THE FOLIO SOCIETY

During the Second World War, Graham Greene worked for the Special Intelligence Service under Kim Philby, the notorious spy. Philby would be exposed as a Russian agent in 1963, and more than twenty years later, Greene took his defection as the starting point for an espionage novel which would be, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘free from the conventional violence... I wanted to present the Service unromantically as a way of life, men going daily to their office to earn their pensions’.

The result was The Human Factor, Greene’s twenty-second novel and a return to the murky Cold War territory he had explored in The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana. This restrained yet astutely paced thriller centres on desk-bound intelligence agent Maurice Castle, whose quiet suburban existence is threatened when – out of loyalty to the communist who helped his wife flee apartheid – he betrays to the Russians a secret Western plan to support the South African regime. After an internal inquiry leads to the elimination of an innocent colleague, Castle must decide where his true loyalties lie – and whether defection is the only way to protect the future of his wife and stepchild.

Greene’s evocation of the dusty, workaday world of the intelligence services is quietly majestic, as is his almost loving depiction of the modest routines with which Castle has sought to cushion his certainty that he will one day be discovered.With typical stylistic aplomb, Greene builds an atmosphere of slow-burning suspense and peoples this shadowy world with very human characters who, if difficult to love, are never easy to condemn. This new Folio edition includes commissioned illustrations by Bill Bragg.