Reviews for Confidential Agent

The average rating for Confidential Agent based on 1 review is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-05 00:00:00 Jason Austin "The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust." If this is one of Greene's "entertainments", what are his serious novels like? The Confidential Agent is a bleak, wistful and ruminative thriller set in the 1930s. It is a "man on the run" sort of novel with a secret agent from a foreign country arriving in England to secure a coal contract that might help avoid a war. The agent, who was formerly a university professor is a haunted man, his psyche infected by anomie from his experiences in the war, but he keeps going on due to some sense of justice. The main character is the very opposite of hard-boiled. He is a literate gentleman who is pulled into the war. While he does get revengeful after the murder of a young girl who trusted him, D (that's the name of the main character) struggles to shoot an enemy responsible for the girl's murder when he has the chance. D's secret agent foreigner experience is emphasized through the insertion of very "English" language of the streets, his amusement at British ways (as compared to the brutal ways of his home country, which is never named) and his acute awareness of the nature of every single voice of various characters that turn up before him. The novel lost me a bit in the middle due to a rather ungainly and preposterous episode where D slips into a village and tries to inspire a workers strike. Greene compensates by writing a beautiful and atmospheric ending set on an island resort and a ship. Some great lines from the book: Far away to the right a rash of villas began; lights were coming out, and a pier crept out to sea like a centipede with an illuminated spine. He felt an odd prick of jealousy because she had taken the trouble to defend Forbes. It was like sensation painfully returning to a frozen hand. When war started the absolute moral code was abolished: you were allowed to do evil that good might come. His territory was death: he could love the dead and the dying better than the living.