A review by sarahmatthews
The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment by Graham Greene

adventurous dark funny medium-paced

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

Read in Braille

Vintage Books

Pub. 1943, 224pp

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This novel opens with a church fete, a cake and a fortune teller and, wow, does it take a turn from there! It’s a story of espionage during WW2, with a little romance thrown in and a great storyline about memory loss and trying to recover but also kind of enjoying the simple life where you’re sheltered from the horrors of the outside world.

Graham Greene evokes the bewildering everyday life of the Blitz and what’s astonishing about this book is that it was written in the middle of it all so he had no idea how the war would be resolved at the time of writing. It makes for a gripping depiction of wartime London:

“The walls suddenly caved in. They were not even aware of noise. Blast is an odd thing because it is just as likely to have the effect of an embarrassing dream as of man’s serious vengeance on man, landing you naked in the street or exposing you in your bed or on your lavatory seat to the neighbours’ gaze.” And he continues: “The awful thing about a Raid is that it goes on: your own private disaster may happen early, but the raid doesn’t stop. They were machine-gunning the flares: two broke with a sound like crashing plates and the third came to earth in Russell Square; the darkness returned coldly and comfortingly.”

This is quite a disorientating read at times and I found myself rereading sections so I didn’t get lost. The writing is superb. I liked the complex character of Arthur Rowe who certainly goes on an adventure, one he fell into unexpectedly and has to make the best of. At one point he loiters in an auction house near an office as he’s in hiding, trying to figure things out and this piece of observation is great:

“The weekly auction was to take place next day, and visitors flowed in with catalogues; an unshaven chin and a wrinkled suit were not out of place here. A man with a ragged moustache and an out-at-elbows jacket, the pockets bulging with sandwiches, looked carefully through a folio volume of landscape gardening: a Bishop –or he might have been a Dean–was examining a set of the Waverley novels… Nobody here was standdardized; in tea-shops and theatres people are cut to the pattern of their environment, but in this auction-room the goods were too various to appeal to any one type. Here was pornography–eighteenth-century French with beautiful little steel engravings celebrating the copulations of elegant over-clothed people on Pompadour couches, here were all the Victorian novelists… There was a smell of neglected books, of the straw from packing cases and of clothes which had been too often rained upon.”

A funny, strange and memorable read which I very much enjoyed.