"What sort of word?"
"Well, I'm what's generally called a traitor."
"Who care?" she said. She put her hand in his: it was an act more intimate than a kiss--one can kiss a stranger. She said, "We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You've never betrayed that country, Maurice."
Maurice Castle is an agent with the MI-6 working on African intelligence. He's an ordinary sort of guy, aging but comfortable. When his superiors suspect that his unit has been leaking information to the Russians, suspicion naturally falls on his subordinate Davis, a desperate and hard-drinking man. These superiors decide it would be best to get rid of Davis, poisoning him in a way that will look like the effects of cirrhosis, but--stop me if you didn't see this coming--it's actually Castle that's the leak. He's no Communist, but he owes a debt to the Russians for assisting in his extraction from South Africa years ago with the Black South African woman who is now his wife. The discovery of the leak puts him in a tough position. Getting out would be the only prudent move, but an old South African enemy he's been charged with meeting reveals that the apartheid regime is considering using "tactical" nuclear bombs on the Bantustans, and Maurice finds himself torn between saving himself and his family, and doing what's right.
The Human Factor is maybe the bleakest and most cynical of all of Greene's books. Maurice is, as he describes himself to Sarah, technically a "traitor." But is his country something worth being loyal to? The chummy ease with which his superiors discuss dispatching poor Davis, between kidney pies and pheasant shoots, expose a British intelligence that has no interest in "the human factor" of the title, only saving themselves from scandal at any cost. They collaborate happily with the apartheid regime in South Africa, whose callousness toward Black South Africans is depicted with shocking clarity. When Castle asks his former South African contact Muller about his attitude toward the innocents who would die from these "tactical nukes," Muller replies that he expects they'll have their own segregated heaven. And to be honest, the Russians are no better--it's revealed late in the book that they, too, are happy to use Maurice more or less for their own purposes. The Human Factor makes it clear that you can as loyal as you wish to your country, but your country will never be loyal to you.
Greene could write about Africa well; he did in The Heart of the Matter. But if The Human Factor has a flaw, it's that the life of Maurice's wife Sarah and her (much darker) son Sam, a pair of Black South Africans living in the homogenous London exurbs, isn't really well imagined. There's a telling moment late in the book where Sarah, stoic but bereft at Maurice's sudden exodus to Moscow, finds herself being called "Topsy" by a stranger--the young enslaved girl from Uncle Tom's Cabin. But in habit, in temperament, Sarah might be another Anglo housewife. Still, the final act, in which Maurice is separated from Sarah and Sam, is among the most bitterly tragic moments in Greene's fiction. The novel ends with sad sourness: the Russians' promise to extract Sarah and Sam has been abandoned, and for the first time Maurice and Sarah are able to talk on the phone for a few seconds before the line goes dead. We don't expect that the two will ever be reunited; they are loyal to each other--the country of themselves--but it's the other, bigger countries that will always have their way.
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