In London during the Blitz, an amnesiac must outwit a twisted Nazi plot in this “master thriller” of espionage, murder, and deception (Time). On a peaceful Sunday afternoon, Arthur Rowe comes upon a charity fete in the gardens of a Cambridgeshire vicarage where he wins a game of chance. If only this were an ordinary day. Britain is under threat by Germany, and the air raid sirens that bring the … raid sirens that bring the bazaar to a halt expose Rowe as no ordinary man. Recently released from a psychiatric prison for the mercy killing of his wife, he is burdened by guilt, and now, in possession of a seemingly innocuous prize, on the run from a nest of Nazi spies who want him dead.
Pursued on a dark odyssey through the bombed-out streets of London, he becomes enmeshed in a tangle of secrets that reach into the dark recesses of his own forgotten past. And there isn’t a soul he can trust, not even himself. Because Arthur Rowe doesn’t even know who he really is.
“A storyteller of genius,” Graham Greene composed his serpentine mystery of authentic wartime espionage–and one the author’s personal favorites–while working for MI6 (Evelyn Waugh). But The Ministry of Fear “is more than a mere thriller . . . it’s a] hypnotic moonstone of a novel” (The New York Times).
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My least favorite G. Greene novel so far.
Not one of Greene’s best. I was surprised that it fell more into the mystery genre.
Set during WWII in London. Good suspense, surprises
Confusing but interesting.
Unique style, interesting plot.
Awful. 4 hours I can never get back
Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear is the perfect illustration of a character arc. At the beginning of the story, Arthur Rowe has lost everything (including his wife) in London during the Blitz. He is lonely and hopeless, renting a single room from Mrs. Purvis. After winning a cake at a London festival, his entire life turns upside down. What he did not realize was that the cake contained a microfilm with the plans of a German spy ring in England. Suddenly strange people he does not know are trying to kill him. He hires a detective to find out who is after him and why, but he is soon caught up in a seance in which a man is murdered with his knife. The harder he looks for answers, the deeper Arthur falls into the mystery.
After an explosion in a hotel that knocks him unconscious, Arthur wakes up in a resting home where he is given an entirely new identity, Richard Digby, by the administrators. Since Richard Digby (Arthur Rowe) has forgotten his past, he is able to reinvent himself into a strong individual who no longer feels sorry for himself. Arthur discovers that he is a capable individual, who now fancies himself a hero. With this new found confidence, Arthur tracks down the man with the microfilm (his personal detective), and saves the day despite discovering that he was a loser before he lost his memory.
The story arc is quite inspirational as it reminds the reader that the greatest obstacle we face to success is our own negative thoughts. Arthur Rowe’s transformation illustrates that when a man is not held down by negative beliefs he can achieve anything, including his childhood dreams of being a hero. This story is both inspirational, and a great example of a spy thriller. Graham Greene has crafted a masterful tale that conveys suspense as the reader worries about what will happen to Arthur Rowe in his search for answers. I enjoyed every second of this book!
This book, set in London in 1941 during the blitz, begins with a man on the outs, Arthur Rowe, strolling through a church fair fundraiser. He plays a few penny games, then has his fortune told. By a stroke of bad luck, he utters the wrong words to the fortune-teller. In exchange, she tells him the weight of the cake in a nearby stall. Whoever guesses the weight correctly, wins it, which is a big deal, because it’s made with real eggs, which are a prized rarity in wartime London.
Before he leaves the fair, Rowe is intercepted by a number of people who want to buy the cake, but he stubbornly refuses their insistent offers.
Back at his rented flat, the landlady points out that the weight he guessed could not have been correct. She puts the cake on the scale to prove it, then cuts a slice for him to enjoy with his tea.
Soon a new boarder shows up. He’s hungry, and seems to be more interested in the cake Rowe shares with him than in Rowe himself or the tea they drink together. Rowe recognizes the odd taste in the tea the stranger has poured for him. It’s the same poison Rowe used to kill his wife years earlier. That crime, which he committed out of pity for her failing health, and for which he was convicted, has haunted him for years.
> Perhaps if they had hanged him he would have found excuses for himself between the trap door and the bottom of the drop, but they had given him a lifetime to analyze his motives in.
> He remembered himself twenty years ago daydreaming and in love; he remembered without self-pity, as one might watch the development of a biological specimen. He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at day-dreams, but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed… Since the loss of his wife, Rowe had never day-dreamed; all through the trial he had never even dreamed of an acquittal. It was as if that side of the brain had been dried up; he was no longer capable of sacrifice, courage, virtue, because he no longer dreamed of them. He was aware of the loss–the world had dropped a dimension and become paper-thin.
Though the crime and its effect on Rowe’s psyche tinge the story with a dimension of weight and darkness on top of the war and the blitz, Greene finds humor in the situation. For example, while Rowe’s friend Henry Wilcox stands by him even after the conviction, Mrs. Wilcox hates him. “Once a man starts killing his wife, she would have ungrammatically thought, you couldn’t tell where it would stop.”
One of the hardest things for Rowe to deal with is the fact that he can’t even help in the war effort when his country’s survival is at stake. His age prevents him from serving in the army and his conviction prevents him from serving at home.
Ironically enough, the stranger who has come to kill him and German bombers trying to blow him up become the first steps in freeing Rowe from the past he can’t stop brooding over.
Greene divides the story into four short books, each told in third person from Rowe’s perspective. Each begins in a new setting, just before or just after a major event, and much of the story’s suspense comes from the reader trying to figure out, along with Rowe, where he is and how he got there, who are his friends, who are his enemies, and how he will extract himself from troubles he doesn’t fully understand.
The story is ostensibly a high-stakes spy thriller, with the main character inadvertently wrapped up in some intrigue that will affect his country and the outcome of the war. But on a deeper level, it’s the story of a sort of everyman trying to come to terms with maturity and the complexities of a world where in which life didn’t go as he had planned.
Halfway through the book, Rowe becomes a different person. His past is wiped away, and he finds himself at last getting the chance to be the hero he always wanted to be, as he tries to expose a cabal of Nazi partisans inside England, a group he comes to call “The Ministry of Fear.”
Later in the book, as he finally pieces together his past and present, “The Ministry of Fear” comes to mean something entirely different. It’s personal now, and has nothing to do with nations or politics or war. This is the main twist of the book (which I won’t give away). In the parallel dramas unfolding within and around the story’s hero, it’s the inner drama that matters in the end. That’s the one that will change him, that he will carry with him, and that he will build his new life upon.
> In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality–heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. This is why no later books satisfy us like those that were read to us in childhood–for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience…
Like all of Greene’s novels, The Ministry of Fear is a book you can find new meaning in each time you read it. It’s well-plotted, well-written, and shows the insight of a deeply observant and reflective mind. It is not a simple story of a simple hero standing on the right side of a clear moral line. It’s complicated, but completely in line with an intelligent adult’s mature experience of a complex world.
I am working my way through all of Graham Greene’s novels and short stories. It is hard to categorize his works. He is an amazing writer on so many different levels.