The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he climbed the stairs. A phrase of Johns's came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and the Tatlers.

It's a classic noir set-up, the wrong man: Arthur Rowe has his fortune read at a local festival. The fortune teller, one member of a spy network working in service of the Axis, tells him the winning number for a guess-the-weight game, and he goes home with the prize cake. But inside the cake somewhere is a bit of microfilm for which England's enemies are willing to intimidate, even kill. A German raid saves Arthur from his pursuers, but they're dogged: first, they try to pin a murder on him, then they try to explode him. Neither of these works, but the bomb gives him a spell of amnesia, and Arthur finds himself committed to a sinister mental ward, under a false name he doesn't know is not his.

It's a shaggy dog story, all right. On top of all this, Arthur carries around with him a horrible guilt: he really is a murderer. Years before, Arthur poisoned his ailing wife in an act of mercy. It's this act, actually, that makes Arthur difficult to blackmail or chase underground. Having done the most horrible thing he can imagine, Arthur has little to lose, and no conception of himself as either too good or too vulnerable. At the same time, Arthur's deed lies in contrast to the murders and machinations of the spy network that make up the title "Ministry of Fear." "You think you are so bad," an Austrian refugee named Anna tells him--not exactly a femme fatale, but a recognizable noir figure just the same--"But they can bear pain--other people's pain--endlessly. They are the people who don't care."

The amnesia thing is very silly. Perhaps in 1943, when Greene wrote the novel, it seemed a little less hoary. But it works here because, while Arthur slowly regains his memories, the memory of his wife's murder is the one thing he fails to recover. By forgetting the deed, he is renewed, equally determined as before, but with a fresh and much-needed conscience. The "new" Arthur is no murderer, but an avenger.

The Ministry of Fear actually struck me as one of the stronger of Greene's espionage books. It's more complex, less tawdry, than This Gun for Hire, more interesting that Stamboul Train, two of the books packaged with it in my four-book omnibus. The fourth, Our Man in Havana, illustrates how Greene's later books, even as they kept their spy themes, moved outward into the "Greeneland" of MI6; but The Ministry of Fear alone captures something worthwhile about the homefront. The constant air raids of the Blitz are a physical analog of the "Ministry of Fear," who look like ordinary doctors and tailors but who whose mission, whether by coercion or bribery, is to batter at the integrity of British domestic life. One way to read Arthur is as a symbol for the United Kingdom: no innocent, but one whose crimes cannot compare to the true evil that wages war against him.