The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (Penguin Classics) | Graham Greene

The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (Penguin Classics) | Graham Greene | A gripping story set during the Blitz

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The Ministry of Fe...

	The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (Penguin Classics) Graham Greene Penguin Classics, 2005 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

For Arthur Rowe, the trip to the charity fete was a joyful step back into adolescence, a chance to forget the nightmare of the blitz?and the aching guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was surviving alone, aside from the war, until he happened to guess both the true and the false weight of the cake. From that moment, he finds himself ruthlessly hunted, the quarry of malign and shadowy forces, from which he endeavors to escape with a mind that remains obstinately out of focus.

A complex entertainment

Arthur Rowe, an inhabitant of wartime London during the Blitz with a terrible secret, visits a fair one day on a lark, setting in motion a chain of events that will thrust him into a shadowy world where nobody, not even oneself, is quite what they seem. Graham Greene is an extraordinary writer, painting fully developed characters with great economy of language. He is also a master of atmosphere; I have rarely encountered an author who so skillfully develops an ambiance of fear, paranoia, and regret. This black mood and a dearth of exciting action set pieces may be the reason some reviewers question this novel's status as a thriller, but I was enthralled by the quiet dread that makes our hero's fate so uncertain. The brilliant conclusion infuses a superficially happy ending with a strong dose of tragedy.

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A gripping story set during the Blitz

Arthur Rowe, a retired journalist, is the unlikely winner of a cake, the weight of which he correctly guessed during a charity fête patronized by The Free Mothers. For Rowe, the fête should have been an innocent trip back to childhood and innocence, a welcome chance to escape the terror of the Blitz and to forget twenty years of his past as a murderer. Instead he becomes a haunted man because he possesses a cake which was destined for somebody else. It turns out that the cake contains some poison - hyoscine - which nearly kills an innocent man called Poole. Then Rowe is involved in a séance with Mrs Bellairs, a fortune teller, and several other people during which a man called Cost is killed with Rowe's own knife. He manages to escape with the help of Willi Hilfe, an Austrian refugee. Next Rowe is accosted by a man called Fullove who specialises in eighteenth century landscape gardening books and who asks Rowe to help him carry his heavy suitcase to the Regal Court and to leave it there in the room of a certain Travers. A page guides Rowe to Mr Travers's room where Anna, Willi Hilfe's sister, is waiting. Soon after that, Rowe and Anna open the suitcase which contains no books but a bomb which goes off...
At this stage - the middle of the novel - the plot does not seem to make much sense but in the second part Mr Greene carefully assembles the pieces of the jigsaw so that by the end of the narrative the reader has a clear picture of the mystery. Reading the novel one realizes that war is like a bad dream in which familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely disguises and that nobody is to be trusted. That is the Ministry of Fear, the general atmosphere spread by the enemy so that one can't depend on a single soul. And then there is that other Ministry of Fear to which all who love belong since if one loves, one fears at the same time.

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London and sanity, crumbling together

An interesting "entertainment" from Greene. The Ministry of Fear is a (sort-of) thriller, memorably set during the Blitz. The protagonist, a tortured and guilty man named Arthur Rowe, haunts the charred London landscape, the half-buildings and surreal remains somehow jibing perfectly with his own skewed perceptions. In a Hitchcockian turn, the doings of Rowe's casual day turn sinister and inexplicable as he stumbles onto a nest of German spies. The now typical formula of "wrong man" episodes and interactions gets a particularly complicated spin in this prototype of the form, mainly due to Rowe's already compromised sensibilities. Everything is suspect, even Rowe's own identity, and solving the mystery will also mean putting his memory and sense of self back together.

As conventional thrillers go, the novel is fairly un-gripping and tame. Many of its confrontations were pretty pat and familiar at the time, I think. But the real strength of the book comes from its piecemeal, often bizarre characterization, and from the reader's having to constantly assess the possibly delusional information being processed by Rowe. I got the sense of two or even more stories playing out simultaneously--occupying the same space, so to speak--and of having the advantage of Rowe in seeing the potential danger before he does. The easy term for that is dramatic irony, and it's the kind of feeling most often evoked by the best horror fiction (like Dracula, for instance). That's suitable, since The Ministry of Fear is nothing if not vaguely nightmarish.

Whether or not the book could be called "quintessential noir" or not depends on your understanding of this many-nuanced term. To me noir is more cynical and fatalistic in its outlook than this. I was most reminded of the sort of noir Hitchcock practiced in his thrillers, where the details of the spies and their villainy were far less important than establishing mood and effect. The mood here is of the silent horror film: unreal but weird, and disturbingly detached from the normal.

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ministry of anxiety

This was my first (and possibly last) reading of a Graham Greene novel. I wanted to read one of Greene's novels to get a sense for the origin of the modern espionage genre. I chose his first "spy" novel (taking my cue from LeCarre) to avoid the overload of anti-americanism for which Greene is known. The novel met these two expectations, but did not rise to the level of significant literature.

The Ministry of Fear is structured in four sections that trace the develop of the protagonist, Arthur Rowe, as he confronts the irrationalities of bombardment and espionage in wartime Britain. I was pleased with with the intensely Kafkaesque style of the first section, The Unhappy Man, in which Rowe's world-view and psyche both fall apart. Unfortunately, Greene could not maintain this approach. The later sections become successively shorter and more mundane as Greene leans on disappointing and conventional plot devices. The Happy Man posits a fantastic form of amnesia in which Rowe remembers only an (inexplicably) idyllic childhood. Bits and Pieces skips through several scenes which instruct Rowe overnight to be a practical secret agent. Finally, in The Whole Man, the feckless Rowe supplants the true spy, Hilfe, and adopts the existential callousness that is the meaning of the book's title.

It's hard to imagine that The Ministry of Fear was ever thought to be a "thriller." What it offers a modern reader is a curious look into the attitudes of British liberals during WWII. There is no sense of anything evil about Nazism - or of any preference for Western values. I was chilled by the overt claims of moral equivalence. On the other hand, the story development depends heavily on an assumption that euthanasia is morally repugnant. Clearly, liberal values in 1942-3 were still not fully deconstructed.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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