The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

• 

  available new & used on Amazon

  Paperback: 224 pages

• Publisher: Penguin Classics (April 26, 2005)
• ISBN-10: 0143039113
• ISBN-13: 978-0143039112

reviewed by Roy Peachey

If you’re after brilliant writing and an exciting plot and don’t mind dodgy theology then Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear is the book for you.

Greene called his novel an ‘entertainment’ but it is clearly much more than that. Despite creating one or two implausible moments in the plot, Greene draws us into the action from the very first pages and doesn’t let us go. The descriptive writing is tremendous and the sense of fear is utterly palpable as Arthur Rowe, the novel’s anti-hero, flees for his life after getting caught up with a Nazi spy ring when attending a fête during the darkest days of the London blitz.

Rowe pops into the fête because it reminds him of idyllic childhood visits to the annual garden fête in Trumpington on the outskirts of Cambridge. A few weeks ago I went to that same Trumpington fête and found that little had changed. There were pony rides for the children, a raffle drawn by the vicar, home-made cakes and secondhand books. It was quintessentially English and terribly innocent, a perfect symbol, in other words, of the prelapsarian world for which Arthur Rowe, a convicted murderer, longs.

Rowe is haunted by guilt and confused by pity in The Ministry of Fear. While everyone else believes that the death of his wife was a mercy killing, Rowe himself accepts the fact that he is a murderer, though he cannot quite come to terms with the psychological implications. He is a man who, while fleeing for his life, is also desperately seeking redemption and, having fallen from grace, is haunted by memories of his own personal Garden of Eden.

The Ministry of Fear may be one of Greene’s ‘entertainments’ from his golden period but it is no conventional thriller, in other words. There is action and excitement but there are big existential questions too.

However, when Arthur Rowe, a Catholic, eventually finds redemption, it is hardly a fully Catholic concept he embraces: he atones for his wife’s murder, he believes, by suffering for Anna Hilfe, his new lover, and by helping to bring about the death of one of her relatives.

In the end, this is a novel which draws as much on the spy thriller tradition created by John Buchan and a worldview associated with Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy as it does on Catholic sources. Equally significantly, Greene gives a nod towards Henry James’s The Golden Bowl by having Arthur Rowe and Anna Hilfe sustain their love through mutual deception at the end of the book. The Ministry of Fear can be fairly described as a Catholic novel but it’s hardly orthodox.

Brilliant writing, an exhilarating plot and dodgy theology: you know what you’re going to get from Graham Greene and in The Ministry of Fear he doesn’t disappoint.