The Human Factor highlights a man, Maurice Castle, who is driven at times to make choices based on love and an often-misplaced sense of moral duty that have some pretty serious consequences for himself and others.

Castle is an agent in MI6, and as the book opens, a leak has been discovered in his division. Suspicion falls on his partner, Davis, who seems to have a lot more money than an agent in his position should -- he bets,he drives a Jag -- and he's also a pretty heavy drinker. Castle is older, near retirement, and leads a pretty quiet life, seemingly beyond reproach. But mild-mannered Castle is the one with the secret life. It started during his time in South Africa -- his black, African wife Sarah, was smuggled out of the apartheid-ruled country by a communist agent; and Castle long ago decided that he owed a debt of gratitude to the communists and started providing them with information from British intelligence, thinking that in some way he is helping Sarah's people. However, when his bosses decided that Castle will be the one who will provide their South African counterparts with information about an American operation in Africa, and he is forced to work with the very man who had held him on breaking race relations laws in South Africa vis-a-vis his relationship with Sarah there, a chain of events occurs which unravels his quiet and ordered life in England with his family.

However, this book really is NOT a story about espionage or the cold-war intelligence game. Castle marches to his own inner sense of personal morality, as noted by his mother at one point, where she says:

"You always had an exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness. It was a sort of insecurity ....You once gave away a good fountain pen to someone at school who had offered you a bun with a piece of chocolate inside."

It hit me while reading that this "sense of gratitude" is the key to understanding Maurice Castle -- and it offers an insight into the reasons behind Castle's actions. Loyalty, for Castle, begets loyalty, but the reader may make judgments based on his or her own understanding of patriotism or morality that misconstrue Castle's actions completely, so understanding Castle as a human being rather than as a spy or as a British citizen is key to understanding this story.

The Human Factor is truly an awesome novel, one of the best I've read this year. It starts out very slow, but the tension builds as the book progresses until you're so caught up in it that you can't look away. I'd definitely recommend it to people who enjoy British literature, and to those who enjoy reading about the grayness of human morality. It's also pretty decent as a novel of espionage if you don't want to get into the deeper aspects of the novel. Very highly recommended. ( )

Even though Graham Greene lived and worked well into the ending of the 20th century, I was a little surprised when I saw the date of publication of ‘The Human Factor’: 1978, the year I graduated from university: For some reason I had associated it with the 1950s and an earlier generation.

Greene had had an early influence on me - but reading Greene from this end of my allotted time is a very different experience. The realisation that he is dealing in my lifetime gives a sharpness, if not bitterness, and reflecting on Greene’s observations is a more personal undertaking than initially presumed. Time present is to be found in time past.

This is a spy story – in the way that King Lear is a story about retirement or Waiting for Godot a play about a missed appointment. The title is appropriate – if 007 is all action, and Smiley not really much deeper than your average detective, Castle, the central character here, and Davis, his co-worker in the Security Service are not only fleshed out and rounded physically, but psychologically believable. The guilts and gratitudes, the anxieties and loves Mr Greene weaves into their tale are not mere excuses for action, they are the subject of the story – The Human Factor.

Through a debt of honour Castle feels bound to reveal what amount to trivial secrets to the ideological enemies of his nation – enemies who acted with more humanity and goodwill than supposed allies and friends. No guilt arises from the treachery, if anything it is a re-affirmation of the love he feels for his wife (the root cause of the debt) and a genuine attempt to relieve the suffering of her ‘people’ under the vicious Apartheid system both the British and American governments are working with covertly (and not so covertly) in an attempt to stop the threat of Africa turning ‘red’.

What we get is the clash of an individual with systems – the resulting crushing of the human by the state and its apparatus is quite desolating. The world has turned upside down – the doctor seeks ways to kill, the policeman attempts to justify and excuse crime; the Catholic church is anything but catholic and even the guard dog fawns on strangers.

Accidents happen in this ‘we’re not totalitarian’ state – the wrong man is executed (how else can we prevent bad publicity) – much as in the ‘regrettable’ accident of the killing of the innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes.

Fictional though Mr Greene’s world is, it is a fiction based on a mental reality – that of a security service more frightened of the enemy within than a real threat without: I can only compare it to the human immune system turning against the cells of its own body.

Relevant to all of us in the present climate of ‘wars’ against terror which produce far more shocking tortures and crimes against humanity on behalf of the good guys than the bad guys could dream up (or afford). ( )

My chest hurts. Okay. One thing I like about this book is how his secret agents are neither action heroes or ordinary boring joes like he's trying to deflate the myth and shit. Like, in this book it's just a job, but it's still a really crazy job and they do intense things. Feels accurate. ( )

Graham Green does world-weary like no other. ( )

The moral relativism referenced by clshaver08 is, in fact, one of the strengths of the book. As Greene himself knew too well, however right and moral one government, or government stance, may be apropos another, the intelligence services are not and cannot be a particularly scrupulous business. They function in a zone of amorality, bending what constitutes acceptable means to serve an end. Whether that end is higher or lower and who is served makes little difference to the essential character of espionage, itself. Not only is it within this world of espionage that the novel takes place; it is on this very quality (among others) that Greene wishes to comment.

Nor, beside love, does the orientation of imperfect and ultimately NOT ideally scrupulous government seem to matter very much. That it DOES may be, to the individual at a given time, utterly beside the point. As Greene says, in intelligence, love is the one fatal weakness.

On the uneasy day I read The Human Factor, I often felt I'd read the book before. Whether too much Greene blends, one tale into another, or I in fact read it, in some earlier year when the paperback was floating freely and I did not, as yet, recognize the name, I can't say. If so, perhaps the repetition is responsible for my disappointment. For all the disillusioned and glorious grey, literary asides, subtly limned evil characters, the careful unknowing of so many - the interest diminished; the book bored me well before its end; and if it had not been Greene, despite all claims of mastery, I might not have finished. ( )