on in my own writings.

4.5 stars

Graham Greene really knew how to write a sentence, and this book is full of startlingly good ones. He also knew how to craft a scene, and this book has some funny ones. That said, for one of his "entertainments" (the books Greene wrote that he didn't consider serious literary works) this book could be more entertaining. It's kind of dreary and angst-ridden.