Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Human Factor, Greene's 22nd novel, combines the shadow world of spies and the games they play with a pervasive spiritual malaise. Secret codes and assassination by peanut-mold toxin entice the reader into the author's gloomy inner sanctum. As usual, the workmanship is superb-almost too good. At times the novel reads as if Greene had entered a Graham Greene write-alike contest. The principal character is British Intelligence Agent Maurice Castle-a surname that pointedly suggests the guarded and lonely aspects of both the man's profession and character. The settings include the nondescript...
This position has sometimes caused him trouble with his church. In The Human Factor, a similar commitment to make one's separate war has catastrophic consequences for Maurice Castle. Outwardly, he is shades of gray: a man of regular habits, careful with money and drink, competent at the office, where he specializes in Africa. The only striking thing about Castle is his wife Sarah. She is a black South African with a young son by a previous encounter. Castle met her while on assignment in the Republic, fell in love and promptly broke the Race Relations Act. With...
...plaintive zither of The Third Man gives way to a sorrowful silence in The Human Factor. The development of Castle's motivation is a little thin; his fleeting interest in religious faith seems like a crack in the sidewalk that Greene is compelled to step on. Despite the title, compassion is not the novel's strong point. It is rather the author's bitterness and sense of inevitability about "the intelligent and the corrupt," the Mullers who talk calmly about final solutions and the agents who plan the murder of a colleague between mouthfuls of smoked trout...
...living in Moscow, Ivinskaya has had her intimate recollections of Pasternak published in the West, thus risking the further wrath of the authorities in the Soviet Union. She has also made another, perhaps more portentous choice: to expose the human frailty that is the underlay of heroism and the foolishness that may be attendant upon genius. She tells of her endless "female tantrums," provoked by Pasternak's determination not to leave his wife and children but to maintain two households instead. To these outbursts the writer often responded, "this is something out of a bad novel." "I suppose...
...dictatorship of the emergency," it does not follow that India's problems have been solved with the election of Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi's family-planning program was often harshly applied. But the sterilizations (8 million in her last year of power) were a human effort to deal with crushing statistics: India's population (now over 620 million) will reach 1 billion by the year 2000. During Desai's first nine months in office, on the other hand, there were only 636,000 sterilizations, the lowest rate in a decade. The threat...