Word: remus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...superiors in the BSS have prematurely liquidated the man who shares Castle's office, a lonely but likeable fellow named Darvis. "C," the chief of operations, has also asked Castle unadvisably to be the British liaison in a fanciful (or perhaps not so fanciful) project code-named "Uncle Remus," in which the U.S., Britain and West Germany are helping the white South African minority to retain political power with tactical nuclear weapons. To add injury to insult, Castle learns that the man who helped his wife escape from her country, a Communist agent and a close friend named Carson...
...several of Greene's other novels, it is not any overwhelming personal sense of justice that prompts Castle to spill the "Uncle Remus" plans to the Russians. ("I don't know what justice means," Castle snaps at one point.) It is rather his lingering sense of gratitude toward his dead friend Carson, along with the requisite twinge of guilt, and his feeling that out of his love for Sarah he should help save her people from suffering. A Greene character would never make such a courageous gesture out of ideological conviction; although this is perhaps just as well, given...
...that Greene means through this novel to justify in a roundabout way the defection in the '60s of his good friend, Kim Philby. But if we take Castle's side, it is largely because the British superiors he defies in the book come off as such cardboard villains. "Uncle Remus," conceivable even now, is done here too baldly to be believed. It is also a bit much that the heads of British intelligence meet over lunch and after shooting parties, to discuss plans for liquidation and trout fishing with the same clubbish joviality. It becomes all too easy to understand...
Years later in London, Castle finds himself privy to "Uncle Remus," a secret plan whereby the U.S., Great Britain, France and West Germany would aid South Africa in suppressing any revolution by the black majority. In a classic bit of Greenery, Castle and Sarah play suburban dinner hosts to their former hunter, Cornelius Muller, a high South African security official and liaison for Uncle Remus. Muller is a courteous, unflappable professional who leads Castle to recall the warning of an old South African friend: "Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel, our worst enemies...
From behind his moat of respectability and silence, Castle has already launched his personal crusade against apartheid and the Western governments that would preserve it for economic and political reasons. He has leaked Uncle Remus to the Russians, but, as he tells his contact, "I'll fight beside you in Africa, Boris - not in Europe." Castle does not have to fight at all. He simply goes too far and winds up in a typical Graham Greene purgatory...