Customer Reviews

MINISTRY OF FEAR: AN ENTERTAINMENT

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

British author Graham Greene divided his early novels into two distinct groups: `serious' novels, like "The End of the Affair," "Brighton Rock," and "The Power and the Glory"; and `entertainments,' his term for his espionage and suspense thrillers. This second group includes "A Gun for Sale" (U.S. title: "This Gun for Hire"), "Stamboul Train," "The Confidential Agent"...and "The Ministry of Fear." Looking back on Greene's long career, this distinction seems very artificial and almost silly; it perhaps made market sense back then, but Greene's entertainments are every bit as serious-minded as his non-genre work. These books are in no way lightweight time-wasters. They are as concerned with character, drama, and the human condition as any of his other books. In fact, I honestly prefer his entertainments; through the mode of the thriller, they actually stab deeper into the reader's mind.

"The Ministry of Fear," published in 1943 when World War II was raging in London's skies, is perhaps Greene's finest entertainment and my personal favorite of his novels. Greene produces here a quintessential noir novel using a premise we often associate with Alfred Hitchcock's films: an innocent man accidentally stumbles upon a secret that turns him into a man marked for death and hunted by the law. However, Greene's main character, Arthur Rowe, is hardly innocent. He is a solitary, lonely individual who harbors a deep guilt over a crime he committed in the past. When he speaks the wrong phrase to a fortune-teller at a fair, he suddenly finds himself the target of a shadowy group of spies in London -- the Ministry of the title. Soon he's fleeing through blitz London, framed for murder, desperate and near-suicidal, but harboring an anger toward the people who have tried to kill him.

Suddenly, Greene pulls a massive plot switch on the reader. The novel makes an abrupt shift that alters the whole nature of the plot. Rowe's story becomes that of possible redemption and the washing away of past sins..but at the expense of feeling whole and complete. To say much more would ruin the surprises of the novel and the internal odyssey of the main character. It's one of the most fascinating moral and character-driven thrillers ever written. And the backdrop of war-torn London, facing daily rains of bombs, is astonishing. It's almost a fantasy world, albeit a horrific one.

Greene's language can sometimes feel too exact and literary for some readers' tastes -- he certainly writes nothing like today's typical churner of bestsellers -- and his peculiar 1940s British terms may cause some head-scratching for American readers. However, Greene had a magical way of expressing ideas that anyone can relate to. He writes in flashes of truth that can make the reader shiver with realization. Only the greatest authors can do this, and Greene does it over and over again in "The Ministry of Fear."

If you've only read Greene's non-genre novels, I urge you to delve into "The Ministry of Fear." It will make you wonder why Greene even bothered to divide up his books. For any lover of thrillers, espionage stories, or World War II, this book will fill all your needs and give you much more in the bargain.

Set in England during WWII, The Ministry of Fear is the story of Arthur Rowe surviving but not truly living in the shadow of what was once his life. He finds himself hunted by shadowy forces of espionage and the memory of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. Somewhat convuluted at times and not Greene's best effort, but still brilliant and heart tugging. Greene's fire always burns brightest when he speaks to the heart and not of cloak and dagger stuff.

Arthur Lowe's (uh, Rowe's) struggle to quiet his life from the awful memory of his merciful killing of his dying wife because he cannot stand to see her suffer is really a low point(if you will) for this man, yet we still feel sorry for him and his battle. He finds great pity at seeing anyone or thing suffer, so much so that he is blind to the moral imperative that murder is wrong and is a crime. Lowe gets away with it in the story, but not in his mind. We see Arthur stepping "joyfully back into adolescence", to "mislay the events of twenty years", that cause him to behave in a childish manner - he will not give up the cake at the fete. The action propels him into a journey of espionage that would change his life. Instead of trying to struggle to forget his past we see him struggle to find his past and to discover who he is. In the process he finds love once again.
The backdrop of the bombing of London and all the underground cubby holes he seeks to shelter himself from the life altering bombs of his mind are all great metaphors that tie this very good novel together. Rowe is not a hero but a highly flawed human who coincidentally disrupts a spy plot at the moment of his catharsis. His purity of compassion and pity for suffering beings is his downfall because he crosses the line into unethical conduct to sooth himself - a selfish indulgence that results in him playing God, and then almost makes the same error again.
How many times do we excuse ourselves for our actions in the name of noble spirit? It is the precursor to Catch 22 ("We had to destroy the village to save it", or "I had to kill my wife to put her out of her misery").
There is much to learn from this "entertaintment".

to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die." Samuel Butler

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that it has taken me close to three score years to pick up and read a book by Graham Greene. On the other hand, I now have quite a few books I can now add to my to be read pile.

I purchased this book after reading Alan Furst's Introduction. I very much like Furst's work (See Dark Voyage: A Novel) and, after reading that Furst was influenced by Eric Ambler I worked my way thought Ambler's works with a great deal of pleasure (See A Coffin for Dimitrios). In the Introduction to Ministry of Fear, Furst mentions that Greene was another key influence. So I was sold, and, more importantly, I was not disappointed.

As in Ambler and Furst's books The Ministry of Fear gives us an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation. Arthur Rowe is an ordinary man, albeit one with a troubled past. He is described by Greene as a tall stooping lean man with a narrow face and whose clothes were good "but gave the impression of being uncared for; you would have said a bachelor if it had not been for an indefinable married look." Set in the early days of WWII, the blitz has just begun and Rowe finds himself in a charity fete. Rowe finds himself paying a few pence to have his fortune told and through a strange quirk of fate utters a phrase that puts him right in the middle of an espionage ring.

The story takes off from there. The cast of characters introduced by Greene should be familiar to anyone who has read Ambler, Buchan, or Furst: the stolid police detectives, the sinister and inscrutable foreign spies and assorted hangers on; and the lovely lady who may be friend or foe. But what Green does here that I find so intriguing is to turn a rather generic story line into a brilliant examination of something entirely different: how memory and forgetfulness either free us or enslave us.

The heart of the book for me was not the story line itself. [Note: possible spoiler follows.] About half way through the book we find that Arthur Rowe had been hurt during the blitz and was suffering from amnesia. As the story continues we see not only the plot develop but witness the transformation of Arthur Rowe. As noted earlier, he had been haunted by an earlier tragedy and, to my mind; this tragedy had totally enslaved Rowe. He was a prisoner of his own guilt and his thoughts and actions were constricted by that guilt. Now that the balance between memory and forgetfulness had shifted so to had Rowe's thoughts and actions. Given a new name he truly became a new person and as his memory starts to return Greene presents us with Rowe force to make a conscious decision as to whether his memory will continue to enslave him. Rowe's decision and the actions that follow take us through the book's satisfying conclusion.

"I have done that", says my memory. "I cannot have done that" -- says my pride, and remains adamant. At last -- memory yields." So said Friedrich Nietzsche and Graham Greene has taken that theme and run with it with great skill and with great delight to the reader.

Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

A kind of dark "Through the Looking Glass" story of one person's experience in World War II London. Greene excels in placing an ordinary character in dramatic, historical circumstances to play out the choices that make up his life.

In this book, it's Arthur Rowe. Rowe steps nostalgically into a church bazaar, visits a fortuneteller, follows a chance mis-identification by the fortuneteller into a winning guess at a cake's weight, and ends up a central figure in international espionage, with the right side and wrong side, guilt and innocence, and even Arthur's own identity all thrown up in the air

It's a good ride through a winding plot, with a twist I'm not used to from Greene -- an involvement of the reader in the novel as a puzzle, almost like more modern or postmodern stories such as the movie Memento.

Greene calls this book one of his "entertainments". I thought it was certainly entertaining, as well as another of his explorations of character under personal and historical stress.

In his introduction to THE MINISTRY OF FEAR, Alan Furst declares that a hero on a classic path in a literary spy novel "...must confront, and overcome, his own private darkness to confront, and defeat, the dark side of the world." IMHO, this formulation applies only partially to TMoF, since the ironic Graham Greene ultimately adds, not overcomes, personal difficulties and fears to the guilty regrets of Arthur Rowe, his protagonist. Still, Rowe does--SPOILER ALERT!--confront the dark side successfully. But in doing so, the ironist Greene shows Rowe making what are probably unsustainable choices.

Through much of TMoF, Rowe, a bombing victim, suffers from partial amnesia. In his case, Rowe can remember his sunny and idealistic youth clearly but has blocked all memories of twenty years of adult experience, including life with his deceased wife. Without memory of his adult years, Rowe connects to his youthful sensibility, which makes him both an oddly effective adversary to a Nazi espionage ring and attractive to the younger Anna, who finds his youthful and adventurous spirit refreshing. Initially, Greene uses the term "ministry of fear" to refer to the Nazis, who create an atmosphere of fear and distrust "so that you can't depend on a soul." But ultimately, the term applies to Rowe, who is regaining his memory at the novel's end and moving into a life where he has guilt and much to lose. A normal life with a significant other, Greene seems to be saying, is also affected by a ministry of fear.

This is the eleventh novel by Graham Greene that I've reviewed on Amazon.com. Like most of these books (THE COMEDIANS is a slow-starting exception), TMoF has a brisk pace, an interesting and surprising plot, memorable characters, and some exquisite lines. The novel is also what Greene deemed one of his "entertainments," which apparently means the protagonist spends little time ruminating about his failings and responsibilities as a Christian or Catholic.

This is an enjoyable novel and fully successful on its own terms.

Recommended.

Graham Greene wrote THE MINISTRY OF FEAR in 1943, while he was serving as chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service station at Freetown, Sierra Leone. That probably goes a long way in explaining why the book is a World War II spy thriller. It also may help explain why THE MINISTRY OF FEAR is the most chaotic and agitated of Greene's novels and why it features so many grotesqueries. (As he writes in the novel, "War is very like a bad dream in which familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely disguises.")

I dare not venture a summary of the plot. It is just too weird, convoluted, and melodramatic. For that matter, it is too much of all three of those adjectives to be first-rate fiction. It seems more like a script for "The Twilight Zone". While many other Amazon reviewers appear quite taken with the book, I find it near the bottom of Greene's fiction, of which I now have read all but two or three works. But it still is a novel by Graham Greene, which means that the reader will be treated to a liberal helping of dour and portentous, yet vaguely cryptic, observations (sometimes, more like conjectures) about what is required to be a moral person in this mortal sinful world. I have borrowed one from THE MINISTRY OF FEAR as the title for this review. It was perhaps more apt during WWII, when people everywhere were espousing abstract sentiments. And, as is also typical with Greene, the moral "lesson" is not fully realized in the novel.

The current Penguin Classics edition I bought has a useful Introduction by Alan Furst. It includes the following quote from Graham Greene, given in an interview late in life: "[E]ver since the age of nineteen I've been on the Left, but I don't know if it means anything or whether it's just my way of thinking. I think it means being against dictatorship. And it's against the extremes of capitalism, which I think is represented by the United States." (And that was more than twenty years ago.)

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

It is a pleasure to turn to the novels of Graham Greene (1904-91) the famous twentieth century British novelist. In a new Penguin edition his 1943 noir "The Ministry of Fear" includes a fine introduction by Alan Furst a fine novelist of spy fiction in his own right.
The novel is set in World War II London suffering from the ravages of nightly bombing during the blitz. The anti hero is Arthur Rowe a shell of a man tortured by the mercy killing of his ill wife. Rowe had been tried for murder but was aquitted.
He stops in at a fair for charity where he buys a cake. The cake was meant for a spy. The cake contains classified film. The short book follows Rowe's adventures as he is suspected of murdering a man at a seance. This book reminds the reviewer of Alfred Hitchcock's classic tales of innocent men wanted for murder.who solve the case (such as in "North by Northwest")
The novel has a good resolution with Rowe finding true love and the Nazi criminals being killed or captured. One section of the book is set in a creepy nursing home where Rowe is sent following the loss of his memory. Through dreams the reader is carried back to an Arcadian England prior to the Great War of 1914.
What makes Greene's tales so good is his ability to write elegant English, turn phrases and keep the reader in suspense.
The Ministry of Fear is a superb classic of espionage writing!

Graham Greene was a very talented and prolific twentieth century writer, perhaps best known for his novels The End of the Affair and the Third Man, both of which were made into successful films. Many of his books explore the struggle of modern man or woman to make moral choices in a complex and often corrupt world. He also liked to write thrillers, which he called "entertainments" to distinguish them from what he considered his more serious novels.

Greene's thriller The Ministry of Fear certainly is entertaining. Greene pulls out all the stops in this story of Arthur Rowe, a middle aged, disillusioned man with a sordid past who stumbles into a real mystery when he wins a cake in a raffle at a seedy charity fair. From the moment he claims his cake made with "real eggs" (real eggs were a true delicacy during the London Blitz!), Rowe becomes a marked man. He is followed, threatened, attacked, betrayed, imprisoned, and nearly blown up. Through it all he tries to figure out what mysterious message is connected with the cake. Does it all point to a devious plot to threaten the allied cause and his beloved England?

Because Greene is such a first class writer, he can't write a story that doesn't have some deeper subtext about good and evil, or create a hero who doesn't engage and interest us. We cannot help but care about what happens to Arthur Rowe. Greene keeps us guessing until the very end about whom Rowe should trust.

When we remember that The Ministry of Fear was written during the war when no one knew which side would ultimately triumph, this novel of espionage and moral choices packs an even more potent punch. Espionage writers come and go, but you will have to look hard to find a writer more engaging, effective, and ,yes, entertaining than Graham Greene.

I was waiting to catch a plane at PDX and saw a young guy sitting across from me reading this book. No this isn't a Craigslist "Missed Connection;" I just thought the book looked interesting so I made a note of it and bought it when I arrived home.

This was a very well written, succinct thriller that was written and published during World War II. Graham Greene is generally known for writing literary fiction but also wrote what would today be called thrillers or bestsellers (which he referred to as "entertainments") and *Ministry Of Fear* is a prime example of Greene's entertainments. It was fun to read a thriller written by such an accomplished literary author, and the book conveys a thick sense of fear and paranoia that I imagine is quite a genuine depiction of life during wartime.

But wait, there's more! An interesting film was made based on this book, starring Ray Milland, who was perfect in the lead role. The movie had quite a few different plot elements than the book, some of which were actually improvements - but the best thing is the entire movie is available for free on youtube - cool!