THE HUMAN FACTOR, Graham Greene

Club de lectura en inglés, Biblioteca de Gavà.

The book

I enjoyed the book a lot. Greene knows how to create an atmosphere of mystery, with an increasing tempo - first things happen in a slow time, accelerating then at a faster tempo in which the story comes to a climax where he captures the maximum reader’s interest. So happens, for instance, when Castle is coming to the end of his secret and tells Sarah his double agent role. And even when it seems the end of the story is discovered - some chapters before the book ends - the story continues catching the interest - as other outcomes of the story are still to come. Even when I guessed that Davis would die, before it happened, I read with full interest, my interest wouldn’t decrease.

I like the way that Greene magnificently described the loneliness and stress of those people working in secret organizations, by the surveillance which they are exposed.

The reader goes into the story very well. Scenes and feelings are well described. The plot is very well achieved.

I think is a good script for a film and I’m sure there is one film based on this story.

The love story between Castel and Sara en their relation with Sarah’s son Sam, is maybe the part the most unrealistic, even keeping in mind that they are in a tight, strict, rigid English society and also given that Sarah is an adult African woman who suffered persecution.

Difficulty

It was difficult to me to follow the story because of the encoded conversation between people, a certainly somewhat cryptic talk of such organizations, section 6 of Foreign Office. Also difficult to follow historic things I didn’t know much about, like Apartheid, South Africa and the secret agents.

Also the writing style of Greene is a little difficult, may be because of it’s a too literary style to me. By the difficulty to understand the style of writing, it also happens to me that I’m still struggling with the difference in the structure of the text, I mean, where we put a comma, the English text puts a hyphen, for example, and the meaning can change. This made reading more slowly.

Names of organizations of sections came easily to the text before you have an idea of what about they exactly consist, like BOSS, section MI5, Uncle Remus. For me was also difficult to follow who worked with whom, like Boris, Carson, Cornelius Muller. The vocabulary wasn’t difficult but sometimes it happened that I knew the meaning of each word but still didn’t understand what Greene was telling there.