Politics have always figured conspicuously in Graham Greene’s fiction. The concerns of his Thirties novels—It’s a Battlefield, England Made Me, Brighton Rock—are largely political; even his so-called entertainments, as we have seen,¹ have pronounced political ingredients: Stamboul Train involves a Yugoslav insurrectionist, The Confidential Agent a continental civil war. Of all Greene’s novels, however, the ones that probably come to mind most readily when the word politics is mentioned—or, at least, those in which his political notions find their most memorable expression—are The Quiet American, The Comedians, The Honorary Consul, and The Human Factor. If in Greene’s political novels of the Thirties his principal object of ridicule is Great Britain, in these later novels—which appeared between 1955 and 197 8—the repellent figure in the carpet is consistently the United States; while the protagonists are invariably competent, seasoned Britishers (or at least half-Brits) who know how complex and morally equivocal realpolitik can be, the forces of evil tend to be either credulous, sanctimonious Yanks (who, fools that they are, take words like democracy and individuality seriously) or their fascist lackeys.

These novels can, then, be shrill, and many a character overdetermined; what’s good about them, however, is that they generally have the virtues of top-notch thrillers: superb pacing, picturesque minor characters, fine local color (not overdone, as in many of Greene’s earlier books), and a convincing air of danger. In each of them, an apathetic but basically good man finds