"Shadow of Abandonment": Graham Greene's <i>The Confidential Agent</i>
�� ��� When compared with what usually are considered Graham Greene’s “major” novels, The Confidential Agent (1939) may seem oddly marginal. 1 Unlike such better-known narratives as The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Quiet American (1954), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), and The Honorary Consul (1973), Greene’s ninth production does not explore in depth any of his characteristic themes—the theological mystery of grace, the ambiguity of love versus pity, the entanglements of postcolonial intervention, the recuperation of existential purpose, and the moral dilemma of responsibility for others. To this can be added the fact that its author categorized The Confidential Agent as an “entertainment,” a designation that pigeonholed it along with Stamboul Train (1932), A Gun for Sale (1936), The Ministry of Fear (1943), and Our Man in Havana (1958) as a type of fiction that gave priority to the development of plot rather than character. Further qualifying the text’s standing within Greene’s corpus are the circumstances of its composition. As recounted by biographer Norman Sherry, in 1938 Greene methodically cranked out 2,000 words per day in the mornings for six weeks, all the while fueling his creative effort with Benzedrine, before laboring more deliberately on The Power and the Glory—at his customary stint of five hundred words—during the afternoons (2: 14). Given these factors it perhaps is unsurprising that Greene’s story about “D.,” a former lecturer in medieval French literature who endeavors unsuccessfully to negotiate a coal contract in Great Britain on behalf of his unnamed socialist country (Republican Spain), is not as widely read as his “mature” work. If we recontextualize The Confidential Agent, however, its stature grows. As John Coates has demonstrated, Greene’s novel rigorously challenges the “pre-1939 thriller” popularized by Erskine Childers, John Buchan, Dornford Yates, William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and “Sapper” or H. C. McNeile (48). Central to these earlier “Clubland” adventure sagas during the years prior to World War I was a xenophobic “them”/“us” binary that vilified the former while valorizing the latter