posted on 14 May 2025

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

Back in 2016, one of our esteemed contributors, Alan Severn, wrote a piece about Graham Greene (which can be found here) in which he said:

“I often think that Greene is an essentially Fifties writer and that this is part of his charm. I don’t think we go to Greeneland for modernity. We go to Greeneland for the undeniable thrill of realising that we ourselves don’t have to live there but can visit whenever we feel the need.

So treat yourself this year. Have a rummage on your shelves or in second-hand shops – there’s always some Greene lying about somewhere because so few people read him nowadays (scandalously, even those of us who already own his books).”

I’ve now taken him at his word and started rummaging in the Greene catalogue for books of his that, for whatever reason, I’ve never got around to reading. One of these is the 1943 spy thriller, The Ministry of Fear set, as you’ll have noticed by the date of publication, in the teeth of the Second World War.

Arthur Rowe is walking the streets of a London ravaged by the Blitz following his release from a psychiatric prison where he was sent for the murder of his wife. We’ll discover that the conviction was the result of Rowe undertaking a ‘mercy-killing’ to release his terminally ill wife from the pain and suffering she was going through due to her illness. Of course, it wouldn’t be Greene if one of his stories didn't have a protagonist wracked with guilt and Rowe walks the pavements seeing the tag ‘murderer’ as one that in some way brands him.

He stumbles on a community fete taking place on one of London’s green squares and, through a series of slightly farcical misunderstandings, finds himself the winner of a cake made with real ingredients – a great luxury in wartime Britain. But no sooner has he claimed his prize that there’s a queue of people trying to get it back from him and offering to buy it for absurd amounts of money.

Without knowing it at that moment, his stubborn refusal to surrender the cake will plunge him headlong into a complex and exciting web of espionage that will lead him to being blown-up by bombs twice, lose his memory, fall in love and slowly but surely rumble the fact that his much-prized cake was in fact a vehicle for microfilm being smuggled by Nazi agents.

I genuinely don’t think telling you that is a spoiler because I’d be very surprised if you didn’t rumble this element of the plot very early on for yourselves. What I’m not going to say any more about are the twists and turns of the plot that are genuinely thrilling and carry you along at quite a pace.

It’s easy to forget that Greene was brilliant at writing fast-paced, thrilling entertainments like this because he’s so often talked about as a ‘serious’ writer dealing with ‘serious’ subjects. Here the book and the story are perfectly pitched tor his wartime audience – there’s no sabre-rattling, no strutting patriotism but it is, I think, a deeply patriotic book that champions what we like to think of as ‘British values’ like fairness, decency and a love for a more gentle, bucolic pre-war England that the war would destroy forever.

The copy I read was the Folio Society edition that has interesting black and white illustration by Geoff Grandfield. But plenty of paperback or even cheap hardbacks are available for well under £10 and I don’t think you’d regret the investment.

 

Terry Potter

May 2025