Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Maurice Castle is a high-level operative in the British secret service during the Cold War. He is deeply in love with his African wife, who escaped apartheid South Africa with the help of his communist friend. Despite his misgivings, Castle decides to act as a double agent, passing information to the Soviets to help his in-laws in South Africa. In order to evade detection, he allows his assistant to be wrongly identified as the source of the leaks. But when suspicions remain, Castle is forced to make an even more excruciating sacrifice to save himself. Originally published in 1978, "The Human Factor "is an exciting novel of espionage drawn from Greene's own experiences in MI6 during World War II, and ultimately a deeply humanistic examination of the very nature of loyalty. This edition features a new introduction by Colm Toibin.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A man in love walks through the world like an anarchist, carrying a time bomb."" ""As long as we are alive we'll come together again. Somehow. Somewhere."" Only Graham Greene could get. away with lines like that--by creating the gentlest, most civilly persecuted of all his men-on-the-run, a bicycle-riding, dog-walking commuter whose heroics are so understated that images of passion and violence take on fresh, half-ironic validity. This ""man in love"" is Castle, a veteran agent-turned-deskman (African division) for British Intelligence. A quietly ardent husband to black wife Sarah. A quietly doting father to black son Sam (although, or because, he's not Sam's real father). A kind, aging fellow. And--as we learn only after Greene has made us at home with Castle--a spy. Grateful to the Communist agent who helped Sarah and Sam escape from South Africa and himself a scarred enemy of apartheid, Castle has been leaking information, via coded Tolstoy and Trollope, to Moscow, piddling stuff mostly. But now, just as his superiors start to suspect him (they've ""eliminated"" Castle's young colleague by mistake), the ""Uncle Remus"" operation passes across Castle's desk--an Anglo-American-German plan to ensure the stability of South Africa's white regime. Should Castle risk this one last leak even as his former friends at ""the firm"" obliquely, inevitably close in on him? Greene, of course, builds suspense, cinematically, like nobody else in the business, but that is only a fringe benefit when the world's most gracefully gifted and practiced storyteller is operating at full power. Scene after scene--a stiflingly chic Chelsea wedding party, an attempt at nightlife camaraderie among fellow spies, a priest's refusal to hear non-Catholic Castle's confession--snakes by with acerbic energy; character after character darts up with surprise pockets of vulnerability. But this book is ultimately all Castle's, for Greene has returned, in part, to his earliest style, has pared down his moral patterns to the barest essential, has abandoned his penchants for exotica and skirmishes. What remains is a story as apparently plain as Greene's perfect prose--an open-hearted, tight-lipped pavane of conscience and sentiment that can be watched and enjoyed for all the wrong, and all the right, reasons. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Born in 1904, Graham Greene was the son of a headmaster and the fourth of six children. Preferring to stay home and read rather than endure the teasing at school that was a by-product of his father's occupation, Greene attempted suicide several times and eventually dropped out of school at the age of 15. His parents sent him to an analyst in London who recommended he try writing as therapy. He completed his first novel by the time he graduated from college in 1925.

Greene wrote both entertainments and serious novels. Catholicism was a recurring theme in his work, notable examples being The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951). Popular suspense novels include: The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American. Greene was also a world traveler and he used his experiences as the basis for many books. One popular example, Journey Without Maps (1936), was based on a trip through the jungles of Liberia.

Greene also wrote and adapted screenplays, including that of the 1949 film, The Third Man, which starred Orson Welles. He died in Vevey, Switzerland in 1991.

(Bowker Author Biography)